I’ve never had a Facebook account or any other social media. I know they keep shadow profiles, but I’ve never given permission. I never had any interest and frankly still don’t.
The problem I’m having is that I don’t exist online when people try to look me up. When someone tries to check me out, there’s nothing there and apparently that’s considered abnormal these days. I think it’s starting to affect my life negatively for various reasons I’d rather not get into.
I’d just like some advice about where to start if you wanted to dip your toes in and check it out. LinkedIn, maybe?
Linkedin is the only social media I would reccomend to put yourself out (as in, put your successful projects in) as it’s used more as a networking tool to land yourself in better jobs.
Fuck other social media. Anonymity is best.
LinkedIn is getting shittier all the time too. I check it out twice a year or so and every time I look at my feed it reminds me a bit more of Facebook. It’s the only social media I haven’t deactivated and is likely to stay that way for a while longer at least but it definitely feels like it’s getting further and further from that professional vibe it once carried, and not in a good way.
It’s like the place where your bosses put lame boomer-styled memes and motivational stuff.
The only reason your boss ever posts something ‘motivational’ is for their own personal gain of earning more money off you.
He never posts “Try to enjoy life. Maybe take a day off sometime to be with your family on an extended weekend and forget work for a while.”
They recently switched some feed algorithms and it became completely useless. At least in my case if I use their “adjusted” feed, or whatever it is called, I sometimes see the same posts up on top for several days! I anyway prefer the chronological feed which you can luckily still set as standard, but there I get so many results, I do tend to miss those “high impact” posts of some of my connections.
So, neither is great and I have no idea how they think its usable in any way. Not using their app by the way, so maybe thats the issue, but I refuse to put that on my phone.
I second LinkedIn.
You dont really have to be all that active there either. Just login every now and then to add / accept new connections and to update your profile.
LinkedIn for me is basically public CV that recruiters can view. Depending on your profession you can also link your github, stackoverflow, portfolio, blog or something similar there to direct people to channels you prefer instead of social media.
LinkedIn has become a Tinder like hookup platform. Lol
Jesus Christ this thread 🤣
Delusional users believing lemmy and reddit ain’t social media.
I thought I was taking crazy pills watching people tell the guy not to join social media, on a social media site!
I think the real question being asked is, should the OP make a social media account that is not anonymous or on one of the mainstream sites. Which I would say go for it if it helps with your IRL social life, just don’t post anything you wouldn’t say in person in public.
People say this shit all the time. “Reddit is social media too dura hurr.”
But anonymous social media sites are an entirely different entity and wildly different experience compared to ones that use your actual name.
Pseudonymous is not even quite the same as anonymous either. It’s not just people randomly saying whatever nonsense like 4chan, there’s all the reputation-building and ego that other social media has, only less personal, for better or worse.
“anonymous social media” is indeed very different, but still social media. It avoids some problems and runs into other problems.
Oh for sure, but I think it’s a really very incredibly important distinction
Whatever you need to tell yourself at night 🤷♂️
While I do consider this my social media outlet it’s different in a few ways. If I meet someone new in person and they’re interested in my online presence
- I am not giving out this username
- they wouldn’t understand or know what to do with it even if I did
Your username is a fairly common noun and an incredibly common, er, auxiliary verb?
They can’t do anything with it by sticking it into Google!
Fancy that eh
They’re forums though, are forums social media? I don’t think services people use anonymously and not for the primary purpose of interacting are social media. The stat has always been 90+% of people are lurkers who just look at memes. Doesn’t sound very social. Scrolling lemmy and reading articles doesn’t get at that part of the brain. We’re not a social group, looking at each others lives.
What stops being social media if we broaden the definition. YouTube is social media if Lemmy is imo.
Lurkers on Lemmy and Reddit don’t seem too different from someone who is on Twitter or Instagram to follow celebrities.
Commenters definitely are in it for interacting, whether they realize or not. Like, just now, you felt the need to express your opinion to this crowd, and so did I.
I think another divide when it comes to “social media” is the idea of following someone.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc let me follow people (or brands).
Reddit however isn’t about people or brands (and yes I’m away they added that feature, it’s stupid), it’s about topics.
Looking at Mastodon, it is also designed to follow people. They do however have the option to follow hashtags, which as a Lemmy user is something I like.
Similarly as a Lemmy user I don’t care who any of you are. I’m not following anyone in this thread. We could interact every day or we could interact once a year, I don’t care who you are and I like that.
Also, I don’t care if you follow me. I’d prefer if you didn’t. I do have an opinion to share, and I do want people to read it. Is that “social media”?
