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It's not just you — no one is posting on social media anymore

It's not just you — no one is posting on social media anymore::Social media is on the decline. Instagram is all ads. No one's posting on BeReal. TikTok is for influencers. The new place for sharing: group chats.

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  • My big take away is that social media as we know it is likely generational. Like real time broadcast TV, it may just not be a thing at all in the future, at least not with the centrality we’ve become accustomed to.

    Polls run here and especially on masto bare this out. Mastodon, for instance, leans x-gen/boomer with some millennial in its demographic. It’s hardly a young persons thing. Once you realise so much of the praise and enjoyment of the Fedi is that it reminds people of the older days of the internet, the generational picture becomes pretty clear. 15 year olds today were born after Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Forums, Usenet, old Twitter are probably like black and white tv to them.

    At the moment, I think it’s a major flaw of the Fedi, that it’s fundamentally backwards looking, trying to preserve older big-social designs rather than doing something more diverse or at least different.

    An obvious example being private or closed spaces like group chats and the like including public versions if desired. This seems to be a growing form of online interaction, that is in a way more humane or eusocial. But apart from matrix, which sits separately, the Fedi is still stuck redoing Twitter and Reddit.

    • There's only so many ways you can arrange a group of people, what they post and their audience. The fediverse is exploring most variations right now and it came up with things like decentralization and activity pub which are unlike any of the big platforms of yore.

      It resembles the internet of the 90s only superficially. The underlying infrastructure and technology is completely different today. Most of the lean towards the 90s is caused by taking inspiration from the way they dealt with similar threats.

      • The fediverse is exploring most variations right now

        Where are:

        • private spaces
        • messaging
        • chat rooms
        • my-space style personalised pages
        • Fusions of any of the variations you're thinking of?
          • Microblogging + Reddit
          • Blogging + reddit
          • Youtube + others
          • Any and all
        • Social RSS feeds like Google Reader
        • Wikis
        • Market places
        • Subscription based content platforms for any format (eg blogs like substack or videos like nebula)
        • Heavily privacy and safety focused platforms (with, eg, abilities to control who can ever respond or see your content)
        • Video shorts (which I personally hate, but there's probably something of value there)
        • Computationally rich posts/pages ... that is, content that is not merely static text of an embedded video but contains interactive components with highly customisable graphics.

        Without wanting to be aggressive or critical of you here ... there's a good chance you, like many of us, are stuck thinking the internet can only be so many things because that's all we've been given for a while (like a long time ... like Twitter and Youtube have been around for longer than half the age of the internet, like we've arguable had real stagnation that might look like the age of Dinosaurs from the future looking back).

        • Fusions of any of the variations you’re thinking of?

          Have a look at https://fedidb.org/software, chances are something has popped up there.

          my-space style personalised pages

          Now that's a blast from the past if I ever heard one. Do people really don't understand why MySpace died? The notion of "personalized pages" went out of style several technological and social generations ago. They're not coming back, and not because it can't be done, because it's an antiquated idea in almost every way.

          there’s a good chance you, like many of us, are stuck thinking the internet can only be so many things because that’s all we’ve been given for a while

          Given the above it's ironic that you perceive me as stuck in my ways. 🙂

          Everything you listed can be done nowadays and there's software for it out there, way too much to list here. Thinking in terms of centralized and/or proprietary platforms is the old way. The new way involves offering services based on open source software, using portable infrastructure solutions, and making a privacy pledge to the users.

          Everything you listed can be done either by setting it up yourself or by finding a service that offers it. There's a billion options.

          • I’m sorry, but I think you’re being too aggressive here and dismissive about how much is not easily doable on the fediverse. We’re not living in some open source utopia where there’s an abundance of awesome software waiting to be used.

            A few quick thoughts.

            • I’m familiar with fedidb. Anything that matches my list is likely to be small and niche. If I’ve missed anything, let me know … it was the point of my response to highlight that all of these variations you claim exist are not so easily identifiable if they exist.
            • Plenty of people (and businesses and professionals!) still have their own web pages of some sort or another. Things don’t have to look like MySpace for that to be a thing. It’s a generic service not at all bound to myspace’s particulars and easily coupled with other platform features (see eg firefish)
            • I wasn’t thinking in terms of centralised platforms, my critique is in many ways the Fedi is.

