Are you still active in any social media platforms?

Are you still active in any social media platforms?

1. quad

   21 hours ago

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   I left broadcast social media a decade ago. (FB, Twitter, …)

   That said, I consider link aggregators like lobste.rs to be social media.

2. Flagged off-topic. Social media usage is not a valid case of the programming tag.

   1. cpurdy

      14 hours ago

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      On the other hand, a careful examination of the oft-repeated statement “I could built Twitter in a weekend” would be interesting 🤣

      1. Ha I am actually building something that could replace twitter usage for a lot of people and, well it has been more than a weekend, but its not a super complex project (here is the gitlab page) if you are interested.

         Other than that I have been off social media for over a decade now, and I don’t miss it at all. I wouldn’t mind using something like mastodon but whenever I try it just feels like a waste of time.

   2. thanks, I was thinking “culture” but reading the description a bit not fit, so went with the default “programming” with the weekly “What are you doing this weekend” question. What is your recommended tag?

      1. culture is maybe closest, but honestly this is kind of an “underpants” thread, as I think @pushcx refers to them–something that everybody has an opinion on but which isn’t really helpful from a professional standpoint or in making one a better programmer.

         Like, the orange site is a better fit for this sort of discussion.

         1. jcdl

            8 hours ago

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            I don’t think the orange site ever offers meaningful insight on social media. SV is responsible for how much of a shit show it is today and HN lives in the valley reality distortion field.

         2. zem

            22 minutes ago

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            if anything, it highlights the need for a [social] or [community] tag, i.e. a way to have conversations of interest with fellow lobsters members.

3. I’ve been on Mastodon for the past 8 months or so and I love it as it has the vibe, the enthusiasm, and the potential of the early Internet. Within hours of joining, with just a dozen followers, I already had interesting conversations and a feed with valuable content.

4. I had a very similar question. I’ve never used any of the major advertising / psychological profiling platforms (getting people to call them ‘social media’ is the best piece of PR work for at least 50 years) but I’d recently been considering Twitter, since it seems like a good way of reaching a large audience for some of my work (mostly this has worked so far by asking other people to tweet about it). Now Elon Musk is killing the platform, it’s not something I want to jump on. Mastodon seems to be where people are going. I don’t want to host my own instance, but I would like an identity not tied to a provider. I’m also interested in whether BlueSky will displace it. What marketing platforms to folks recommend these days?

   1. danso

      15 hours ago

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      advertising / psychological profiling platforms (getting people to call them ‘social media’ is the best piece of PR work for at least 50 years)

      This is fairly applied to Twitter and Youtube, but some, like Lobsters and most Mastodon instances, don’t do any advertising or data collection/manipulation at all. Have you settled on a term which includes them?

      Besides that, you might be forgetting about “carbon footprints” ;^)

   2. gpm

      11 hours ago

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      I don’t want to host my own instance, but I would like an identity not tied to a provider.

      Mastodon supports moving accounts between instances, which might be close enough to what you want?

5. Nope. Rage-quit Twitter a number of years ago. Quit social media altogether at the beginning of the pandemic. Too much heat and not enough light. Never looked back.

6. I quit FB and Instagram few years ago and never felt better. Tried Twitter but got to angry. I do have Linkdin but only to keep in contact with few former colleagues. Other than that Signal and maybe some social Slack channels at my job. And good ’ol RSS.

7. What’s next though? Whatever it is will probably be worse.

   The next big thing will probably be worse, because it will be driven by profit seeking, which means finding a way to make social media even more addictive so that you can extract even more money from your users. But I don’t want to hang out with people who are locked into addictive behaviour, regardless of whether they are meth heads, gambling addicts, or they are obsessed with increasing their social media status.

   I don’t think I want to be on a social network with 1’000’000’000 users, because how does it avoid being a hellscape?

   I prefer smaller online groups that have a friendly atmosphere, comprised of like-minded people, with no advertising or other forms of manipulation. These groups will continue to exist even as the rest of the internet goes to hell. Lobsters is okay but I wish I could hide my ever-increasing social media score that appears in the upper right corner.

8. I think social media, at least to me, is best viewed as “stopping off at the pub after work”

   Some folks can do that everyday. Some folks end up with a drinking problem. I think it varies a lot both by the individual and the platform.

   I gave up FB. I stay on FB messenger but only on one machine. I use Twitter more than I should, but not a lot. I mostly don’t do anything else except Discord, where I’m experimenting with the platform as a tool to enable ad-hoc working teams, coding and working on technical problems with a minimal amount of structure. So far I’ve had mixed results.

   For what it’s worth, in general I’ve found that the more dispassionate I am about picking my broadcast platform (and changing them), the better the overall quality of my decision looks years later. I’ve never had any luck with becoming upset and engaging in any sort of written communication at all, much less social media. It’s best for me to step away. YMMV.

