Social media for the hopelessly out of touch…

[wildeabandon]

As some of you have seen, I've just created a new Facebook account. There are two reasons for this, one is that much as I love DW, it's easier to post quickly and frequently on a platform where shorter posts are more the norm, and since I'm going to be getting a lot less in person interaction with people I know well now that I'm living on my own, I think I might benefit from a slightly greater amount of undemanding online socialising than I've become used to. The second is that I'm probably about to start meeting lots of new people, and whilst I have mostly forgotten how one goes about making friends and building community, I seem to remember than having an online presence is pretty helpful, and I imagine that that is even more the case now than it used to be. I added a few people, but then Facebook seems to have decided I might be a spambot, and won't let me add any more for a while, so if you're on there and want to friend me, that'd be neat.

Having said that, I suspect that these days Facebook isn't actually where most peoples' online lives take place, and I suspect I might need some other accounts as well. I am, probably needless to say, not going back to Xwitter. I imagine I might want an Instagram account, although creating one seems to be more difficult than it ought to be, because apparently I did create then delete one at some point in the past, but now I can't recover it, but nor can I open a new one with the same email address. I'm sure I'll figure it out, although I’m not really sure what Instagram is for - is it basically like Facebook, but all posts start with a picture of some kind? I'm fairly sure that I don't want TikTok, or anything else that is primarily video based. And I don't really know what else is out there. I had a tumblr for a while, but the interface drove me batty. I've heard of Mastodon and Bluesky, but I don't really understand what they are. The answer might well be just to wait and see what sort of networks the people I meet tend to use, but maybe that would be weird, if I'm setting up new accounts to link with someone I just met?

Those of you who use social media that isn't DW or Facebook, what do you use, and what do you like and dislike about it? I am only really interested in using them to interact with people I already know in real life, or maybe encountering people whom I can then get to know in real life, rather than getting involved in primarily online communities, and I definitely want to limit my exposure to political discourse, because it tends to be really bad for my mental health.

Comments

[atreic]

Instagram is as you suggest Facebook but with pictures, but really it is just a different demographic, Loïs and my speed skaters use insta but don’t really use facebook. I’d expect insta to be useful for uni people (but maybe they are all the next next generation now! 🤣)

[sfred]

I use Instagram quite a bit, but mostly post about sewing and occasionally birds, rather than the whole spread of my interests, and I haven't sought out all my friends there because I mostly want to see pictures of birds and sewing. The photo-based setup lends itself to that sort of specialism, although I do know people who use it more like Facebook.

I very intermittently use Mastodon and Bluesky. Bluesky is more or less a clone of Twitter (at least as similar as DW to LJ). Mastodon is very similar but clunkier, like something made by and for anti-capitalist techies. I like both of them; I just have other ways of keeping up with the people who are important to me.

I'm also on various Slacks and Discord servers, which are more like olden-days BBSs/forums (fora): closed environments for discussion often about specific topics, split into channels for subtopics.

I scroll Tumblr for pretty pictures but for me it is not at all for keeping up with actual people.

[bunnypip]

Also useful for keeping up with my daughter/your god daughter

[bunnypip]

I am on FB (and have had interesting conversations recently about how some people's usage on there is switching to being more based around groups).
I am also on bluesky (if you go on there then join the narthex thread (anchor icon). There are others that might be useful too)
I'm also on various slacks and discords and use Instagram a little bit

[wildeabandon]

That is indeed one of the things that made me think Insta is where all the young people are these days :)

[angelofthenorth]

I use bluesky for keeping up with #tinyjoys and friends, and for following public profiles, and Facebook for odd friends.

[sfred]

Oh, yes, I use it for keeping up with at least one of my stepchildren; sometimes two.

[rmc28]

I have a Facebook and an Instagram, both linked to the same email address, which is not my usual one. I use Facebook just for ice hockey stuff that is organised there, and haven't made any posts. I accept friend requests from hockey people and react a bit to posts by the people I follow, but mostly I dip into it once every couple of days to keep an eye on things. I was just using Instagram to follow some hockey teams and players in a parasocial pretty-pictures way, right until about eight weeks ago when some of my new friends from the France hockey tournament said "follow me on insta". This seems to have led to to me following an ever-growing number of hockey buddies, and making a small number of posts and stories.

