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I think being any age demographic that grew up before these apps came to rise you can remind yourself that you don't need to have them. I do remember a time whe

I think being any age demographic that grew up before these apps came to rise you can remind yourself that you don't need to have them. I do remember a time when Facebook was purely about your closest friends and family, not articles, not random videos from across the world, not influencers, but people that were actually close to you. I didn't need to send a text message any longer, I could send an instant message or a post to a group of friends and family. Social media really hasn't got much better for my quality of life than that. It's now filled with crap, random videos, random influencers, eat this, don't eat that, you're not motivated because of x, read this/read that. Having said that, for me it's more about attention span, these social media apps have grabbed way too much of my attention and continue to find ways to keep me opening my phone. I can clearly see that these apps are trying to keep me looking at content and that's it, they aren't really adding value to my life, they're trying to make it my life.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
I was using IRC and a few forums at that time. Those have been largely drained.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Funnily enough, I closed all my social medias account except the activitypub one and I am still loging in almost every day to 2 old school web forums. Activity may be lower than during the heydays but in term of quality and positivity it is much better. The moderators are doing a good job to keep everything civil, which is only really possible at a small scale.
- operatingthetan 3y ago
  I still follow some forums and the tone of the conversations there are generally much less combative and friendly than reddit, so if you can find some in your interests it can be great.
  - iforgotpassword 3y ago
    I still frequent one but it's basically the same people as 15 years ago and conversations are exclusively injokes and lore. No sane person stumbling across it in their right mind would ever sign up there. I think this is a common problem to smaller, older communities, but I feel it is more pronounced in German ones. We are the kings of snark and knowing-it-better. Just the other day I was googling about a TRV and ended up in a German home automation forum. A new user started a thread posting a very specific question that was about the mechanical connection of the TRV to the radiator, they explained the issue well and included a photo. In the photo you were able to see the exact brand/model of the TRV. The very first reply was literally just "why are you using X? Aren't you reading this forum?" Like, this shit would get downvoted into oblivion ob sites like reddit, but since this was an old, well established user with a four-digit postcount, another two or three users chimed in commenting about the TRV sucking. Not a single mention why it sucks, or a Link to an according thread. This was German forums in a nutshell to me.
    - rrr_oh_man 3y ago
      Thank you for bringing back those memories
nicbou 3y ago
Whatsapp is the closest replacement for me. It's private, personal and simple.
- hbbio 3y ago
  Private? Meta must collect tons of data!
  - Erratic6576 3y ago
    Yeah but they spy on you privately. People love that they care so much about their privacy and people loathe apps that neglect them like signal.org
    - nicbou 3y ago
      Yes but good luck convincing all if Europe to follow you when you switch.
  - 10729287 3y ago
    Private as "Not public"
- ensocode 3y ago
  Thought the same. What most first-gen social media users in my bubble want is a messenger (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Matrix whatever) with the possibility to form groups/topics... ideally this should be open protocol and there should be clients for all systems and of course everybody would have to use the same protocol and not a zoo of different apps :-D
Nursie 3y ago
> I do remember a time when Facebook was purely about your closest friends and family I used to be a staunch defender of FB on that basis - while everyone else was complaining of having hundreds and thousands of not-really-real friends and not finding any value, I was finding it useful to keep up with my actual friends in small ways. Friends who are all over the world and who may not see each other for quite some time. In those situations you often lose track of each other's day to day lives and the friendship slowly feels more remote and fades. But they killed that. Step 1 was to take away all options that would allow me to see a chronological feed of what my friends are up to in favour of their algorithm. Step 2 was to insert more third party stuff whether I wanted it or not. No, I don't want to see short videos of the girl with the cleavage or the guy with the car or whatever it is that dog is up to. Please stop trying to make me. Step 3 seems to have been to just flood everything with bullshit. How would you like to follow this? This local group is suggested for you! This group that is not local too! How about one for nostalgia of a band you've never liked? How about 1500 variations on star wars meme groups? OK, maybe now one friend post. Now how about a cat thing? Or something about conservation? Here's a fan group for an old movie! The number of IRL friend posts is now much smaller because people have moved off the platform as it becomes less useful. And it's harder to find the content they do generate because they're buried in shit. By trying to increase my levels of engagement with the platform, FB, you've utterly poisoned it. I presume it works for some portion of users as they must be reporting favourable engagement metrics. But I'm pretty close to just giving up and its network effect feels to me like it's just in a death spiral.
- 15457345234 3y ago
  > By trying to increase my levels of engagement with the platform, FB, you've utterly poisoned it. I presume it works for some portion of users I'm pretty sure 100% of their growth is coming from the developing world where they basically _are_ the internet.
