1y ago

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

www.businessinsider.com 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.

TechNews @radiation.party

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

www.businessinsider.com /social-media-dead-instagram-tiktok-bereal-replaced-group-chats-messaging-2023-8

1 1

Technology @lemmy.world

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

www.businessinsider.com /social-media-dead-instagram-tiktok-bereal-replaced-group-chats-messaging-2023-8

659 182

334 comments

And yet, after joining Lemmy and Mastodon, I post a lot more.
- Like for real!! I was a semi-lurker on reddit. Posted a couple times a year.
  I just passed 500 posts on Lemmy.
  
  I've found lemmy to be alot less hostile, don't care about downvotes, but attacking people because of opinions doesn't sound like a fun time to me
  
  Huh, when I clicked on your profile it says 0 posts...
- Part of the reason is Lemmy's default sorting algorithm for comments, "Hot", addresses reddit's biggest flaw, which is that earlier comments snowballs with upvotes, so it buries late-comers to conversations, leading to the rat-race of everyone trying to get their funny one-liners in as early as possible for maximum karma (which also isn't a thing here.)
  The "Active" default sort for posts also means that comments are a lot more concentrated to what people are actually talking about and posts tend to be stickier. (also, botting upvote is a lot harder on Lemmy, since it's easy to bot upvotes, it's a lot harder to fake real conversations in comments. )
  In fact, it is pointless to comment at all past like 4 hours on any post on reddit since it will just sit unread for hours, but here you can comment 1 day after a post and still have people talking to you.
- for me, I was motivated to make this my first post because I want to help solve the death of content issue we still have. it's gotten quite a lot of attention. I think that anywhere bigger, anything of relevance would have already been posted by the time I see it
  
  Also, for me, it's the fact I do not feel my data and privacy are being siphoned, sold, and fingerprinted on this platform. Another factor is that I feel the people and interactions are pure and authentic, rather than astroturfed and ambiguous. That may change as the fedicerse grows, but for now it is bringing me back of the older days of the internet.
  
  You bring up one advantage I see from Lemmy. Even though I've seen this article posted before (I think by L4Sbot in this technology community), the nature of de-centralized content means that cross-posting onto various servers is actually encouraged to get input from a variety of users from different communities and configs (for example, people who have disabled viewing bot-account posts).
  On Reddit, people would be quick to say "boooooo repoooost", but I've not seen that too much of that, just a few complaints of "there's too much orange guy and muskrat in my feed".
- Same here. For me it's because it feels smaller more often instead expecting to be buried.
  
  I just want the communities I post in to grow. Just trying to do my part to keep people engaged and encourage others to do the same.
- I comment about as much as I did on reddit, but I feel like I see less negative replies. It doesn’t seem to matter what I’d post on there, somebody somewhere would have something shitty to say. It’s not my fault society can’t accept my seal clubbing hobby.
  
  If you want to go clubbing with 90s phenom and signer of the hit song “Kiss from a Rose”, then you go for it! You are accepted here ❤️
- Absolutely, I post much more here because I know actual people will actually read it and may actually respond like they would to an actual human. It's like the old days of the internet.
- Because people here are nice
  
  Yeah look I don't get slurs thrown at me or people abusing the "send help" button. So that's a bonus.
  
  Some are.
- Hey me too! Just the Lemmy side (was never into twitters whole thing) but I actually post stuff here, even if it’s just cross posting.
  I always used an alt to post on Reddit and did so very infrequently. I think I posted maybe 3 things on the 4 years on Reddit?
  I comment a lot more, and have posted a ton more (even without removing the posts! And yea, 5 is a ton more since it’s in the last 2 months rather than 4years!)
  I don’t even clear my comment history as a compulsive thing (I changed me behavior somewhat, to allow for this) because I don’t want to remove activity from the platform. I know it needs me to contribute so I do!
- I do, too, but it's out of duty and I'll stop when other people pick up the slack.
- Found the bot /s

The concept of "influencer" as a career needs to die a quick death.
- it's fancy speak for "salesman"
  
  Ooo it's the equivalent of "side hustle" just being a 2nd job.
  
