I have fully transitioned to using Lemmy and Mastodon right when third party apps weren’t allowed on Spez’s place anymore, so I don’t know how it is over there anymore.
What do you use? Are you still switching between the two, essentially dualbooting?
What other social media do you use? How do you feel about Fediverse social media platforms in general?
(I’m sorry if I’m the 100th person to ask this on here…)
Lemmy is my main but I still use Reddit sometimes for more niche subreddits.
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.
Lemmy is my main one, yes. I browse Pinterest every now and then, though I’m not sure how many would consider it social media in the traditional sense.
I feel like that would compare two very different types of social media:
- Consumption oriented: Platforms which mainly tailor to consumers, like Tiktok, Pinterest, Instagram and Youtube.
- Collaboration oriented: Platforms where engagement with the content and discussions are encouraged, like Lemmy and Mostodon and their proprietary equivalents.
It wins by default but only because I never liked the Twitter/Mastodon/Bluesky-like infinitely scrolling threads and only use Discord to follow some artists.
Have a very similar experience with Mastodon-like platforms. These feel more like announcement-sites rather than actual social media platforms.
These days twitter is where it’s at for keeping up with everything that’s censored everywhere else. There’s nowhere better for Palestine updates. I hear tiktok is good too but I’m no longer a teenager.
It is for me, I use an account on Lemmy.ml for general browsing (and correcting misconceptions about Marxism, if I’m being honest), and a Hexbear.net account I pretty much only browse locally if I just want to relax and not have to worry about getting into an argument.
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.
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!
I only use Lemmy. Never had accounts on any of the other social media platforms apart from Facebook more than a decade ago. I’ve been checking reddit, reluctantly, here and there recently to have something to post to my communities. Apart from that, it’s been Lemmy only since the exodus
Very interesting. I do still see many posts originating from Reddit around here, presumably exactly because of that reason.
But I must tell you, making your own funis and ideas and putting them onto Lemmy feels really great.
It feels like an invitation to discuss the topic with others and come up with new ideas, instead of feeding other peoples algorithms and keep them hooked on the site.It feels much more like interacting with real actual people, even if there are less on here.
I hear you. The thing is, the communities I mod are quite niche (in relation to Lemmy’s population, that is) and apart from the corresponding subreddits I used to lurk on for years, I’m not really exposed to anything new that would prompt me to make new discussion posts and memes. I’ve watched all video essays there are about the games, I played through all of them repeatedly, new content is not on the horizon for any one of them. The best thing about them is the discussion in the community which has been missing ever since I created the communities in the first place.
Believe me: I’ve tried. But keeping three separate communities alive all on your own without community members ever feeling the need to contribute gets exhausting and doesn’t feel worthwhile. So making my own content, which I do when I have a cool idea, feels like more of a loss when the engagement is just as high, sometimes lower, as with content off reddit.
Lurkers will be lurking, I guess
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
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
Bluesky at this point. It has most of the people I used to follow on twitter already.
Instagram, followed by Lemmy. I’m trying to use IG less often.
I was addicted to IG, getting off that platform was a blessing.
