Proud of myself, not cause I'm old, but because I managed to guess the intention of the word first try. Excited to see people say frying more often, maybe it'll be on those "banned words list" posts.

It's just a perception thing we have, a phone number DOES feel more personal to me, even if most people's Instagram accounts are even more detailed. In my case, I literally never posted anything on Instagram, so there was nothing to gather about me besides what posts I liked.

Plus some people my interpret asking for a phone number as wanting to date them or smth (although the same could be said for any messaging service tbh).

Am Gen Z, and currently in college. Clearly am on Fediverse, and I was never a fan of using IG (only got it cause my middle school friends made me since COVID was happening) and I have completely deactivated my account as of last winter. I have met several people at my college who don't use Instagram for various reasons, and while my other friend is a little disappointed that she can't message them on insta, at the end of the day, we live and move on.

At my college a lot of clubs use GroupMe (owned by Microsoft unfortunately) and we have an official Discord Hub that a lot of clubs are on also. So there's two different methods of communication that aren't Insta that are common on my campus. Some of my friends do have Signal in fact (even my Instagram loving friend), but because more of them don't we unfortunately don't use Signal, even when I beg my one friend who has it. She says 'it sucks and who uses it", but I've never really had the chance to use it to judge her statement as true or not.

Anyway, yeah, you could do a bunch of crazy shit and make fake accounts on Insta to have superficial conversations with people who won't give you the time of day for having an app, or you could just not. It's not that hard to find better friends/people to hang out with, and if you really make a connection with them then they should be happy with any form of communication you offer. Not all Gen Z are adamant Instagram defenders, some even hate it for various reasons (Suckerberg, being data stalkers, promoting bigotry, promoting mental health disorders, etc.)

Unfortunate, I had to use this app when my highschool offered a Europe trip during the summer. The shit barely worked anyway because most of us had shoddy service or didn't have a plan where we could have our data on 24/7, so it wouldn't be able to update our location often. It'd make it look like a kid was 3 miles away from the hotels we stayed at, and one time two girls almost got in trouble during curfew cause the app wasn't updated.

I really wish there were OSS apps out there that let people track their friends/loved ones, because I totally get it, sometimes you can't call/text at that moment. Hell, if they get kidnapped you might have a chance of finding them if they still have their phone on them.

I love how people just drop xkcd pages like how religious zealots drop Bible verses. Y'alls minds are beautiful and I'm amazed every time someone remembers a specific comic.

Cannot WAIT for the day that Lemmy blows up even more and we begin to make the million of subgenre cat communities like how Reddit had the million different cat subs. My mom is always talking about the new cat subreddit that she found and will be like, "oh found a new cat sub, this one focuses on cats that go "eechecheh", I love it!" or some shit.

What? What? Please inform me of this Lemmy lore I'm hella confused

Reposted it to Mastodon! Hope it makes a change, cause America can usually catch the waves.

FUCK can't read 😭🔫

Misskey is like a double edged sword for me. It's so much more cooler and fresh looking than both Mastodon and Pixelfed, like I truly do love how sleek it looks on browser. There's a shit ton of customization for profile pics, banners, icons, emoji reactions, etc. It incorporates both in one, pictures and short messages with hashtags.

But like, the site is so overstimulating too. I think it's partially because it's influenced by Japanese website culture which loves to overload the screen with text and ads and other graphics, so people's reaction emojis will be table slamming, and their icon will have a fish doing backflips on their profile pic, and they'll put text like "わぉぉおおおおお!1!1!1" that shakes around and shit, and it basically feels as overwhelming as this runon sentence. Like I feel a little lost when I use it ngl. Also the fact that basically all the servers are Japanese (cause it came from Japan) and the really good ones (misskey.io and pawoo.net) are not allowing foreigners to sign up because people got mad (I mean there's a lot of loli shit on there too...) so it's a struggle for non-Japanese speakers (I'm learning the language but my brain gets tired looking at misskey).

I joined a misskey sever but barely use the account, and half the time I'm looking at posts from remote servers (which is another fun bag of worms, looking at remote content on both Mastodon and Misskey sucks in app tbh). Honestly I barely use Mastodon or Pixelfed anyway, Lemmy is my main time sinker.

Edit: A Misskey feature that Mastodon doesn't have is antennas, you can basically make a feed based off of a keyword you make. Almost like following hashtags but you can really specify it!

I know that they might not be as secure as GrapheneOS, but you should totally give LineageOS or /e/OS a try, as they're both not limited to Pixels. I haven't tested them myself however, since I am a Graphene user. The most I ever tried with one of them was testing ROMs by installing LineageOS on my old Moto G7 play.