  Fancy speak for “cheap salesman who has a large network” /0.5s
  
  Wha..What?! So you're saying I'm not a BOSS BABE?!
  
  I call them peddlers
- I mean I think it's a fine career, it's the name that's dumb.
  For the most part they're just entertainers. The "influencer" name suggests way more than should be.
  
  Entertainers are supposed to be entertaining though.
  These people have all the "entertainment" value of a late-night infomercial at best. "Oooh, watch me get excited about unboxing this item. Whatever could have Disney sent me this week?"
  The worst problem is that these influencers do gain huge amounts of followers, but rarely fact-check or do hard sciences needed to ya know, give information to viewers? See Linus Tech Tips and the whole crap they're into right now.
  
  Like they could be a video journalist or a nature photographer or a lifestyle model. All those would be more descriptive than just influencer.
  
  I prefer "content creators. " Sametimes they can be very educational or entertaining. (I watch a lot of comedy, travel, and home workout content.)
- You don't like the Z-list celebrities?
- It's a double edged sword. I do like some of the niche content the industry has created. I like coffee and I get a lot of indepth coffee analysis from folks who likely wouldn't be able to spend the time doing so if they needed "real" jobs. I think it's the ones where there's no actual valuable content that is what gets people annoyed. I don't understand how someone can just play video games in front of a camera. Or where they're famous for their personality.
- Why though? You don't have to be their customer. But clearly lot of people are.

Talking to real friends more interesting than arguing with strangers? Shareholders flummoxed! News at 11.
- Hey, I take offense to that! I'm going to write a vitriolic response to your seemingly-normal-but-different-viewpoint-than-mine opinion where I'll use non-applicable slurs and misinformation and then call you dumb if you post a sensible reply!
  
  tfw you just stand on the sides and then meme on what’s happening with a lame joke instead of contributing your two cents on the socioeconomic practices that are happening in the US that are currently choking its working class to death
  lmaooooooo gottem
  
  Hey, I take offence to your office! I’m going to write a nonsensical response that parallels your comment where I’ll use no sources and not really make any point whatsoever!
- ... real friends ...
  I don't understand.
  
  Like text but with noises and fleshy.
  Edit: sometimes they congratulate you on the anniversary of exiting your mother's birth canal.
- Flummoxed is such a choice word
  
  It's kinda fetch

I've seen the birth of it in my lifetime, I'll see the death of it in my lifetime. Way to go, evolution!
- It had the potential to be good. But as with everything, once capitalisms tendrils flowed through it the benefit to anyone except those wishing to reap a profit is gone. I’m hoping the fediverse gets the support it needs because infrastructure is expensive and we have something good here
  
  There used to be a time when corporations were taxed so hard they did everything they could to reinvest their money into the company/employees/communities just to avoid it going to taxes. Unfettered capitalism destroys the humanity in everything it touches.
  
  The worst part is the Cambridge Analitica kinda shit that they figured out eventually, the orange cunt, brexit and other modern calamities were fueled by the social networks reach into private activities or otherwise. It sucks cause it exposes how easy normal people will go down the rabbit hole.
  
  You underestimate capitalism if you think the fediverse is safe. It's going to be a constant fight against an immortal enemy. It's only a matter of time. I just hope it's after mine.
  
  Yeah it truly is a bummer. The early days of myspace and Facebook were great
- I was in high school when facebook went live, just out of curiosity how old were you?
  
  I was in college and I still do not understand it. My friends were like dude there's girls on it and you can poke them. But there's girls out in the real world. Now it's the reverse where meeting people on the internet is more normal than meeting IRL.
  
  So cruel

Social media in general is in the following stage of Enshitification:
Launch
Growth at all costs, user focus
Use size to bring advertisers
Gradually shift focus to advertisers and money bringers
Ensure users are way too invested to quit
>> Sell out <<
It's no surprise that people only end up seeing "carefully curated" content, it's what "sells", or rather, ensures people stay in the stupid app. From TFA: "While sharing has tailed off, consuming content hasn't slowed"
I have an Insta account for some of the part time 3D printing I do, but since I'm not a "content creator", my stuff has almost zero reach. Whenever I open the app, it's roughly 1:1:1 posts of "recommended", someone I actually follow, advert. 2/3 of everything shown to me is stuff I didn't ask for, not to mention when the advertises are actual scams or fucking pyramids
- I first heard the term 'enshitification' on the last episode of On the Media. Perfect description
  
  It was coined by Doctorow and his article about it is very popular on the fediverse.
- I redownload insta like a month ago because I thought fuck it. Other than reels from old friends from highschool, it's all adds and the same regurgitated memes and stand up comics.
  It was creepy that after nearly 4 years of being inactive it knew that I liked golf, and drink too much.

