Cuz the comments throught Lemmy/Piefed seems to indicate that literally every user on here is a FOSS/Dencentralization Purist and has 100% abandoned mainstream platforms.
I wonder if this is actually true or just a small minority of users being overrepresented.
Not even a little actually.
I’m well acquainted with the “I have an account for my social circle but just don’t use it” version of this answer, and that’s not what I mean. I genuinely never saw the appeal.
The only periods in my life where I ever held social media accounts were due to collective years of badgering and bullying by friends. I didn’t get a facebook until 2017 or snapchat until I was basically about to graduate from college.
The moment I lost the social obligation I deleted those accounts with gusto and the sentiment “You know how to reach me.” We all have phones and emails lol
The thing that always put me off social media more than anything, extending all the way back to the MySpace days, is how fake I would watch people I knew irl behave online. Someone could swear up and down that they hated someone’s guts and wished them nothing but suffering in life… but online they’d send them friend requests and heart their little vacation posts. And that’s without even going into the “personas” and curated images I’d see them project online…
I noticed myself almost fall into it once too. I uploaded two different profile pictures within a short timespan, and the one that felt a bit more staged and less like “myself” got a barrage of attention whereas me being myself was ignored. And I almost leaned into that for a couple of months before I caught myself and realized this is how personas start, and stopped trying to curate my photos for social media.
That place is not for human interaction, it’s like one of those labrat drip-feeders, but for online validation. It’s theater without conversation.
I genuinely never saw the appeal.
For me it’s finding diasporas to connect with
No, only this.
Just YouTube, but I only watch and don’t comment or use it as social media.
This is literally my only social.media. i have a discord but mainly use it for tech forums. I ditched meta completely a couple.years ago ad it has been one of the best decisions ive ever made. I did it when i was getting sober because i recognized that it was an addiction and hated the way it made me feel. Never had a shitter or anything. I technically have a youtube but i only use it for posting the occassional video for joy.
Besides YouTube, I only really used Reddit in the last years. Since the API change I basically switched over to Lemmy. About once a month I browse one of like 3 subreddits for a few minutes, but that’s it.
I’m glad I deleted my Facebook account years ago and never really got into Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and all that shit.
So basically just YouTube now.
I don’t think Youtube counts as a social media lol
Youtube,
Otherwise, No. No FB, no insta, no reddit, no shitter
Does linkedin count? Lol
LinkedIn counts way more than Youtube, since most people apart from creators don’t really have friends or acquaintances they follow or interact with. Maybe a “parasocial media” at best lol
Being honest? Fuck no. Well, except for Facebook Marketplace. I try Craigslist first but all the good shit (and stupid people… holy fucking stupid people) are on Marketplace. Which means I technically have a FB account. I did venture down the feed a while back and the amount of AI slop had me noping out faster than a crab at a seagull convention. How anyone tolerates that shit is beyond me.
Unless you count old Reddit as “mainstream”, I never did.
Even if I have to deal with pissed-off people because I “still didn’t join them on facebook”.
my favorite is people wnat you to join them on some app. whatsapp, signal, etc. and you say you don’t use apps and they ask you why you are such a dick.
because i use my phone as a phone dude.
I actually quit a volunter org because they demaded we all have slack on our phones so we could ‘be available to cover for each other’. And I just flat out refused and they all got super upset with me, so I just quit. basically gen z people had choiced and they refuse to use phone calls or texts to communicate. everything is slack/discord or some other group chat app.
I think you’re seeing a loud minority honestly. People who use mainstream socials still (yes, I do) don’t tend to shout about it all the time.
Unfortunately yes. I use Wechat, for that it has been stupidly made a required app for people living in PR China. Worst of all there’s ID verification, and they ban your account for alternative front-ends. I hate and absolutely despise it.
Other than that, not really. I have a TikTok account for a streak (sending someone a message every day with them replying to you, consequetively for many days). Its stupid and I have thought about deleting it, but the other side having the streak would be upset.