  - Nursie 3y ago
    I guess that does make some sense, if you use it for everything. It is still useful for one other thing - looking up opening times for local businesses that may not have their own website. But at that point it's not the social network part that's doing it, it's serving more like a geocities page...
pjerem 3y ago
I agree. In fact it’s pretty wild to think that Facebook used to be somehow … sane. Before engagement algorithms, influencers and news outlets everywhere … it was just what your friends did today. It was mostly stupid and sentimental but that’s what humans are anyway. I’m sad the world now looks like a worse place.
- jader201 3y ago
  The world outside of social media and the internet is not necessarily worse. I think it’s just these things that have brought out the worst in people and the world. Sure, in some ways it brought people together. But I think the net result is worse and has divided people and the world, and monetized relationships. I wish we would collectively realize this, and just abandon these apps, and go back to real life connections. But it’s too late for that, I’m afraid. The world is already addicted.
  - zerbinxx 3y ago
    I think the beauty of the mid-internet era was the aggressive personalization of it: the connections I made galvanized careers and friendships, celebrities seemed closer and more human, ideas seemed worthy of debate in your small corner of the world. As these became KPIs for companies, they drifted into the realm of the inhuman - the algorithm ultimately decides who meets who, what gets brought up, who gets listened to. I will say that I find discord to be a breath of fresh air, but I haven’t really found a true community there, more like disparate groups of people who share common interests but rarely first names. The internet today is either terrifyingly closely related to your first and last name or a hall of mirrors hidden behind myriad layers of post-irony. The veil has been shattered: either you sign up for “real” talk with people you will never know or settle for a blanched façade of communication with real-world acquaintances who refuse to really show themselves for fear of what that might mean.
    - ruszki 3y ago
      > you sign up for “real” talk with people you will never know This only works very rarely, and I don’t think that it can work today anywhere. When my favourite subreddit had 5000 subscribers in 2014-2015, it worked. There were meaningful conversations, because every active people knew everybody else, and nobody was asshole with each other. Nowadays, I can’t find such communities, and of course the same subreddit now with 400000 subscribers is a terrible place. Even smaller ones behave like these larger ones now. People who want to achieve something, or simple assholes find these places too quickly, if it’s open in any way. I’ve also met people who behaved in real life like during a stupid political argument on an anonymous forum. That slowly becomes the norm for too many. Btw, game theory indicates that this should happen when most of your communication is with strangers. Also politics, and state of the society in my original country definitely made people in Hungary more asshole. The society, how people behaved there 20 years ago, basically collapsed there to a depressive and anxious state (“conservatives”/alt-right/“classical liberalists” hurray!). This can be applied to most of the countries, but if you are lucky, just not that extreme way. That also doesn’t help to find any kind of community where there are no toxic people.
andsoitis 3y ago
Break free!
- NoPicklez 3y ago
  I want to break free!
nox101 3y ago
My facebook is still that somehow. In desktop I use FBPurity. On mobile, ... I think I don't use it much but checking it right now, it's not toooo bad? When I do I say "not interested/don't show" though it's gotten worse in the last 2 months. Loops, which I have zero interest in, showed up 8 posts in and ever 6 posts is trying to get me to add more friends but the rest was all actual people/friends/groups I was following I wish there was a social media all my friends were on that didn't try to show me anything. All I'd want is chronologic posts by friends and family. Also, no "so-and-so was tagged ...", no "so-and-so commented on" unless it's my post or a post I commented on, no "you're all caught up so here's a bunch of other stuff", No "shorts/loops", No more than 1 ad every 5 non-ads. I'd use it way more if that's all it was. I recently finally quit Instagram because it was all noise, no signal.
pndy 3y ago
> It's now filled with (...) All of this and more wasn't here when social media become a thing - we all had fun talking to each other and sharing funny, stupid and interesting stuff. Of course there were weird and dangerous people or communities around but they were keeping themselves at bay. Personally, I believe that once social media become a collective virtual conscience it since then didn't do anything good for the whole society. On contrary - it seems it become a tool for various agendas, people who are trying to dismantle the known society and introduce some weird substitute propelled by ads and influencers. And they are giving us a false sense of happiness, engagement, commitment to causes - just as they artificially smile to us from these gaping youtube thumbnails.
fariszr 3y ago
I never use Twitter to keep up with anybody who I know in real life, Its always where I go to get the latest news, the latest updates about anything I am interested in and musk doesn't seem to really care about that. Mastodon is way too niche to have the variety and the relevancy of X and Facebook is just way too cowardly to build a platform that's actually relevant to real life and not just wasting time while selling as many ads as possible. I think the best way to be up-to-date with people is ironically to use messenger app stories, they are almost always encrypted and will show up to all of your contacts without any algorithms in between.