I am still getting my head around insta but it's mostly "pictures and optional short bits of texts", and I find it far more engaging than Facebook, it really is very tempting to check it multiple times a day. The adverts are noticeably, even creepily, well-targeted. (am I interested in a K-pop dance class in Cambridge? hell yeah!)

[yiskah]

Instagram is my absolute favourite, and the only social media site that I actually enjoy engaging with (Facebook is basically just a numbers game, like using Tinder for hook-ups). Some people do use it in a similar way to FB but to me they're quite distinct; there's a lot of accounts where I just engage with the visual content without necessarily reading the captions; it's good for keeping up with friends with kids; I really like it for travel inspo; I follow a few accounts for learning (e.g. the National Gallery); and it's much more acceptable/normal to add someone you don't know just because you like their content than is the case for FB.

[simont]

I echo the "kind of Twitterlike" about Mastodon, although having never got a Twitter account, I can't personally comment on how exact the technical or UI similarities are. But I joined Mastodon last year, and my social experience of its Twitter-nature is that so many of its users are refugees from Twitter that you'll sometimes find people being surprised if you're not one.

Mastodon's federated nature mostly doesn't get in the way on a day-to-day basis. It acts as a defence against the next Muskrat buying the whole thing, because there isn't a "whole thing" in one place. But mostly the federation Just Works and it's a minor UI quirk that usernames are @person@some.domain instead of just @person. The only in-practice oddities are that sometimes replies arrive in the wrong order (I suspect this of being the cause of occasional "10 people ask the same question about my post even though I answered it the first time" incidents, though that could also just be Did Not Read The Thread syndrome), and instances vary their character limit, so that if you're on a 500-char instance (the default) then occasionally some user on an instance with a higher limit (Mathstodon springs to mind) will drop a huge multi-paragraph response and you can only reply to it in turn with zingy one-liners :-)

[ewt]

Mastodon is Diet Twitter for computer geeks who are happy with a certain amount of technical pain in the neck as part of the cost of doing business. It does have content notes which function a lot like cut tags on DW, though the cultural practice of using them for politics has been less prevalent since one of the influxes of people from Twitter. Filtering out keywords is fairly easy. It also has the ability to determine private/local instance only/public posts on a per-post basis, which is handy. I think siderea wrote a post on how to start using Mastodon which I could dig out if you like; your choice of instance does matter, and cultural norms vary a lot by instance.

Bluesky is Diet Twitter for people who want something that's quite a bit like Twitter but less terrible. More of Church Twitter is there than anywhere else (other than Facebook) these days. I'm not sure if you can filter out words you don't want to deal with.

[barakta]

Still here, not posting as much as I'd like.

Still at Twitter even tho it's a shithole cos that's where the disabled folk still are.

Mastodon is where some of the geeks and hippies went to. I quite like it cos there's much less nastiness and I've come across a few new people and there's very little nastiness as it's not algorithmically driven and is almost anti-clicks-for-attention. I filter using keywords.

I have a Bluesky but rarely remember to use it.

I still have my Facebook but find the User Interface so infuriatingly horrid I only really check it once a month which is a shame as I think many of the people I'd like to be more in touch with are mostly there.

Haven't managed to get a handle on Insta.

[shermarama]

Not social media, but have you looked at meetup.com at all? I have found it useful when moving cities / countries, because a lot of the other people that use it are in a similar situation and are generally open to meeting people, but in a way where there's a useful task-focused reason for being there.

I still use FB a bunch (as you've seen) and I think young people don't because they see it as an 'old people' thing, but, well, I'm reminded of Joe's youngest sitting in our lounge and telling us about how cringe it is that anyone over 25 is into fandom or writing fanfic, so I don't know what young people's idea of 'old people' stuff actually is but I suspect, from that, that they think it means being a servant-droid who doesn't actually have any inner thoughts at all.

I do also use Instagram but I'm maybe missing something on how to use it socially. I look at what other people are doing, and there's some great images and it's nice to have the sense of what people I know are up to, but it's quite passive - I'm not really sure how you can interact beyond clicking 'like' and occasionally messaging some comment. I would post there more but you can't post links in captions, just the text of links that it's hard to copy, so it's useful for visual thoughts but not for ones that make connections, which I find frustrating.