I still visit Reddit but I no longer engage in any way, other than reading comments. No up/down voting, not commenting, no reporting spam. Nothing but reading with multiple layers of ad-blocking.
PS: the overall quality/value has dropped precipitously
- I deleted all 6 of my accounts. I can’t upvote or comment and I like it that way. Reddit no longer values me as a content producer by eliminating my fav apps, so I no longer value Reddit.
  
  I have used it just a handful of times where adding "Reddit" to the end of a search would get me what I was looking for - usually "peer reviewed" options on some topic.
  1 time I went for commentary on a niche reality tv show to feel validated in my hate for the designated villain.
  I am not logged in and don't interact any further
- I deleted my main Reddit account but still find myself going back there occasionally for specific topics. For example, I haven't found a good place on Lemmy to ask travel questions.
  
  place on Lemmy to ask travel questions.
  Good luck. One poster would ask if you like sex and travel, then tell you to "Go and get fucked."
  Another would accuse you of being a bourgeois lib who is killing the planet with your capitalist excesses.
  Another would go on a rant about privilege and how your very ability to ask such questions in a public space speaks to your total lack class consciousness and your ignorance of "The Movement" or something like it.
  In short, check out Vang Vieng in Laos and have a great time.
- Did you not enjoy your tenth fight video of the day?
- I read AITA on Lemmy via a bot, that is the last vestige of Reddit I haven't dropped.

Those platforms are business media now, not social media anymore.
- This is really interesting to think about. On my photography IG the one users who are still having good reach are the ones who are promoting their patreon/presets/editing services, are constantly trying to earn money in some way and are posting a million reels every day.
  More casual photographers like me are getting zilch. I used to get 1000 likes on 95% of my stuff with some going viral. Now I get 200 if I'm lucky, my reach in general is in the hole and I refuse to spend hours editing reels and begging for the algorithms attention. I'm close to shutting it down but I help mod a page right now so I'm hanging on for a bit yet.

The fediverse, while still social media, has a level of authenticity unrivaled by most major social medias in my opinion. Hopefully it stays that way!
- Has any communication system managed to do that? Once certain types of people catch the scent of profit, they tear the medium apart searching for every penny of it.
  Letters became junk mail. Email became spam. Newspapers and magazines became mostly ads and shilled content. Television became for-profit news and reality content.
  That authenticity is just going to make it more appealing to astro-turf.
  
  we need to shitpost more. a neighborhood that is high in crime does not appeal to advertisers. like north korea, they live in paradise whilst convincing the rest of the world that it's a shithole.
- ah i guess that's in the process of changing. you can see this happening right now. more right-wing memes, more "look at this cool movie/toy/outfit... i found. it's really me, a normal human being just like you!"
  
  Lol I would bet the majority of that crap is from just normal people.

I also noticed how my social media usage (even on Lemmy and Mastodon) is consistently declining, I haven't opened the clients I use for either platform in days (or possibly more than a week). It's bad because I was pretty invested in the fediverse, but it's good because now I can actually do something productive, or even go outside.
- It's not bad... it's actually healthy. I think that feeling that you must post on social media isn't really good for the head.
  Go on social media when you feel like it, but it's best if the default is to not use social media.
  
  Good point
  
  Agreed, this experiment should be able to last by itself without feeling obligated to post something. If that's the case then it's failed.
- Same. Good stuff.

No app better defines the changing nature of social media than Instagram. The app started as a digital scrapbook — a place to keep up with real-world connections, close friends, and family. While other networks had more users (Facebook) or generated more news (Twitter), Instagram seemed to define the ideal form of this era of social media. Instagram became a verb, an aesthetic, and a generational signifier.
huUURP! BLAAaahhriifgghhh. . .
Garbage marketing platform dies horribly. Thousands of clueless "journalists" bereft.
- Insta-gram
  I thought it originated as a marketplace for single servings of drugs.
  