As other folks have pointed out, this is all more similar to Internet forums. Are those “social media”? I would argue they are not, but if you stretch the definition far enough… I guess?
It starts with something silly like an avatar or profile pic next to every comment. If you’ld have had a flag or a dogpic or so next to your name/comment, I wouldn’t have read your comment in the same relatively neutral way. I dislike the persona stuff, it’s why I prefer forums. Lemmy is a collection of forums to me. I profoundly distrust persona cult stuff, like influencers etc. Sure, I’ll encounter same people here I’m sure, but frankly: I’m mostly unaware, usernames barely register in my mind.
The part about social media I dislike is the real connection between Irl and online, and the “profile”-focus, for now both is no issue for me on lemmy.
I don’t think the definition needs to be stretched very far. In any of such cases, the function is social, it is about connecting people and enabling them to communicate in a wider, multilateral fashion, online. However asocial we might convince ourselves of being, if we truly had no interest in it, we wouldn’t even be discussing anything here.
Even lurkers, at the very least, place trust on a group to bring them matters which they are interested in, and if you consider it, this is the manner in which Reddit and forums are most similar to following influencers. The only difference is that it is a crowd-driven highlight, rather than an individual one, and even then people don’t tend to follow just one single influencer.
If the expression of opinion or interacting with that opinion is all it takes, then YouTube is social media, IMDb is social media. Blogs are social media, any news site is social media. It has to be more specific than that because every site has a comment section and it’s a pretty useless definition.
I think the object of interest has to be people, and the engagement has to come from fixed personalities. Who develop a rapport. For example, you add friends and follow people, who you recognize, interact with and develop a social or parasocial relationship.
Although Reddit has maybe gone that way in some respects, sites like YouTube (maybe) Lemmy, 4chan, Q&A sites (Quora, stack overflow), and more traditional forums have anonymous people jumping in and out, and the focus is the idea (meme, article, creation, question).
Maybe we ditch the term altogether as everything is adding a social component and it will all devolve into a digital singularity.
It’s not that far off, frankly. A lot of websites with user comment sections have a social aspect to them. But even if we discount those whose the primary focus is not that, and we take YouTube and IMDb out of it, Reddit and Lemmy lack the sort of stable end result that reference sites and wikis focus on, or the sort of separation between creators and audience that YouTube has (then again isn’t Instagram like that too?). Even if we make a distinction here we are still left with a place whose content, curation and discussions are community driven. A subreddit or Lemmy community is nothing but that which the people who participate in it decide. Sounds like a social form of media if I ever seen one. An internet platform for public collective multidirectional communication.
Frankly, I think Reddit and Lemmy resist the classification as “social media” not because there aren’t reasons to count them as that, but because the userbases in these sites see it as a dirty word and they like to believe they are above the unwashed, stupid, celebrity-worshipping masses.
They are not. We are not.
How much do we mock people commonly not reading articles and just commenting immediately in both these places? That shows link aggregation is not necessarily the main driving appeal of these places. Even for lurkers and outsiders, they often use Reddit to see what people are commenting, especially as far as advice and recommendations go. We are even in a community whose primary content are questions from other users for us to talk about our opinions and ourselves. How much more socially driven does it need to be for people to accept that it is social media?
Even if one argues it’s different from Facebook because we don’t use real names, Twitter also goes by pseudonyms and everybody considers that “social media”.
Content curation and discussions sounds like Wikipedia to me, and honestly most information sites. As basically everything on the Internet is community driven by a small vanguard of committed posters. I guess we can just call all websites with social interaction social media.
My issue is, to me, lemmy, 4chan, and old forums are completely different to Twitter, Facebook, bebo, Instagram, Snapchat, tiktok etc etc in look, form and function. But I think if we still are just calling them social media, and there is no consistent definition that also umbrellas most of the Internet, it seems silly at that point. Much easier to just not call lemmy social media.
I could also argue people calling lemmy social media are trying to be contrarian and get a rise out of people. Like calling cereal, soup.
This ain’t Wikipedia. Nobody is just leaving their info and settling at that. Nobody is even trying to be objective (even if Wikipedia doesn’t always manage it). Threads don’t result in a single consensus reference page to be maintained indefinitely, but multiple discussions where everyone is making their opinions heard. As much as some opinions are highlighted over others, it’s not collapsed into a final conclusion.
Be honest here. Look at Twitter and then look at Wikipedia. As far as similarity in function and behavior, which is Reddit/Lemmy more like? If anything, to me saying Lemmy is the same as Wikipedia is calling cereal, soup.
The difference between Reddit/Lemmy and Twitter is that it’s based on subcommunities rather than personal feeds. Even then, Facebook has that too, in their groups.