wahnfrieden 3y ago

I was using IRC and a few forums at that time. Those have been largely drained.

prmoustache 3y ago
Funnily enough, I closed all my social medias account except the activitypub one and I am still loging in almost every day to 2 old school web forums. Activity may be lower than during the heydays but in term of quality and positivity it is much better. The moderators are doing a good job to keep everything civil, which is only really possible at a small scale.
operatingthetan 3y ago
I still follow some forums and the tone of the conversations there are generally much less combative and friendly than reddit, so if you can find some in your interests it can be great.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  I still frequent one but it's basically the same people as 15 years ago and conversations are exclusively injokes and lore. No sane person stumbling across it in their right mind would ever sign up there. I think this is a common problem to smaller, older communities, but I feel it is more pronounced in German ones. We are the kings of snark and knowing-it-better. Just the other day I was googling about a TRV and ended up in a German home automation forum. A new user started a thread posting a very specific question that was about the mechanical connection of the TRV to the radiator, they explained the issue well and included a photo. In the photo you were able to see the exact brand/model of the TRV. The very first reply was literally just "why are you using X? Aren't you reading this forum?" Like, this shit would get downvoted into oblivion ob sites like reddit, but since this was an old, well established user with a four-digit postcount, another two or three users chimed in commenting about the TRV sucking. Not a single mention why it sucks, or a Link to an according thread. This was German forums in a nutshell to me.
  - rrr_oh_man 3y ago
    Thank you for bringing back those memories

nicbou 3y ago

Whatsapp is the closest replacement for me. It's private, personal and simple.

hbbio 3y ago
Private? Meta must collect tons of data!
- Erratic6576 3y ago
  Yeah but they spy on you privately. People love that they care so much about their privacy and people loathe apps that neglect them like signal.org
  - nicbou 3y ago
    Yes but good luck convincing all if Europe to follow you when you switch.
- 10729287 3y ago
  Private as "Not public"
ensocode 3y ago
Thought the same. What most first-gen social media users in my bubble want is a messenger (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Matrix whatever) with the possibility to form groups/topics... ideally this should be open protocol and there should be clients for all systems and of course everybody would have to use the same protocol and not a zoo of different apps :-D

Nursie 3y ago

> I do remember a time when Facebook was purely about your closest friends and family I used to be a staunch defender of FB on that basis - while everyone else was complaining of having hundreds and thousands of not-really-real friends and not finding any value, I was finding it useful to keep up with my actual friends in small ways. Friends who are all over the world and who may not see each other for quite some time. In those situations you often lose track of each other's day to day lives and the friendship slowly feels more remote and fades. But they killed that. Step 1 was to take away all options that would allow me to see a chronological feed of what my friends are up to in favour of their algorithm. Step 2 was to insert more third party stuff whether I wanted it or not. No, I don't want to see short videos of the girl with the cleavage or the guy with the car or whatever it is that dog is up to. Please stop trying to make me. Step 3 seems to have been to just flood everything with bullshit. How would you like to follow this? This local group is suggested for you! This group that is not local too! How about one for nostalgia of a band you've never liked? How about 1500 variations on star wars meme groups? OK, maybe now one friend post. Now how about a cat thing? Or something about conservation? Here's a fan group for an old movie! The number of IRL friend posts is now much smaller because people have moved off the platform as it becomes less useful. And it's harder to find the content they do generate because they're buried in shit. By trying to increase my levels of engagement with the platform, FB, you've utterly poisoned it. I presume it works for some portion of users as they must be reporting favourable engagement metrics. But I'm pretty close to just giving up and its network effect feels to me like it's just in a death spiral.