I love wechat compared to almost every other messaging app
Good for you then, I guess it’s not that bad at what it does. I mostly just hate it for ID verification (and how many services require wechat for registration, but that isnt their fault i guess). Ads are a thing also, but they don’t really push it to people who they think are foreigners, which is why I’ve set my default language to English.
Yeah, I feel ya! I’m referring to its clean UI, ease of use, and lack of ads, as well as features like the wallet and payment system. They also have Facebook style posting, but it’s much nicer to see
My actual favorite chat app is Signal, for overall privacy and security. It helps that Signal also has a nice, intuitive UI and clean appearance, but it lacks some cool features.
Wechat was the first to implement so many things: message translation, voice message transcription (and translation), delete & edit, sending cash to friends (red packets in group chat is a fkn blast!)…
Only YouTube.
I was pretty addicted to Reddit for a while, but eventually I got banned for basically no reason and that was enough to get me to almost entirely stop checking it.
I don’t think YouTube counts as social media. Also, you can disable ads, comments and shorts, it feels so much better
Why would YouTube not count as social media?
Pre-rebuttal in case you go in this direction: Being a social media platform and being a video sharing platform are not mutually exclusive.
Another even simpler point I haven’t seen anyone else mention yet is that social media is historically associated with being used to socially interact with friends and family, either people you know irl or closely-knit online groups you treat as legitimate personal relationships.
Though I suppose Twitter can be an exception to this, but anyone who remembers how Twitter started out knows that it was never intended to be that way lol (now that government and judicial agencies use it as a defacto form of official press release ontop of everything else)
If the question is “why not”, I think a good reasoning is simply because it broadens the categorization to the point where the term begins to lose all meaning. Different websites inherently have different forms of structure for interaction.
The way you behave on Instagram, Facebook, tumblr, and Twitter all feel fundamentally different from the way you behave on forums and video sites. People on Lemmy don’t “reblog” stuff, people don’t send each other friend requests on Youtube. It redefines the core dynamic.
On Youtube, the dominating theme is channels and parasocial relationships, more similar (but not exactly the same) to an audience’s relationship with traditional media like Film and Television and their responses to the various actors/artists/celebrities therein rather than a 1:1 reciprocal relationship. Sure, there are fan groups, which gets into an interesting subset where you can begin to socially interact with each other, but these groups often live in outside spaces (such as tumblr). Hence the point I’m trying to make.
Even classifying Lemmy and Reddit as “social medias” feels like a stretch. I mean yes, in a technical sense we’re all “socializing” with each other in this moment and having (mostly) genuine conversations. But for the vast majority of it, I would say:
It’s just TV, there’s nothing social about it for many people
Like Netflix with a different library
Would you consider tiktok to be social media, then?
Tiktok is the definition of social media imo. You respond directly to each other with videos that reveal who you are in real life. It’s almost aggressively social lol, like neighbors yelling at each other inside of the same apartment building, even if you live on opposite ends of the continent.
But that’s not how most people actually use it
yeah because it’s mostly talking heads and the tik tok videos are meant to be replied to by other videos.
a lot of youtube isn’t like that. it’s just videos.
do some people use youtube as a social platform? yes. like the massive genre of talking heads and ‘reaction’ videos.
I don’t think many people use tiktok like that. Most people are just commenting, or lurking. It’s functionally pretty similar to how YouTube is used for the average person.
I remember there was actually a time (probably way back in the late 2000s) where youtube used to have a little “video reply” feature, and they would nest the replies beneath the video in a little banner! I miss those days…
That’s a way to use it (and the one I prefer) but it’s still media with social components, ergo social media.
That’s too broad.
There’s a pretty general consensus that it counts, and it makes good sense from a media literacy point of view to treat it as such.
