I’ve treated Lemmy as a fun, silly blog since I made my account. I love how you can freely post anywhere and as much as you like, unlike on Reddit. I’m also a teen who grew up online with unrestricted internet access and does online school, so I’m a bit addicted to being online. I love how much more interactive the comments feel here, despite it being a smaller platform. I’ve had fun reading and interacting with people. But I think I might delete my account and everything, because people analyzing my behavior and accusing me of things has started to get to me. Most recently, someone accused me of trying to manipulate people because of my age and gender. All I wanted to do was make people feel some fun and giggles. I’m wondering if you’ve ever felt something similar.
If you are talking about the people who don’t believe you that you were born in 2008, that’s just an aspect about the internet society we have to live with. A lot of people here only have a stereotypical idea of how people of a particular age-group (even their own) behave, especially in the internet. It’s a little price for our anonymity that strangers won’t accept that you behave outside of your stereotype.
Keep in mind that most of them don’t mean you any harm. Predators that lure their victims with a younger age or otherwise problematic scammers are a big problem of the internet and people would rather wrongfully accuse you of that than letting such a scenario play out.
While personally I didn’t feel suspicious of you or have no reason to care, when I think about it, I can see that people get irritated by a person who is often highlighting that they are 18. If you really are 18, you probably didn’t even notice that and it’s natural. But maybe you can imagine that from another perspective, it may look different.