  I thought it was putting grandma on speed dial

- Discord is better than IRC imo. I used IRC for a VERY long time and Discord was the one that finally killed it for me. We'll see if it lasts. I guess if they kill themselves (and they keep trying to), IRC will still be there waiting. Used to be on Rizon!
  
  Discord is sooo awful imo. Every server has annoying “rule bots” or people constantly changing the look/feel of the channels or trying to engage you with @all or @channel (which you can ignore but it’s still annoying)… even the more technical ones have the same vibe. IRC is so much easier to communicate in IMO.

No one's posting on BeReal
Nobody has heard of BeReal
- BeReal is pretty popular with a lot of the people I know- you might not be in the right social circles who know about it
- What is BeReal?
  
  Rapper in Cypress Hill. Oh, no, that's B-Real.
  
  I believe it's an app, where you randomly get a notification and mist poat within then and 2 minutes. It takes a pic of both the front and back cameras on your phone. The idea is that you can't make yourself look good, like with Snapchat filters, or even Instagram where you can find a nice angle or whatever.

Also, if no one is posting on social media, then what the hell are we all doing right now then?
- My Facebook is only memes, only from the large meme pages, not the ones I like that I have to check manually since they'll never end up in my feed. And news articles.
  It started with Facebook just hiding what your friends are posting. It still happens that someone shares a photo once a year or so, but I will never get shown it. I just browse my friend's profiles manually.
  
  That was extremely dissatisfying about Facebook. I’d see an endless stream of crap from people that I barely knew and didn’t care about at all, and then when I’d look at a profile of someone I actually knew and did want to keep up with, I’d see posts about significant and interesting things that happened in their lives which Facebook never showed me. I tried to get them to stop showing me irritating posts about politics - unfollow people, block people, mark “show less posts like this”, then it would come up with more political posts from people I didn’t even recognize. Meanwhile, oh, colleague got married…. sure, just never show me that post and show me 15 idiotic political memes instead.
- I don't consider this or reddit social media. I don't know anyone, nor do I care to.
  Instead it is like a collection of forums since forever like in the bbs days.
  I pick and choose what rooms to go in and learn something. But it isn't about me, or staying connected. You know, the social part.
  
  This and Reddit are 100% social media. Right now, writing this, we are socializing on this media.
  Maybe I'm wrong, but this is how I've viewed it for years
  
  That's basically how most of Instagram works and is what the article is about. No one knows folks on those platforms either. They aren't "social" anymore. No one shares anything personal, it's all "content" created for millions of followers by influencers and the like. This is probably more like social media than current platforms are. It's closer to what social media was when it started.
- I'm assuming you're just here studying nerds for your next blockbuster where you're playing Ada Lovelace or something.
  
  ... I don't know what you're talking about.
  On a purely coincidentally note, how likely would you be in watching an Ada Lovelace biopic? No reason, just asking.
- I see your point, but I only used Reddit for a long time and the difference was the anonymity, so it's social media but minus the personal brand.
- Dancing, walking, re-arranging furniture... glances, shopping, I let the bird out of the cage
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=4JkIs37a2JE&
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
- Lemmy isn't social media, it's content aggregation, like reddit used to be
  
  Might as well say Instagram isn't social media either, nor is Facebook or Twitter. Social media is just a platform where one of the biggest parts of it is the commenting system. Its a social media platform for content aggregation. The commenting makes it social.

I almost never use Facebook anymore because whenever I’m on it, all I see are posts from groups I’m not even in, ads, videos, and interspersed in all that algorithmically chosen content, the occasional post from people I actually follow and know. Social media isn’t social any more.
Even fricking tumblr now has videos on it, and you can only shut “tumblr live” off for a week at most before they come back.
- I didn't think anyone used Tumblr any more since they got rid of porn.
  