It is social media. Some users just want to believe they are above that. It does get a rise out of them, because they refuse to believe it. It doesn’t mean it’s not correct, not only based on pedantic definitions but also how and why people use it.
Say, even in participating in this discussion, what is your goal here? It’s not like this thread will ever serve as a reference material for the classification of websites. It’s not even the main point of the thread (whether and how to join social media). Seems to me that you want to make your opinion known, and so do I. Whether or not you remember my username, this is social interaction. And by experience I can say the same sort of discussion happening here happens on Twitter/Mastodon near identically.
My purpose is to work out if Lemmy is social media, and solidify my position on it through debating (arguing) with people about it, I’m afraid I’m using you for my own ends 😉.
My point about calling lemmy Wikipedia is like calling cereal soup. I agree, because if we widen this definition to include Lemmy, we start having justifications for calling things that clearly aren’t social media, social media.
My ideal is that we just have old style Internet platforms in their own box called forums. And social media can continue on its way with phone number verification, blue check marks, and whatever else goes on.
I suppose the actually productive thought process is to think why we need to differentiate sites from each other like this, and come up with a definition that has function without being confusing. I’d argue the endless debate and confusion around this topic, especially on Reddit, for years and years, indicates a poor definition.
Yes. Forums are social media. The mental gymnastics…
Is it my imagination or do you think people that don’t consider forums to be social media are doing it out of denial, as if they consider social media to be inferior and they want to be the superior ones without social media, but by encountering you telling them these ugly truths, they deny and defend themselves almost in a tantrum?
Because that may happen with a person or two, but no, many people don’t have problems having social media, just don’t consider Lemmy a social media for various reasons (e.g. not used with a real name, they do not personally message from here, etc.). If their criteria is wrong or right, I don’t know. I do consider this a social media, but it’s open to discussion.
It’d be helpful if you stop looking at situations as if they were the crying wojak (them) vs chad wojak (you) because that’s not how we all work.
It’s not mental gymnastics. My reasoning is straight forward, and I disagree.
People don’t really know what the term means. Any media where the users create the content is a social media. That’s what social media means! YouTube, reddit, Lemmy, Instagram, Snapchat… All of these are social medias! Perhaps we need some different term to differenciate them based on whether you’re more expected to interact with friends or anonymously with strangers though.
Yes, stupid delusional users who actually know what social media is and isnt, unlike a self aggrandizing imbecile making comments like yours.
👌👍🤡
Hey there, i just signed up for Lemmy after being “social media” free for a few weeks after I left Reddit. Yes this is an I made this account to comment here post. I (like OP) have a near 0 online footprint. You can NOT Google me. I only want to point out that if someone were to leverage money they could still have all the data on me. I just dont willingly add various photographic proof of my presence.
People say that all the time, but I disagree. They’re link aggregators with a comments section.
It is an anonymous social media, and the post is talking about non-anonymous googleable profiles (Facebook, Instagram, etc.). Quite different if you ask me.
I know how you feel but joining in now might be a mistake. The trend at the moment is people leaving social media, soon people won’t care if they can find you or not.
Stay away!
The trend at the moment is people leaving social media
Eeeh… Is it really? I know that’s what many people on Lemmy would like to believe because that’s what they largely are doing, but lemmings are a minority. I think the vast majority of people don’t even know or care about how bad social media is these days and continue using it.
People’s situations can be different, OP is asking how they can join while minimizing the harms
We don’t have to not join something because the trend is people leaving. Worst case scenario they meet the immediate need and leave alongside whoever they need to connect with
Don’t.
Thats the only advice you need.
Social media is so dead. Everyone has one yeah but it’s a placeholder. The novelty is gone
Seriously I kind of miss the “Internet playground” era of 10 years ago. It felt like you could easily find not just one but multiple close knit groups for ANYTHING you might enjoy. It was easy to engage with people without huge effort.
Nowadays it’s monolithic corporate groups. Soulless without the close interactions. Content is at an all time high yet simultaneously true interactions are dead. Forget about trying to find multiple groups, they all have been cannibalised into a singular Uber corpo group if it exists at all.
i miss the mid 90s internet.
Where the internet was a curiousity, not yet exploited by companies and advertising, where to find new websites you had to click next on ring networks or find a website directory cause search engines werent even a thing yet, but every website you found was someones passion project and rife with the interesting and bizarre
For me it’s the early 2010 internet. Where technological advances made navigating it easy and you could with no effort find several groups chatting about topics you liked. Information was easily available yet it felt extremely personal too.
