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Same for me. Mostly using Lemmy and Mastodon since theyβre filling two different roles. I also reluctantly still use Instagram since all my friends are on it.
Some people seem to see it as a negative that Mastodon with its linear feed doesnβt get them nearly as addicted as corporate social media but for me thatβs a huge plus.
Same! The "lack of content" is really refreshing somehow.
Not having some proprietary algorithm spoon-feed you content is very nice. It literally only shows you exactly what you tell it to.
Lemmy is the only one I'll log onto and the only one I have as an app.
Sometimes though, I'll miss a super specific community from the place spez ruined, and scroll through it in DuckDuckGo browser.
Anything that has an intransparent, engagement driving, ad laden algorithm that determines what you do and don't see is thoroughly unappealing to me. At least now that I'm a little more tech savvy and anti-corporate.
I guess I do technically have a Facebook account still because I don't remember the password of either that account or the associated email address. I used that for local flea market and food sharing groups up until maybe 6 years ago.
It feels super weird having used Lemmy for a while, and to then come back to something like Youtube, which does have it's proprietary algorithm thingy. So weird seeing content I didn't explicitely agree to seeing.
Facebook appears to be a common ground for many replies on this post, which I find very interesting.
Ikr? I have to use YouTube a specific way. I'll go to a channel and go to the tab that just lists the videos chronologically. I'll go back there if I want a second video. The only way I find new creators I enjoy watching is through recommendation/someone sending a link to a group chat. Shame really, I bet there's plenty of content out there that I'd enjoy, but I can't handle the algorithm.
I think the Facebook thing is because it was more or less the first social media that pretty much everyone was on. Everything before was a little more niche. But back in, like, 2010, it felt like you were missing out if you weren't on FB. At least that's my experience/guess (I'm 27 and in middle Europe).
Anything that has an intransparent, engagement driving, ad laden algorithm that determines what you do and don't see is thoroughly unappealing to me. At least now that I'm a little more tech savvy and anti-corporate.
Hear hear. Under the guise of Engagement, corporations have weaponized algorithms to maximize the time you spend on their platforms, and it's absolutely been a race to the bottom, prioritizing Outrage above all else. Hard pass, thanks.
Corporate goals don't align with that of users like they used to.
hey, I know this funi! I've seen this guy on 196 before!
yeah i basically only use lemmy and watch youtube videos, or i pirate media, play games with friends, or do stupid stuff with my computer that i shouldnt be allowed to do
Lemmy and Mastodon
I have deleted my accounts on Reddit, Twittet and Facebook.
How do you use Mastodon?
I have tried to engage with it more multiple times, but I tend to not get anywhere. Is it like instagram, where you gotta subscribe to some hashtags?
Yeah, you subscribe to hashtags to start, find people you agree with/find interesting, follow them, and then as they boost stuff you'll find more and more people to follow.
Started on lemmy today after reddit perma banned my 14 year old account for breaking the first rule of reddit. I may have told some to kill themselves. I'm definitely in the wrong but I don't care I'm taking the ban personally and never using it again.
lemmy is my first and only social account (unless you consider software forums or gitlab lol)
Matrix too but not using that in a social media way, only as a direct messenger.
Had a Facebook account I completely ignored (set it up for my first girlfriend and we exclusively used Yahoo Messenger) then turned into a music dump, then deleted. I honestly never saw the point of Facebook, not with apps like WhatsApp or even standard SMS evolving as they have, even back then (talking about the 2010s).
Had an Instagram account for about 3 months - surprisingly decent source of grotesque/morbid art! Again, saw no point in this, and Reddit felt superior in all ways.
Mainlined Reddit for a good couple of years, mostly during the Pandemic. By the time I got into it, one could feel its bulk, so to speak. Sure 99.7% of Reddit were the users, but even so, it felt as though subreddit quirks and in-jokes had ossiffied into tennets by that point. Loved it, but it felt constraining here and there.
Switched to Lemmy a couple of months after deleting my Reddit account when shit went down, and it's all I've been using and plan on using. Unless one counts news aggregators as social platforms.
I love this scroungy, spit-and-duct tape feel of the fediverse, to be very honest. Feels like the days when we used to group chat on local network sharing apps, like it's just the neighbourhood kids around. And it seems to not be dissipating even with the huge increase in users, which is a good sign. Plus the obvious lack of curation other than baseline moderation and/or personal grudges is always nice!
I see it the exact same way!
The way that the fediverse is split up like this, with many instance working with different rulesets really does make it feel like some neighbourhood people coming together to chat.
I especially like the way how, why you chose an instance, you can either stay within the bounds of your own local group, or interact with all the people by switching over to the "subscribed" tab (at least this is the case here on blahaj zone).
Yeah, pretty much. This and Discord really. Signal for P2P messaging.
I went full Lemmy for a while but have to admit I'm reading reddit again, but without their dumb app. Just the web browser.
Looking through a few subreddits, see what's new for five minutes. I don't post anymore, don't have an account.
It's my only social media. I have Voyager, and it's all I need. I never used FB or Twitter, or anything other than Reddit. And I'm done with that cesspool.