- Xitter: App is installed but only for the @YearsProgress notification (which counts in percentage how far along we are in the year. Just a fun gimmick I could get from other apps but idc enough for to get active)
- Trakt: Replaced by locally hosted yamtrack (It’s a forked version and way better than trakt)
- Discord (if that even counts): Only to message friends. I don’t engage in public server discussions outside of rarely asking for troubleshooting help
- Instagram: Only because friends send memes. Not much else
- Pixiv: Very rarely
- WhatsApp: Mainly due to family and RL acquaintances
- Reddit: Only at work while waiting for a loading bar to finish. Also I can’t always take/endure the high volume neutral-negative leaning posting of political threads of my lemmy-feed and I can’t be bothered to login to my lemmy account. But I never engage in the reddit posts with voting and commenting.
- Youtube: Very much so. Just the normal vanilla youtube experience. (And yes, I use Premium because I use it so heavily. Also the creators I watch get compensated more per view and I can’t be bothered to subscribe to every patreon)
Edit:
Honestly, the reddit api-exodus helped me get off entirely from both reddit and lemmy and to reduce my reliance on it during lunch break.And yes, I use Premium
laughs in Invidious
Laughs in I don’t really care and I could use YT on firefox and enable ublock origin but I also use it on my TV so patching APKs is not really easily done and sideloading is a pain. Oh and btw, I don’t trust those applicarions witg my google account
Invidious doesn’t support Google accounts at all
you can make an Invidious account to subscribe to stuff tho
and to use it on a tv just use your tv as a monitor for a laptop
Great…Another thing to run on top of my TV.
Yeah, no thanks.
I lurk on some subreddits still. Sometimes I just want to look at pictures of orangutans or neatly organized server racks without anyone bringing up Trump in the comments.
Also if you count YouTube, I still have premium though I’m starting to wonder if it’s worth it.
What do you use premium for? I used to have it a long time ago until ad block made it unneeded.
PS Trump is an orangutan
PS Trump is an orangutan
Y’all always have to be “on” don’t you?
I was just making a joke on your comment
without anyone bringing up Trump in the comments.
Fair enough, but I’m a hair’s breadth away from deleting my account here and never coming back. Apologies if you’ve read my spiel before. I post it a lot only because I think it ends up being relevant a lot. Anyway, Most people, myself included, join the fediverse for ideological reasons. I’d wager most of us are anti-corporate, or at least don’t trust Google or
Facebooksorry Meta 🙄, and Reddit, et al.But just because I’m here for ideological reasons doesn’t mean I want to talk about nothing else. But every community is either soaking in politics, see my pics above, or empty. Even Anne Frank wrote about other stuff in her diary every now and then, so I don’t buy the “everything’s on fire so we should work it into every discussion” argument.
Reddit used to have a somewhat similar problem, in that it attracted a very specific type of user (neckbeards), and the experience was less fun if you weren’t one, but Lemmy seems so much more obnoxious in this regard, and I can’t fathom how it could get better.
You probably already know this, but there are other smaller instances that have way better “local” feed stuff because all of the main politics and shit posting are already on the big ones, like world.
Sorry for being annoying with my joke
I already have an account on lemmy.radio. In fact it was my first foray into the threadiverse in 2023 during the Redit APIpocalypse. I made an account here because I post a lot in !worldbuilding@lemmy.world, and after the UK lost access to imgur I didn’t feel it was polite to clog a tiny instance with my unrelated uploads.
But herein lies my gripe about the fediverse as a whole. Fediverse platforms are by and large clones of larger social media offerings, and thus inherit some of their problems. Lemmy prioritizes new content over old but still relevant content, so if you want to aggregate a discussion under a single topic, as you would on a forum, it inevitably gets pushed off the front page as new posts come in, and nobody will ever see it again, so you have to keep posting new topics, but those end up clogging the feed. If you look at my posts on the worldbuilding community here, I have a bunch of different topics, but on this phpBB forum All my stuff is tucked neatly into a single thread that doesn’t clog the feed because the thread will remain visible as long as I kee posting.
You CAN sort posts by newest comment, which replicates the default forum style of topic bumping, but nobody ever does that, so the culture grows around the default “hot” sorting algorithm.