   • I like telling jokes and making people smile. I find that this is the thing that keeps me coming back to most of these platforms. I don’t need an audience, but if I can make one person feel better then I feel like I’m helping folks.

   1. What does Discord offer that Matrix, Mattermost, or Zulip doesn’t?

      1. I’ve been experimenting with online publishing and various forms of audience interaction since, well, there was a web. I tend to avoid things like featureset comparisons, or promises of instant fame or fortune.

         When I finally realized I had to leave my FB friends, it was almost like losing my family! Very strange to have that sense of loss.

         I decided that I wanted to go somewhere that already had a big crowd, was used by people who wouldn’t put up with a lot of marketing, and allowed fairly seamless integration either in meeting/coding mode or post-respond mode. Discord offered me that.

         For my server I made a minimum number of channels and I manage content there. I think this allows folks to drop by and consume the kinds of things they want while leaving me open to experiment. Now that Discord allows folks to subscribe to channels on various servers, it opens up the opportunity to do something like have a set of channels on crypto, for instance, all managed by different folks. This would be the closest I’ve seen to what magazines used to be. We’ve combined the author and editor role.

         But the big thing was turn it on, it works. Any questions, somebody is around to help out.

9. danso

   15 hours ago

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   Join us on Fosstodon! It’s always been fun, but it’s especially active now for 44 billion reasons.

   Aside from that, I read Lobsters daily and am usually idle on Libera.Chat. I feel some professional need to keep a LinkedIn account, but LinkedIn is a silly place.

10. icefox

    14 hours ago

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    I use Linkedin to keep track of people I’ve worked with and like. It’s occasionally been useful. I probably log in like 2-3 times a year. Most reliable way to send christmas messages to ex-bosses and coworkers I like though.

    Used to use Reddit fairly regularly but the few subreddits on topics I liked suffered the Eternal September, as always happens when communities get too large, and I don’t bother anymore. r/AskScience is occasionally a good way to kill some time.

    Sometimes I browse imgur but it mostly makes me angry so I’m working on quitting. I’ll get my cute fox pictures somewhere else.

    Played with Mastodon a few years ago and it was pretty cool but after like a month I realized it had spent far more time making me annoyed or anxious than making me happy, and quit.

11. Nope. Moved my personal stuff to Gemini a while ago, too. Shut down my LinkedIn account too.

12. toastal

    edited 17 hours ago

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    My LINE and Instagram were both suspended in the last year by their corps because of not wanting to fork over my information. Facebook languishes and I check it once a month in case of family stuff. Proprietary stuff, I still actively use YouTube, Flickr, Hacker News, and Reddit. I guess GitHub counts as well after they’ve added so many uncessary engagement features, but I have a uBlock filter list to make it tolerable for work and open source projects that have you to migrate elsewhere.

    I’ve made it a personal mission that if I do any new social media, it will only be on open and/or decentralized platforms. As such, I have Mastodon, Matrix, Signal, Lobsters, and hop on IRC every once in a while. There’s some big downsides though as I have gotten invited to a lot less stuff and have had less interaction with friends as despite warnings, never took up my contact info on an alternative or fail to see the benefit it could have to them. As such, only the loyalest friends and techies are left.

    The weirdest part is developers are techie and know better having built these platform and know how they sell off your data and use patterns to make you addicted, but they still only offer these options for communication and engagement on their projects. The GitHub + Discord + Twitter thing needs to die.

    What’s next though? Whatever it is will probably be worse. I know Zoomers use TikTok as a search engine generally. I think governments prefer the lock-in and account verification for law enforcement and capitalists love their advertising/data harvesting money and delivering value to shareholder over what’s best for users. I want to believe, but I don’t think the open source platforms have a real shot since I don’t see young folks talking about it and the youth always define “cool”. There’s no money in it, and it’s a good idea to donate to these projects and when you’re young (and poor and impressionable) free as in beer always trumps free as in freedom until society shifts.

    1. I guess GitHub counts as well after they’ve added so many uncessary engagement features

       The original tagline was “social coding;” It’s always been at least as much about being a social network as a developer tool.

13. reezer

    18 hours ago

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    Yep, lobste.rs among others.

    No Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc though and have to get rid of my LinkedIn and such things, but didn’t log in there in many years.

14. I am most active on Lobsters and a local linux users group mailing list, where I both read and post. I passively consume a few other sites and fora, like Hacker News. I’m on Matrix a bit. I’ve recently slowed down on Github, which is also social media, with its badges, stars and feeds, despite the constructive purpose of sharing and collaborating on code. (Maybe I’ll switch to gitea when it federates?) I have friends on Facebook but have avoided joining so far due to a strong distaste for how FB works.

    For me personally, I hope that what will be next is hanging out more with people in real life, and less time spent compulsively checking my feeds, which feels like addictive activity.

