this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
6 points (100.0% liked)

Ask Lemmy

39573 readers
1720 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Cuz the comments throught Lemmy/Piefed seems to indicate that literally every user on here is a FOSS/Dencentralization Purist and has 100% abandoned mainstream platforms.

I wonder if this is actually true or just a small minority of users being overrepresented.

top 27 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] FosterMolasses@leminal.space 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Not even a little actually.

I'm well acquainted with the "I have an account for my social circle but just don't use it" version of this answer, and that's not what I mean. I genuinely never saw the appeal.

The only periods in my life where I ever held social media accounts were due to collective years of badgering and bullying by friends. I didn't get a facebook until 2017 or snapchat until I was basically about to graduate from college.

The moment I lost the social obligation I deleted those accounts with gusto and the sentiment "You know how to reach me." We all have phones and emails lol

The thing that always put me off social media more than anything, extending all the way back to the MySpace days, is how fake I would watch people I knew irl behave online. Someone could swear up and down that they hated someone's guts and wished them nothing but suffering in life... but online they'd send them friend requests and heart their little vacation posts. And that's without even going into the "personas" and curated images I'd see them project online...

I noticed myself almost fall into it once too. I uploaded two different profile pictures within a short timespan, and the one that felt a bit more staged and less like "myself" got a barrage of attention whereas me being myself was ignored. And I almost leaned into that for a couple of months before I caught myself and realized this is how personas start, and stopped trying to curate my photos for social media.

That place is not for human interaction, it's like one of those labrat drip-feeders, but for online validation. It's theater without conversation.

[–] Magnum@infosec.pub 2 points 1 day ago

No, only this.

[–] Zetta@mander.xyz 2 points 1 day ago

Just YouTube, but I only watch and don't comment or use it as social media.

[–] ThunderQueen@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

This is literally my only social.media. i have a discord but mainly use it for tech forums. I ditched meta completely a couple.years ago ad it has been one of the best decisions ive ever made. I did it when i was getting sober because i recognized that it was an addiction and hated the way it made me feel. Never had a shitter or anything. I technically have a youtube but i only use it for posting the occassional video for joy.

[–] DarthFrodo@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Besides YouTube, I only really used Reddit in the last years. Since the API change I basically switched over to Lemmy. About once a month I browse one of like 3 subreddits for a few minutes, but that's it.

I'm glad I deleted my Facebook account years ago and never really got into Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and all that shit.

So basically just YouTube now.

[–] FosterMolasses@leminal.space 1 points 10 hours ago

I don't think Youtube counts as a social media lol

[–] kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Youtube,

Otherwise, No. No FB, no insta, no reddit, no shitter

Does linkedin count? Lol

[–] FosterMolasses@leminal.space 1 points 10 hours ago

LinkedIn counts way more than Youtube, since most people apart from creators don't really have friends or acquaintances they follow or interact with. Maybe a "parasocial media" at best lol

[–] laranis@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 day ago

Being honest? Fuck no. Well, except for Facebook Marketplace. I try Craigslist first but all the good shit (and stupid people... holy fucking stupid people) are on Marketplace. Which means I technically have a FB account. I did venture down the feed a while back and the amount of AI slop had me noping out faster than a crab at a seagull convention. How anyone tolerates that shit is beyond me.

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Unless you count old Reddit as "mainstream", I never did.

Even if I have to deal with pissed-off people because I "still didn't join them on facebook".

[–] AskewLord@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

my favorite is people wnat you to join them on some app. whatsapp, signal, etc. and you say you don't use apps and they ask you why you are such a dick.

because i use my phone as a phone dude.

I actually quit a volunter org because they demaded we all have slack on our phones so we could 'be available to cover for each other'. And I just flat out refused and they all got super upset with me, so I just quit. basically gen z people had choiced and they refuse to use phone calls or texts to communicate. everything is slack/discord or some other group chat app.

[–] Paradachshund@lemmy.today 1 points 2 days ago

I think you're seeing a loud minority honestly. People who use mainstream socials still (yes, I do) don't tend to shout about it all the time.

[–] mrmaplebar@fedia.io 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Only YouTube.

I was pretty addicted to Reddit for a while, but eventually I got banned for basically no reason and that was enough to get me to almost entirely stop checking it.

[–] qevlarr@lemmy.world 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I don't think YouTube counts as social media. Also, you can disable ads, comments and shorts, it feels so much better

[–] Mesa@programming.dev 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Why would YouTube not count as social media?

Pre-rebuttal in case you go in this direction: Being a social media platform and being a video sharing platform are not mutually exclusive.

[–] FosterMolasses@leminal.space 1 points 10 hours ago

Another even simpler point I haven't seen anyone else mention yet is that social media is historically associated with being used to socially interact with friends and family, either people you know irl or closely-knit online groups you treat as legitimate personal relationships.

Though I suppose Twitter can be an exception to this, but anyone who remembers how Twitter started out knows that it was never intended to be that way lol (now that government and judicial agencies use it as a defacto form of official press release ontop of everything else)

[–] FosterMolasses@leminal.space 1 points 10 hours ago

If the question is "why not", I think a good reasoning is simply because it broadens the categorization to the point where the term begins to lose all meaning. Different websites inherently have different forms of structure for interaction.

The way you behave on Instagram, Facebook, tumblr, and Twitter all feel fundamentally different from the way you behave on forums and video sites. People on Lemmy don't "reblog" stuff, people don't send each other friend requests on Youtube. It redefines the core dynamic.

On Youtube, the dominating theme is channels and parasocial relationships, more similar (but not exactly the same) to an audience's relationship with traditional media like Film and Television and their responses to the various actors/artists/celebrities therein rather than a 1:1 reciprocal relationship. Sure, there are fan groups, which gets into an interesting subset where you can begin to socially interact with each other, but these groups often live in outside spaces (such as tumblr). Hence the point I'm trying to make.

Even classifying Lemmy and Reddit as "social medias" feels like a stretch. I mean yes, in a technical sense we're all "socializing" with each other in this moment and having (mostly) genuine conversations. But for the vast majority of it, I would say:

[–] qevlarr@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

It's just TV, there's nothing social about it for many people

Like Netflix with a different library

[–] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 0 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Would you consider tiktok to be social media, then?

[–] FosterMolasses@leminal.space 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Tiktok is the definition of social media imo. You respond directly to each other with videos that reveal who you are in real life. It's almost aggressively social lol, like neighbors yelling at each other inside of the same apartment building, even if you live on opposite ends of the continent.

[–] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 points 20 minutes ago

But that's not how most people actually use it

[–] AskewLord@piefed.social 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

yeah because it's mostly talking heads and the tik tok videos are meant to be replied to by other videos.

a lot of youtube isn't like that. it's just videos.

do some people use youtube as a social platform? yes. like the massive genre of talking heads and 'reaction' videos.

[–] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 points 20 minutes ago

I don't think many people use tiktok like that. Most people are just commenting, or lurking. It's functionally pretty similar to how YouTube is used for the average person.

[–] FosterMolasses@leminal.space 1 points 10 hours ago

I remember there was actually a time (probably way back in the late 2000s) where youtube used to have a little "video reply" feature, and they would nest the replies beneath the video in a little banner! I miss those days...

[–] yakko@feddit.uk -1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That's a way to use it (and the one I prefer) but it's still media with social components, ergo social media.

[–] FosterMolasses@leminal.space 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)
[–] yakko@feddit.uk 1 points 10 hours ago

There's a pretty general consensus that it counts, and it makes good sense from a media literacy point of view to treat it as such.