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.
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.
Just YouTube, but I only watch and don’t comment or use it as social media.
No, only this.
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
It had to get really, really, awfully, embarrassingly bad for me to leave Facebook. But it really was, and a few years ago I did. If Facebook was only half as awful as it is, I would probably still be on it.
And the sneaking suspicion that every social media site will eventually devolve into Facebook has kept me from joining any more.
I still use Youtube for videos on how to do DIY home projects and repairs, but I don’t consider that social media. To me, “social media” is not “an app that distributes content”. I would say “social media” has the user’s real name on it and is for the purpose of interacting with friends and family, and meeting new people. That’s definitely not what I use Youtube for.
You know to my surprise, I actually don’t… I’ll watch a YouTube video or read a reddit post, but I don’t go there on my own or ever sign in anymore.
Discord has for sure been hard to avoid, but I just don’t chat with those people I guess. Some have come over to Delta chat, but if I really need to reach someone I’ll just text them.
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
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.
using social media is just assumed. like driving a car, having a job, watching tv, etc. it’s just background assumption, and if you don’t use it, you’re weird.
but there are vastly different ways and volumes in which people use it. i have most only ever used it for community/volunteer stuff. i only used it personally like 10 years ago back when it was just pictures my friends and I posted. I stopped using it in 2021 or so after it got enshittified and became nothing but advertising and porn in my feeds and my friends photos took scrolling for 5m to find.
Yeah I’m basically the same. I have it, but I only use it sometimes. It doesn’t hold my interest that much.
Agreed.
I also find it funny how you (mostly) read about (F)OSS purists here but readily engage in using Chromium based browsers like Brave.Like…why?? You (not you OP :p) can’t preach about FOSS but also use Brave in the same contexts.
I use discord and piefed and that’s it. Discord is mainstream, but I’m just in a couple small servers talking with friends.
I just don’t mesh well with most social media. Mastodon and Bluesky confuse me just as much as Twitter and Facebook did.
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.
I’ve been using SmartTube on a Firestick and it’s great. Not only does it get rid of the YouTube commercials, it can also get rid of the “…and that’s why I use SquareSpace” type stuff.
Yes this is perfect. With YouTube history disabled so you don’t see recommendations at all. Just subscriptions, ‘watch later’ list, and non-personalized post-video recommendations on some devices.
Yes, I’ve disabled history and use the FF extension Untrap for YouTube to block anything else that might bleed through. Endless Algorithmic feeds are bad for you imo
Its not worth it. Try freetube.
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 scrape reddit for things that can’t be trusted to stay hosted there and put them on the Fediverse. But I don’t actually use reddit.
Based. What are some examples of such things?
Boobs n butts.
Every morning, I scrape reddit to see what crimes the fascist paramilitary invaders known as ice did recently. Then post it to Mastodon so the media is off reddit servers and then post that to Crimes of ICE
I don’t know why people are trusting reddit to host this media, it gets deleted often and it’s too important to let get deleted. One day, there will be trials, and this will be evidence.
Nope. Got off all of it in 2017 and I’ve never looked back
Same,in 2013.
Decentralisation purist here.
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?
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…
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.
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.
social media
noun
Interactive forms of media that allow users to interact with and publish to each other, generally by means of the Internet.
I think it counts
So anything with a comments section? That would make pornhub and animekai “social medias” too LMAO
unless you’re actively posting and commenting and interacting on youtube, you aren’t though.
some of us just watch videos. I never had an account either until I was forced to get one due to them blocking so many vids from being viewed without signing in.
just like i sometimes read twitter comments, but i don’t have a twitter account and i don’t interact it, they just sometimes come up as links in stories i’m reading. same with tiktok or IG videos/images. I see it mostly through other websites that are using them as sources.
that’s very different than most people who are using it to as a means of socialization. I don’t even regard reddit/lemmy or internet comments as socialization. some people do. i have never have a ‘reddit friend’ even though I used teh site for over a decade. to me it was just shit on the internet that was fun to comment about.
I keep trying to block reddit, but half of the good practical advice and troubleshooting help is trapped there.
If anybody has a giant directory of active messageboards, I’m all ears.