15457345234 3y ago
> By trying to increase my levels of engagement with the platform, FB, you've utterly poisoned it. I presume it works for some portion of users I'm pretty sure 100% of their growth is coming from the developing world where they basically _are_ the internet.
- Nursie 3y ago
  I guess that does make some sense, if you use it for everything. It is still useful for one other thing - looking up opening times for local businesses that may not have their own website. But at that point it's not the social network part that's doing it, it's serving more like a geocities page...

pjerem 3y ago

I agree. In fact it’s pretty wild to think that Facebook used to be somehow … sane. Before engagement algorithms, influencers and news outlets everywhere … it was just what your friends did today. It was mostly stupid and sentimental but that’s what humans are anyway. I’m sad the world now looks like a worse place.

jader201 3y ago
The world outside of social media and the internet is not necessarily worse. I think it’s just these things that have brought out the worst in people and the world. Sure, in some ways it brought people together. But I think the net result is worse and has divided people and the world, and monetized relationships. I wish we would collectively realize this, and just abandon these apps, and go back to real life connections. But it’s too late for that, I’m afraid. The world is already addicted.
- zerbinxx 3y ago
  I think the beauty of the mid-internet era was the aggressive personalization of it: the connections I made galvanized careers and friendships, celebrities seemed closer and more human, ideas seemed worthy of debate in your small corner of the world. As these became KPIs for companies, they drifted into the realm of the inhuman - the algorithm ultimately decides who meets who, what gets brought up, who gets listened to. I will say that I find discord to be a breath of fresh air, but I haven’t really found a true community there, more like disparate groups of people who share common interests but rarely first names. The internet today is either terrifyingly closely related to your first and last name or a hall of mirrors hidden behind myriad layers of post-irony. The veil has been shattered: either you sign up for “real” talk with people you will never know or settle for a blanched façade of communication with real-world acquaintances who refuse to really show themselves for fear of what that might mean.
  - ruszki 3y ago
    > you sign up for “real” talk with people you will never know This only works very rarely, and I don’t think that it can work today anywhere. When my favourite subreddit had 5000 subscribers in 2014-2015, it worked. There were meaningful conversations, because every active people knew everybody else, and nobody was asshole with each other. Nowadays, I can’t find such communities, and of course the same subreddit now with 400000 subscribers is a terrible place. Even smaller ones behave like these larger ones now. People who want to achieve something, or simple assholes find these places too quickly, if it’s open in any way. I’ve also met people who behaved in real life like during a stupid political argument on an anonymous forum. That slowly becomes the norm for too many. Btw, game theory indicates that this should happen when most of your communication is with strangers. Also politics, and state of the society in my original country definitely made people in Hungary more asshole. The society, how people behaved there 20 years ago, basically collapsed there to a depressive and anxious state (“conservatives”/alt-right/“classical liberalists” hurray!). This can be applied to most of the countries, but if you are lucky, just not that extreme way. That also doesn’t help to find any kind of community where there are no toxic people.

andsoitis 3y ago

Break free!

NoPicklez 3y ago
I want to break free!

nox101 3y ago

My facebook is still that somehow. In desktop I use FBPurity. On mobile, ... I think I don't use it much but checking it right now, it's not toooo bad? When I do I say "not interested/don't show" though it's gotten worse in the last 2 months. Loops, which I have zero interest in, showed up 8 posts in and ever 6 posts is trying to get me to add more friends but the rest was all actual people/friends/groups I was following I wish there was a social media all my friends were on that didn't try to show me anything. All I'd want is chronologic posts by friends and family. Also, no "so-and-so was tagged ...", no "so-and-so commented on" unless it's my post or a post I commented on, no "you're all caught up so here's a bunch of other stuff", No "shorts/loops", No more than 1 ad every 5 non-ads. I'd use it way more if that's all it was. I recently finally quit Instagram because it was all noise, no signal.

pndy 3y ago

> It's now filled with (...) All of this and more wasn't here when social media become a thing - we all had fun talking to each other and sharing funny, stupid and interesting stuff. Of course there were weird and dangerous people or communities around but they were keeping themselves at bay. Personally, I believe that once social media become a collective virtual conscience it since then didn't do anything good for the whole society. On contrary - it seems it become a tool for various agendas, people who are trying to dismantle the known society and introduce some weird substitute propelled by ads and influencers. And they are giving us a false sense of happiness, engagement, commitment to causes - just as they artificially smile to us from these gaping youtube thumbnails.

fariszr 3y ago

I never use Twitter to keep up with anybody who I know in real life, Its always where I go to get the latest news, the latest updates about anything I am interested in and musk doesn't seem to really care about that. Mastodon is way too niche to have the variety and the relevancy of X and Facebook is just way too cowardly to build a platform that's actually relevant to real life and not just wasting time while selling as many ads as possible. I think the best way to be up-to-date with people is ironically to use messenger app stories, they are almost always encrypted and will show up to all of your contacts without any algorithms in between.