Aimee Davies, better known as Aimsey to their fans, is 24 but looks much younger. Sitting in a bland meeting room above the annual TwitchCon event in Rotterdam, they’re a barely contained whirl of energy in a beanie hat and T-shirt, all smiles and lightning-fast chatter. Aimsey (who uses they/them pronouns) is also a Twitch veteran, having started streaming eight years ago at the tender age of 16. A million subscribers tune in every week to see them chaotically play Minecraft and share snippets of their life. They have grown up, from teen to young adult, carrying a vast audience with them into maturity. What is it like to experience that?

“When you’re 16 you want to tell everyone everything about you,” they say as music blares from the event below. “When I came out as a lesbian, I told the world. Every part of my identity, my mental health struggles … I thought if I could help one person feel like they weren’t alone, I wanted to do that.”

For several years Aimsey was in a relationship with another content creator, Guqqie, and it played out in front of their fanbases with very little filtering – until it ended. It’s a situation common to streamers – they’re young and naive, they build an audience through sharing personal details with few boundaries, then the pressures of endless invasive attention take a toll. “Honestly, for a long time, the lines got blurred,” says Aimsey. “Streaming would seep into my real-life friendships, where I thought the only way people would be my friend was if I could give them something – because that’s obviously how it is on a stream.”

Recently however, Aimsey has learned how to step back and be a little more guarded. “I’ve been so open all my life, but I was falling into these cracks where I was like, God, who am I? I felt like I couldn’t figure that out. I think that in the last few months something switched in my brain. I’m living a little bit more of a reserved life. I’m still myself when I stream, but I’m trying my best to keep some things private – at least for now. I surround myself with people who definitely remind me that I’m not just content.”

Fellow Twitch star Sweet Anita is older at 35 years old, but she too is a veteran, having streamed since 2018. As a sufferer of Tourette syndrome, the platform has been a kind of emancipation. “Streaming has changed me a lot,” she says. “I used to be a timid person and quite apologetic – obviously I’d learned to be after a lifetime of dealing with Tourettes. I feel like streaming really gave me a space to be myself without constantly having to apologise to people. I have a lot more fun, I reach out to more people, I’m a lot more sociable now.”

It concerns her that so many children are now listing content creator as their ambition. “When I was a kid, it was astronaut or fireman, but now they desperately want to be in my position,” she says. “But it’s a little bit of a trap because once you’re here, people don’t forget you. You could leave tomorrow and someone might continue stalking you for the next 10 years. Once you’re in, you’re in. The only difference is how much security you can afford.”

For its part Twitch recognises the vulnerability of streamers. It has set up guilds to help specific minority groups navigate the platform and communicate concerns to the executives. It has created an AI-driven AutoMod feature, which polices chat during streams to delete abusive messages. “We’ve invested heavily in moderation tools so streamers can define what safety looks like to them,” says head of community Mary Kish. “It is going to be very important to be familiar with how you can protect yourself. I’m worried about anyone who might think on a whim, I’m going to go live. You need to be prepared – you need to have mods, or at the very least, turn Auto Mod on, you need to set your community up. We have a little work to do to make sure that anyone making their first stream understands what they’re getting into.”

Tellingly, neither Aimsey and Sweet Anita have plans to stop streaming any time soon. “Honestly, my vision is I’m probably always going to be streaming,” says Aimsey. “It’s something that’s been so consistent in my life and I adore it. That could change. But I’ve got so much more stuff I want to do with Minecraft – I want to do events, I want to do more stories and role-play, and there are so many more ideas in my head that there’s no point in even thinking about stopping.”

Sweet Anita has plans to move on from video games, at least some of the time. “I used to do animal rescue before this and I haven’t done enough for animals – that’s what I’d like to do next. I hope I get to go to animal sanctuaries, I hope I get to show people endangered animals. I’d love to do some rehab again, release some wild birds, that was the core of my existence before all of this.”

The maturation of both streamers and stream watchers is certainly something Twitch itself is thinking about. A huge majority of streams used to be about playing and watching video games, but recently categories such as Just Chatting and In Real Life (IRL) have become more popular. Streamers are getting out of their home studios and taking their viewers on days out, to restaurants, on walks, and beyond – top creator IShowSpeed has been streaming while scuba diving. Shayanelhawk literally sent his Twitch chat into space.

“Right now our biggest age group is actually 25-34 because people have aged up while using it and they keep using it,” says CEO Dan Clancy. “We’ve seen this in the growing diversity of content because as creators get older, they have new interests and their community stays with them. So I think we’ll see continued diversification. I’ve often conjectured that when the so-called Twitch generation gets to 60-70, we’ll see all these knitting and crochetting streams. As you get into retirement – the issue of looking for connection that you had as a teenager comes back, because the kids have left home, you’re looking for people, for community – and you have time. As we saw during Covid, Twitch is a platform that explodes when you have time.”

The one massive gamechanger lurking on the horizon is AI. There is already a successful AI avatar streamer, Neuro-sama, a cutesy anime girl with 1 million followers. Will Aimsey be part of the last generation of human teens who’ve had the chance to become, and grow up, as streamers? They think not. “No matter what happens there is always going to be an audience for human-made things. It doesn’t matter what we do, it doesn’t matter how big AI gets, there’s always going to be people who need that human connection to feel real.”