That was before everything became ultra monolithic and corporate. You’ll be lucky if you find even just one active forum for something you like and more often then not it’s been cannibalised by one of the megacorp pages like YouTube or reddit where interactions are all dull and dead, soulless posting only for menial engagement instead of making friends
The internet has definitely lost its wonder, and more become a thing of dread due to bullshit, ads, spam, etc etc.
I honestly disagree, even if it’s a lot harder now. Discord kinda took the place of forums and other niche groups.
You’re on social media right now, but personally, I don’t care if there’s nothing when people look me up: Seems like a bonus, I barely get spam calls anymore.
“The problem I’m having is that I don’t exist online when people try to look me up.”
That’s not a problem, that’s a privilege very few people get to enjoy. Fuсk social media and fuсk Facebook in particular.
Yep, that is something I’ve tried to achieve for years… I’m jealous for you OP
Don’t do it. I have stopped using Facebook and Instagram since November when they give me the choice to either pay a crazy amount or accept targeted ads.
The amount of time that I suddenly have is crazy. I have already read 7 books and Its been 20 years since I last had read a book!
Not to mention all the negativity and toxicity that I no longer get exposed to.
Its people own fault of they judge you by your being online of social media or not. That said, I don’t think you’d be any better if they did value you on what you do online.
Maybe you can create a website with your basic information a few pictures and a short descriptive text. It’s kind of a business card style website that will show up when people search your name on Google
You owe the internet NOTHING. You do not owe it posts at a certain interval, you do not owe it media, nothing. Only post what you want to post, when and how you want to post it.
Social Media should serve you. It should make you happy, it should make it easier to communicate with people you care about or share interests in. If it doesn’t serve you or makes you unhappy, you should not feel any shame or regret in just walking away.
If you don’t know whether or not you want to use “insert platform here”, go ahead and sign up for a free account to reserve your name then just leave it until you find a need for it. If you end up not needing it, you can delete the account or just abandon it in place.
I would also say something like ‘don’t be afraid to ask questions’, but you’ve already got that one down.
Have fun! :)
You’re already using social media, the only difference is that you’re in the fediverse, not the metaverse.
I know you’ve probably heard this about a dozen times by now, but…
Don’t join Facebook.
They track everything they can about you, down to how long you spend looking at something on your screen. I’m fairly certain they listen to what’s going on around you if you put the app on your phone. An ad for something I’ve mentioned in passing has popped up on my feed shortly later too many times to be a coincidence.
They follow you around on your browser, too. They know what you shop for. It’s all specially tailored to sell you their ads.
I keep an account to stay in touch with my family, and it’s appalling how much more information they get from you than any other app. Not to mention the heavy prevalence of MAGA hats and I’ll-kill-you-before-I-consider-your-opinion conservatives.
Instagram isn’t much better, but at least the people there are nicer.
It sounds like Facebook tracks non-registered users as well, so everything you’re saying remains true for everyone who doesn’t have a pretty strong security posture.
If OP isn’t blocking third party cookies, FB scripts, and piholing unwanted requests, they might as well join the platform and get the tenuous benefits it provides.
The spying is horrendous. Even after taking so many measures, I still swear I’m eavesdropped occasionally. Ad blockers, private DNS, Firefox containers, GrapheneOS on my phone (I only install messenger, not the Facebook app). I don’t use Facebook on Windows.
I wouldn’t be surprised if other people’s devices are collecting info about me. I have no control over that.
Unfortunately it’s at a point that I won’t get invited to parties without it. It’s how my friends all organise events.
My advice is to cancel joining.
I’d say if you aren’t on them and don’t need them, there’s no reason to dip your toe in.
It’s okay to be a little weird and save tons of time and not have to read worthless comments.
I was part of the main ones, but got rid of everything, LinkedIn Facebook, all of it. They are useless or detrimental personally, and I don’t need them for my job.
This is the extent of my social media now.
I think that if you don’t want to have social media, you shouldn’t make it. If someone is giving you shit about it, then tell them to fuck off. You do you, Booboo.
If you insist on it, LinkedIn is barely social media since there’s limited interaction. It’s more of an unstated competition on who has the best resume/CV. Facebook is a bunch of people sharing updates and opinions no one cares for. Instagram is people sharing pictures no one would have asked to see.
lol. I’m on some bullshit today. Anyway, if you’re going to make a profile, set a limit to how much time you are going to spend on it. That stuff is designed to keep you hooked, so it might suck you in. Keep yourself to your own boundaries.
Don’t join LinkedIn unless you need to look for a corporate job. Be a trailblazer and join Mastodon or something if you need an online presence… Frankly I don’t have a single social media account that I appreciate having. It’s occasionally useful to find people on Facebook, but there’s nothing really it gives me that getting someone’s phone number doesn’t.