15. I’m semi-active on Twitter and recently signed up on a mastodon instance. I honestly don’t get the hate Twitter gets. I only follow journalists, economics experts, and people that tweet about programming things I’m interested about and my feed is fine. Twitter is mostly what you make of it.

16. owl

    edited 13 hours ago

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    Only fediverse I guess, not counting chat platforms like matrix.

    I have a little instance running GoToSocial and have made some friends on there, it’s nice.

    Left the corporate ones some years ago (2016 it seems) and don’t regret it.

17. Messenger + LINE for chatting with friends but they definitely leave something to be desired. For event planning & discovery I’m stuck with Facebook + Meetup, but I’m really hoping that a viable alternative will emerge.

18. I’m a focused user of Twitter; I follow two specific science-related people (0, 1), but only see what they share/promote.

    I think I still have Facebook, but never check it. I went to finally close my LinkedIn account, but it seems to have gone away on its own.

19. I use Twitter most of the time. I built my own bubble, so it’s comfortable. I switched it to “Latest Tweets” and I have to dislike every ad post once in a month to not show up for another month. Lifehack. So I only see what I want to see there.

    I also use LinkedIn, because as of my latest discovery, recruiters are the most converting source when it comes to job seeking. To be noticable, I used to post some small essays about topics which I don’t see covered elsewhere.

    I have a Mastodon account for years, but I ain’t that active as on other social media. Matrix is a facade for me for IRC, where we have small groups from university times. I occasionally click on reddit, it’s trash, but I do get in conversations for career advices and such, so try to help there.

    Github is a special kind of animal. I follow fellow coders with whom I share some common (mostly the spoken language), so I can locate myself in the field. I don’t have the intention to go international, so it’s again a bubble :)

20. mat

    15 hours ago

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    Lobsters is my most heavily used social network for now, alongside various messaging platforms. I used to use social media much more broadly, but have stopped using most of my accounts regularly.

    For the most part, I just delete the client I would have used or stop logging in, ie my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts are still floating around, just mostly derelict. I deleted my Twitter account a couple of years back because the urge to just peek was too strong.

21. I’m on Mastodon (Fosstodon, specifically). I check Facebook periodically to keep up with two people, but I never post there. I’m on Linkedin but only for job stuff, not for reading or posting content.

    I use Reddit a fair amount, and Lobste.rs, obviously. I’ve started to use forums again. I’m also experimenting with Nicheless.

22. I’m a musician and instagram is where i share my music & see music from my friends. Its also one of the ways i get to see some fun things my friends are up to.

    A few years ago i dropped everything for what i considered moral reasons & my band hated me for it 😅. Now I’m less ideological, though i still yearn for a better platform. One thing i will say is i found dropping everything & starting fresh has made my feeds 10x better.

    Every once in a while I’ll delete the app as i find the updates from friends sometimes too much & other times i enjoy it.

    I hope in the future a geocities on steroids exists with great drag & drop ui builders & pluggable static api plugins so friends can fetch updates & maybe clients can exist that aggregate updates from your friends (like rss readers on steroids)

23. I’m not a poster on all the major social media except LinkedIn, where dispite the urge to delete my account, I feel like I need to play this game for professional reasons i.e. catch with old co-workers, assist with recruitment for my team, etc. I also use Telegram a lot, the groups are great resources for many areas of the Cybersecurity field.

    I’m definitely not interested in the personal social part of it, and have never been.

24. Yes, I post on Twitter (in Mastodon too, mostly the same) which is more like a “international social media” and Instagram, which for me it’s more like my “local social media”. In Instagram I only follow people I know in person or meme accounts. They’re like very different worlds to me

25. zaphar

    15 hours ago

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    I exclusively use twitter for personal social media, but it’s heavily curated. I use the mute and block button liberally and I’m not shy about clicking the un-follow button. I refuse to use the algorithmic feed. If there is one thing I would pay twitter for it would be to permanently shut off the algorithmic feed.

    I use LinkedIn but pretty much exclusively for work purposes. It’s a halfway decent professional network It is also heavily curated though and I also avoid the home feed there. I only visit the notifications window.

26. I’m very active on tumblr and I love it so much that I’ve paid them for an ad-free experience. I love that it’s so easy to see nothing but the content that I want to see. Do I recommend it for anyone else or think it’s the future? Not really. I doubt there’s much of a programming community, but that’s not what I use tumblr for.

    1. Care to share some of your favourite content? I never found anything of interest there.

       1. I’m not who you asked, but I mostly use it for (fan)art

27. I’ve doomscrolled my fair bit on Twitter and was very active on Google+ before it was wiped off the face of the Earth. As of recently I’ve started becoming more conscious of the effect being online every waking hour has had on my mental health, and have cut down heavily on social media usage.