Lemmy has replaced reddit for me.
Mastodon doesn't do it for me, most of what I find interesting isn't really... there yet.
So my mains are Instagram > Discord > Lemmy > Reddit
In that order I'd say.
Instagram is just the most "personal" social network. I watch my friends' stories, share some of my own here and there.. It's close to how we used facebook back when it wasn't a cesspit of ads and "pages".
Discord is where I keep in direct contact with most of my friends, besides like messengers. Reddit is for specific problem solving and random hobby content.
Lemmy is filling the same niche but I just scroll it more than I do reddit for news, articles, hobby stuff...
Bluesky at this point. It has most of the people I used to follow on twitter already.
Lemmy and Mastodon for me. I donβt get a lot of engagement on Mastodon but I never did on twitter either. So Lemmy is probably 90% of my interaction and mastodon is basically an reader for certain hashtags and people on the fedi
Lemmy is my main social media account. I also switched from Reddit when Spez killed third party apps, and I won't go back. I use Sync for Lemmy on my phone and tablet. I paid for the lifetime Ultra account, because that's how much of a "fuck you" I wanted to give Spez. I'll gladly pay the $100 for an alternative ad-free app than use Reddit's free app.
I also use Imgur, although it's been suffering from enshittification ever since Sarah and the team sold it. I can't even save a post without getting a pop-up asking to subscribe to the user or follow similar content tags. Or downvote without being asked if I want to block the user or related tags. Just let me do the thing and move on! Stop trying to customize my experience! I'm still able to block their ads, thanks to my VPN service, but they built a dedicated ad space at the bottom of the app that I can't make go away. So a section of the bottom of my Imgur screen is unusable black space. I miss being able to use my full screen to browse images.
I still have Facebook, but only because everyone I know from my childhood until now is there and it's my main way of staying in touch with people. If I dump Facebook, I'll have practically no one left in my life, except for my sister, wife, and maybe two friends. If I need social engagement concerning something going on in my life, I'll post it there. But I don't use it much.
I have LinkedIn and spent years keeping my profile up to date and super detailed, expecting to need some good references and a solid history of experience and accomplishments. But then I retired at 38 years old and found out I don't need to work anymore, so it's just been collecting dust for the last 2 years now. I still get the occasional request to connect from someone offering to help me find a job (I'm a veteran), but I don't need their assistance. I'm quite happy being retired young.
I have a Discord server I built for my closest friends to stay in touch, but only 2 people regularly interact on it. I subscribed to maybe 30+ other random servers, but I mute pretty much all of them so I'm not inundated with Discord notifications all the time.
I have Twitch, but mostly used it to stream the games I'm playing when I'm bored. I'm happy if I get 1 or 2 views. I do it just for the fun of it, not to build a following or anything.
I have NextDoor, but there are thousands of people in my town who use it regularly, so it's hard to stay in touch with my "neighbors." I mostly ignore it unless I'm trying to find suggestions for something local.
I made a Bluesky account last year; got an invite from a friend before it opened up to everyone. But I hardly ever used Twitter in the past. I always felt like it was pointless unless you were a celebrity with tons of followers. So I'm having trouble thinking of ways to use Bluesky now.
I have Instagram, but only because Facebook merged my account with Instagram when they bought it. I've never used it, not even to browse others' content there.
I made a Snapchat account in high school, but never used it. That was over 20 years ago. Back then, Snapchat was just used to share selfies, and I didn't like taking selfies so I had no use for it. Is Snapchat still a thing?
I had a MySpace account when I was a teenager, but I guess the site got sold sometime in the past decade or two. I kinda forgot about it, and the last time I went to check it out, it was a totally different site and didn't recognize my login anymore.
I made an account on Pixelfed last year to share pictures, but I don't really have anything to share right now. I only remembered I had the account because I just now found their app in my phone.
I use Patreon, mostly just to follow a few people I know and support them.
I worked as an IT guy in the military, and we were explicitly banned from using TikTok when it became popular, because it was a Chinese spyware program and they didn't want it stealing data on US military members. When you installed it, we found that it embedded itself in your phone in a way that was extremely difficult to fully remove, then granted itself full access to your phone and started trickling your data to Chinese servers. It was a massive security vulnerability, which is why President Biden pushed to block TikTok from the US. But the app was so popular, he got a lot of pushback and it never got blocked. It's still wildly popular, but I'll never touch that program.
the tiktok part was really interesting. thank you for sharing!
It is. Both lemmy and Mastodon.
I cannot use Reddit or Twitter anymore.
Mostly on Lemmy. I'm on Mastadon too. I don't know if YouTube counts but I'm on there as well and is the only corporate social media I use consistently.
I find myself using Instagram more but only following a handful of creators, I don't post or check on my feed. I deleted my Twitter and LinkedIn but can't get myself to delete my Meta accounts because of the people that I have contact with on there. I hardly contact ppl but the sentimentally of the connections is something
I primarily use Lemmy. It's the only place to really find intelligent conversation. I hop over to reddit on occasion for topics that just aren't here yet. But almost every comment thread is either full of bots or those with little reading comprehension.