        • I am also going to say that nostr has all these things in some alpha form or another. However, it is very much a mess right now and it is harder IMHO to connect with others or curate my feed with stuff I like.

          The advantage of small groups and fedi is starting with a small network and growing it slowly, this is more rewarding than starting with the whole world and trying to pull back.

          Nostr might have all the features but its a mess right now

      • came up with things like decentralization and activity pub which are unlike any of the big platforms of yore.

        I personally think activity pub is overrated. Not that it's bad or anything. But many think of it, IMO, as the beginning and end of a new form of social media and people taking back the internet. In reality, I think it's literally just a protocol and so much more than people recognise depends on what people build on top of it. So far, for example, the limited interoperability between lemmy/kbin and the microblogs/mastodon, which is not a simple bug fix away, at all, is a major friction between these two platforms that essentially forces them to be separate spaces/platforms. This is so despite both using ActivityPub and actually federating with each rather well. Because, it's not (just) about the protocol, it's about platform designs and structures ... IE the software ... and the protocol can only do or guarantee very little on that front.

        From what I've gathered, the diaspora people didn't adopt activitypub in large reason because of this, and I think they've always had a point. The pain some users have gone through trying to work out how to use lemmy and mastodon together, having been promised that ActivityPub is a whole new thing that creates a deep and wide fediverse, has been awful to see.

    • My big take away is that social media as we know it is likely generational

      I don't think that's the right takeaway. The demographics of certain platforms may be skewed, but people who for example were active on Facebook 10 years ago still exist, they're just posting a lot less.

      I think engagement is down across the board because of various reasons: the continuing crappification of the various platforms, people are starting to realize the risks of oversharing and public sharing, people are getting turned off about loud toxic discussion, people are becoming aware that their data is being mined by faceless corporations who don't have their best interest in mind, in short all the negatives of these platforms have become more obvious to the average user.

    • I think you have a point. However, my 13-year-old and most of her school are all on Snapchat and use it constantly. They're also regularly posting TikTok videos. Kids get in trouble for doing them at school all the time.

      • Interesting! You think TikTok and Snapchat are counters to my closed group chat observation?

        If so I didn’t mean to suggest that that’s where everyone is going. Not at all. TikTok and Snapchat would be examples of the generational factor I was talking about.

        • No, I said you had a point. I was just addressing the idea that, while it may be generational, even the current generation is still addicted to social media. Maybe less so, but still addicted to it.

    • Strongly agreed.

      Some other loose thoughts related to this:

      • a very similar phenomenon is visible in Bluesky, but in that case it skews heavily towards older millenials who are trying to recreate a culture that used to exist on Twitter, and is now dead. Bluesky is fundamentally even more backward looking than AP-fedi, as ATProto really cannot do much else than microblogging
      • its been striking for me for a while that the fediverse developer community isnt able to become an actual community, and instead has been trying to reinvent community initiatives outside of fedi for a while, and they all bleed out. Think there are lots of reasons for that, but if the people building a social network cannot manage to use their own tools to use that social network to become a social community, than that usually does not bode well
      • there is a very loosely defined 'community' of people who are interested in talking about fedi on a meta (not Meta) level. youve been involved, so you know most of the names. Again, its striking to me that this group (me included) hasnt really transformed into an actual community, and instead its fleeting ephemeral posts on a feed that only some of the regulars see and comment on.

      • God ... so sorry ... just had a coffee and mashed the keyboard ... looooong rant ... IN SHORT ... yes!!

        Interesting thoughts here!