    I’ve completely eliminated Twitter as of recently, and use a Mastodon account on an Android dev instance because that’s one community I wanted to stick with. I also go through lobste.rs itself a lot so I built a read-only Android client for myself to curate a local reading list without getting involved too much in the discussions here.

28. easrng

    15 hours ago

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    I am active on fedi (I my main is on a mastodon instance and I have an alt on an akkoma instance) and discord. I have a tumblr but I don’t post much, I mostly just have it to look at fanart and stuff.

29. mordae

    14 hours ago

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    I have tried Twitter two separate times. First time I was just bored and the second time I have gotten angry.

    I also tried Facebook, but it just didn’t click. Felt like a hassle to check up on it. Reading an article or blog post shared on the orange site (in the past) or here (nowadays) has always been more interesting to me. I mean, would you give up this in order to read your second cousin’s rambling about vaccines and autism?

    YouTube has also gotten weird, lately. I mean, automatically playing videos when scrolling through them on the mobile app is meh, but no biggie. Recording them in my history as watched, that ticked me off. I have subscribed to nebula.tv recently, but I am still not sure about it. It sure would be nice to have a moderated platform (YouTube comments frequently are a hellscape) for educational content without ads, but with a sane way to compensate the producers.

30. I maintain a Facebook account primarily because I’m a heavy Marketplace user and secondly because I have friends who prefer Messenger. I could fallback to SMS if I wasn’t on Facebook but I am so it’s fine. I also keep an Instagram account for following local bands and venues for show listings. A game changer for me was unfollowing all my Facebook friends and groups so that my feed is empty. Well, it used to be empty but they started filling it with ads and promoted posts but iit’s stuff I’m not interested in at all so I’m not tempted to scroll. Otherwise I use lobsters (mostly lurking), an archaic punk record trading message board, and occasionally check my city’s subreddit to keep up with what’s going on. Twitter was hard to give up but after some months I found I don’t feel like I’m missing out, or at least that the benefits outweigh whatever little I am missing out on.

31. tedchs

    11 hours ago

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    My local tech community has a pretty active Slack instance, on the free tier. It’s technically invite only, but there’s a web site bot that will auto-invite someone. It’s a nice way to stay in touch with people who are acquaintances IRL, whether from user group meetups or other in person events.

32. ilmu

    edited 6 hours ago

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    Nope I only use email, lobsters, hackernews and matrix. Edit: signal and telegram I can access but don’t use proactively. I can also make phone calls and sms (no mms tho).

33. I was never active in any, it just didn’t appeal to my personality somehow.

    But what does appeal to me is to run a node for others. It gives me so much joy to see them interact and have fun.

34. Reading the comments, it makes me so happy to be a member of lobsters. Seems like 99% of the members here agree on the harm that social media does, therefore doesn’t use none or close to none. P.S. I also don’t use social media.

    1. 99% of the commenters… please be aware of sampling bias.

35. nomemory

    edited 6 hours ago

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    No, i am not, except maybe LinkedIn that I keep around for job opportunities.

    I don’t feel the urge to share too many things about my personal life, and as a mean of information, I prefer keeping an eye on a few hundred blogs. After a long hiatus I am back to the good old RSS Reader. As a personal rule, if the blog is on medium, no matter how good it is, I don’t read it.

    The only things I keep visiting are:

    • lobsters (this is actually the only place where I sporadically comment or submit links that I like);
    • hn (read-only, not commenting or reading comments)
    • lemmy (read-only)
    • reddit (niche subreddits in read-only mode)

    In the past I’ve tried Mastodon - never clicked and Parler - quit after a few days, too many weird people and literary néonazis.

36. I use Twitter and I use it mostly for microblogging and seeing what my friends are up to, and following artists that I like. I just talk about my life and random things I like that my friends may or may not be interested in and I chat with them. I actually made a couple good friends AFK through Twitter, and Twitter’s the only online place I interact with a couple of them so it’s kind of hard to leave the platform.

    I only follow like 200 people and split the follows between friends/acquaintances and artists with two lists, which are what I mostly use to browse the website, and when I don’t I only use the chronological timeline so even if I end up scrolling down all the way I have a stopping point eventually. When I feel like my timeline is becoming too much to handle I use clients like Tweetdeck on desktop and Talon on my phone, both of which have options to filter retweets on lists so I only see actual people I know talking about what’s going on in their lives.

    I don’t follow celebrities and I mute a lot of words related to politics, especially concerning american politics (I live in Italy and couldn’t care less about that outside of what I see on italian news) and when I see people I follow regularly retweet that kind of stuff I turn off their retweets or just unfollow them.

    I built my own bubble and it works well for me, when I open my feed I almost only see stuff I care about and none of the rage-inducing stuff that Twitter is apparently so well known for.