I completely switched to Mastodon and here, I'd rather not use platforms that are locked down by corporations and will inevitably enshittify without leaving me a simple way to migrate
Yeah I'm on Lemmy and Mastodon. I also still watch YouTube. They haven't passed whatever my threshold is for suckitude, yet. I'm sure it's coming.
I use Lemmy almost exclusively. Mastodon and Twitter never appealed to me, as I simply donβt see the point. Unless you use it for receiving info from local authorities and such.
I do still use Facebook for all the local and niche communities, which you canβt find anywhere else. I wish Mobilizon was more equal to Facebook Groups and had an actual mobile app.
My only use for Reddit now is reading r/hfy stories, though I'm doing that through a local Redlib instance, hoping that those glitter sniffers don't lock website content behind accounts like almost every other social medium does (but we all know that if something can get worse to make more money, it WILL get worse to make more money).
It's very sad to see general social media platforms go that route. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are unusable without an account.
It is, I don't go on Reddit anymore, it's insanely toxic. I've gotten all I could've gotten from there anyway. I only use Lemmy nowadays.
Besides this place, I also use Imgur and YouTube to help fill in the void after leaving reddit. I'm considering joining Bluesky and Mastodon as well but I've never used a Twitter-like interface before so it's intimidating.
Unfortunately I still haven't found a suitable replacement for niche communities. There's always forums, but I got too used to points-based communities, and because comments are sorted chronologically, it's hard to know what's crap and what's actual useful information. Which can suck if you need a good opinion on something. 20-30 years ago that wouldn't have even bothered me, cause forums were the only social media I knew then. But times have changed.
s/main/only/
Lemmy, though I admit two days ago I put on political filters. I'll open the flood gates again in a couple weeks.
That being said, before Lemmy I hadn't used main stream social outside of Reddit for years anyway.
May want to give that four years or so. It's just going to be predictable, depressing slog with no avenue to affect change between here and there
Yes. For over a year, from Reddit. Although I like Bluesky more than I expected. Also Discuit is awesome.
I have never really considered Lemmy or Reddit to be "social media." They're entirely anonymous, and you're not being exposed to posts where a apecific person is talking about themselves (at least for the most part). I think a modern equivalent to a PhpBB forum or (if you're old) a BBS is more accurate.
In an ever-evolving digital landscape, I am thrilled to immerse myself in the liberating experience of using decentralized platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy, and Pixelfed. Freed from the constraints of centralized social media, I have embarked on a transformative journey. Recognizing the excessive time once consumed by my phoneβnearly ten hours a dayβI have successfully halved this to around five hours daily, allowing for a healthier balance, with a slight indulgence during weekends.
My commitment to this shift is further evidenced by my conscious decision over the past two years to bid farewell to major platforms such as Twitter and Tumblr. More recently, I have cut ties with Instagram, Facebook, BlueSky, Reddit, and even Snapchat.
In an effort to further champion these alternative platforms and their communities, I am proud to contribute by donating to Mastodon. This initiative not only represents a personal commitment but also an investment in the growth and resilience of decentralized social networks, encouraging more people to explore the boundless opportunities they offer.
This sounds like an apology video written by an AI and thus I am not sure if you're being sarcastic.
I'm on Lemmy essentially 99% of the time. When I'm on Reddit it's because of niche hobbies that have more presence there. It's very rare. (Or search index results.)
I never use Mastodon. I was only on Twitter for very niche and interactive hobbies that do not have enough people to engage with on Mastodon. I mostly use BlueSky now but still use Twitter on occasion. It's like 50/50 at the moment, but that's a lot considering my BlueSky account is only like two weeks old.
Lemmy has enough content to keep me entertained for general browsing and most of my hobbies.
I have been Lemmy only since the 3rd party app thing also. I also stopped using Twitter when Musk bought it, and have Mastadon on my to-do list but I'm not sure if I want to spin up my own instance or make an account elsewhere. Other than that I have no other social media accounts and never have.
As for other Fediverse platforms, I'm strongly opposed to the for profit ones, but happy to see all the open source ones.
Lemmy and matrix, I still use Discord though because the communities are more active
Lemmy after reddit banned me. I've been getting into Bluesky, too. Sometimes Mastodon. I'm open to other suggestions, too.
Lemmy is the only thing i post to occasionally. On Reddit and Instagram i just lurk
Definitely Instagram.
While Lemmy is slowly making a dent in my reddit participation, it doesn't do much for other things. I'm involved in IRL politics, food, and the clubbing scene, all stuff that is almost completely absent on the fediverse, especially the American-dominated side of it.
I was never much of a social media guy, especially after moonlighting one summer as a social media marketer on Twitter and Instagram (really, really kills it for ya), but I was a redditor for a while.
I swapped over to Lemmy exclusively during the API fees, but to be fair I was already getting frustrated by the service. The karma farming was just too much, so many stupid reposts of the same stupid made up wholesome stories and crap. I think I only miss r/comics and r/idiotsincars, the later requiring a critical mass of people to actually be worthwhile.