        • The BlueSky situation makes a lot of sense. In another thread on here I was discussing with some people how the psychology of leaving a big long term social media staple like Twitter/Reddit is non-trivial. Someone interestingly suggested that most of the "rage" or "rudeness" you see here isn't from a bad Reddit culture coming across but a side effect of the anger and frustration felt and expressed through the whole migration event.
          • Beyond that there's probably more to unpack about the idea, where, I'd guess that building a culture based on leaving a "bad place" is always harder than doing it based on a starting "new and good place". A lot of the "culture problems/frustrations" over on masto seem to resonate with that idea. For me, personally, though I'm not really a social media person and have never really been committed to any platform or anything, masto and ActivityPub kinda feel like let downs, and I think the psychology of "migrating" off of a "bad place" and the way it plays out and affects culture is a major factor behind that. The others being aligned with your other points!
        • I didn't really know the developer community had failed to coalesce ... I'd always figured it happened somewhere I didn't know about. Interestingly, from what I've heard, the lemmy admin/developer community has kinda coalesced on a few matrix rooms and discord servers and it is working well so far. Lemmy is much smaller than mastodon though, so it might just be that there's less room for drama/splits (though obviously it does occur).
          • On the other hand ... how much of this is mastodon culture? I'd bet some of it is ... ?
          • More generally though ... a very scathing critique IMO! I'd imagine people who know about community management would have something to say about it. My intuition thinks about the lack of shared software which means no developer has any reason to cooperate with any other. If there were for instance a commonly used generic AP server or stack, or reference implementation, then there'd at least be a common development forum for people together. But, having just a common protocol and then completely diverging projects building decentralised systems means that separation and independence are the key social structures between developers and admins. Lemmy devs for instance are not fans of mastodon devs due to allegedly poor documentation and the resultant difficulties of federating with masto.
          • Beyond that, I think of where communities have developed in tech, with particular languages being an obvious example, and I think that you need a commonly loved central tool (such as a language, framework, kernel, OS, app etc). ActivityPub is probably not that tool? And masto creating its own de facto standard that other platforms have to begrudgingly work with probably doesn't help at all. I wonder how devs of mastodon forks feel about the code base? Have masto fork devs not formed a community, and if so why not?
          • And then of course is your point which is bang on. I've said it before and also elsewhere in this thread ... the lack of chat rooms on the fedi is probably getting kinda bad now. Your argument is pretty scathing (what are the initiatives you mention ... places on discord/matrix?). I noticed the same when I looked into some defed drama and found the only meaningful conversation to have happened on a Discord server. But beyond that so much stuff is happening on Discord (and matrix and the like), it seems, with IMO plenty of arguments for why such a model is a good form of social media (IMO, (micro-)blogosphere-link-aggregator + chat-rooms (optionally closed) seems like an obvious mix), that the fedi might look a little stuck in the past, especially given that it still doesn't have decent private messaging (apart from dansup's venture).
          • As for whether current fedi platforms are insufficient for facilitating communities ... if true, why is that? How did communities form on Twitter for instance? Is the lack of algorithmic feeds part of this ... like, can we now say that as problematic as they were they actually had pro-social effects by disproportionately promoting posts by those you have stronger connections too??! I feel like I've seen the community/group format work ok with the !lemmyapps@lemmy.world, !fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml communities.
        • As to your last point ... yea that's interesting. For my experience, part of that is that I'm strewn across 3.5 different platforms (lemmy, masto, firefish and occasionally checking but not really using kbin) and that there's no real place to go to check up on "that community", in large part I feel because masto and the microblogs don't have groups/communities and in the absence of any sort of algorithm that's honestly fatal for true community development. I often wonder how much masto as a twitter substitute will be an overall "bitter victory" for the fedi at large and those who've bought into it. For me, the ideal of the fediverse is to give people what they need to organise online, and, IMO, masto is not that and the ecosystem, because of the reasons you highlight, hasn't worked out how to provide the necessary diversity.

      • fediverse developer community isnt able to become an actual community

        Somewhat relevant thread I saw on masto: https://social.coop/@smallcircles/110195840314469391 (which you may have seen yourself already).

    • Where are the group chats happening then?

      • As far as I understand, Discord and WhatsApp, with maybe Slack still a thing in that space and maybe Zulip doing a decent job at eking out an open source alternative.

        And from what I've seen, it's a cool way to do online social media. I happened upon a Discord recently run by and for some people I was loosely in contact with online, and going in and saying hi and having and seeing some conversations, after being exclusively on the fedi for a while, opened my eyes to why it was such a thing ... compared to the feed generating focus of reddit/twitter/facebook/youtube style big social platforms ... it is truly SOCIAL media as it emphasises the creation of and interaction amongst an actual social group, not open ended public blog posting for the whole world to read and interact with. It also emphasises conversations, rather than "posts".

        From what I've gathered it is likely the phenomenon that is the Fediverse's blindspot ... the "new" form of social media that is growing in place of or supplementary to big social ... that is making a better form of online social interaction without trying to "merely" modify the designs of big-social (where, let's be real, even decentralisation is really a modification more focused on ownership than the form of social media).

      • The article talks about DMs on those platforms, but mainly focussed on Instagram

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