  A solid amount of new memes I see are from Tumblr posts. A lot of people went back prior to Twitter changing ownership, and then many more after that too.
- Yea. My whole Facebook feed is full of ads and posts from people I don't even have on my friend list. I got fed up and barely go on there anymore.
- There was a bizarre transition to "other page" content on Facebook. It realised nobody posts there anymore, and tried to transition to a quasi Reddit. But the content it displays is pure garbage.
  
  Facebook now fills half my page with the worst boomer memes. Then something updated and it scrolls the page right while I'm reading something. I don't know why I even bother anymore.
- God yeah Tumblr is so frustrating now. Like I get that a site needs to make money and I'm not even opposed to the gimmicks they have. But changing the look of it (which has been changed before but at least it made sense a lot of the time) to what is essentially a clone of Twitter. It's frustrating to see a site I love so much, decide to kill itself and for what?
  That and also the fact that they allow racism, transphobia, homophobia to fester. You'd think that a site that is pretty popular with the LGBTQIA+ crowd, they sure like to keep people around who would harm us.

it's interesting how many comments show that people like to read the headline and are content with that to form an opinion. literally the first paragraph says that it's not "THERE ARE NO POSTS" but it says that the "feed is swamped by a combination of perfectly curated photos and professionally created content." - the problem is that the paid content creators have become GOOD. so many of them really look like they are just opinions and casual mentions of movies/clothes/...things. viral marketing is really at a point where so many fronts that have been established have been broken down in the guise of "irony" or "sarcasm". "I'm only buying the Barbie merch ironically" etc.
- it’s interesting how many comments show that people like to read the headline
  I read articles about India landing on the moon, ancestors of humans nearly dying out, tech employees being dissatisfied in Austin, etc. I don't care about social media enough to read an article. That's probably a lot of people here.
  
  Are those articles shown to you by Google News (the thing built into Android) by any chance? I've had those exact ones recommended to me in the past few days and it's a little unnerving seeing someone else mention reading them all lmao.
- It's not just about content creators becoming good though, the article also explains how the algorithm pushes that content over others.
  Granted, the quality of the content is still a big part of it, another point it makes is that people refrain from posting things because it's not "good enough" compared to others.
- Isn't that what the summary above pretty much says with even less words?

My following on insta is dominated by meme pages, influencers, and that one person in your social group who practically shares their life on social media.
- The only followers I’ve been getting on tumblr lately are porn bots. I don’t even follow porn bots or look at their pages, I’m only there to shitpost.
  
  Same. I hate how often I have to block them.
  I even wrote into tumblr staff and they acknowledged it was an issue in the ticket but won't say anything publicly which is annoying.

I dont even want to talk to half the people I know anymore lol. I stopped using FB but keep it running because there are many years of pics and what not for family. And when I bring it down people freak out and think something is wrong with me. Other than that, it has been stripped of any identifying information, only has people I know and I never use it anymore. That was the only real 'personal' place I had on the internet. Everything else is fake names and whatnot, always has been.
- download all your facebook data to get all memories locally, then you can delete
  
  They let you transfer it to other services now, too. That's what I did for my photos and videos before deleting them from Facebook.
- Could I ask why you don't want to talk to half the people you know? I have the opposite issue where I try to talk to people I know but they don't reciprocate, I'm finding it hard to imagine the inverse.
  
  To add an additional perspective, it's not that I dislike these people, some of them I love, but my time has so many asks as it is, and I just cannot maintain active relationships with that many people who have no other impact on my daily life. There are a few I would make time for when the opportunity comes around, but I can't keep sustained things going with more than a few people. I say can't, but what I mean is that I prefer to spend the vast majority of my time with my wife and kids, and I will use just about any amount of time that I can spare for parents, siblings, and their kids. I have a few friends who fit into the same group as the family. After that, it's occasional messages, Christmas cards, and the rare visit/meet up. If you are there for the good, you should be prepared to be there for the bad, in my opinion. I cannot offer that to too many people beyond immediate family. Also, I certainly don't have the money to support some of those folks through their rough patches, and saying "no" to people you care about sucks.
  
  Getting older. Lots of drama. Lots of political bullshit I can't stand anymore and don't want to hear about. Not saying my situation is the healthiest in the world but that is how I am feeling these days.
  
  There are people I liked a lot in earlier stages of my life, that I no longer have the desire to talk to not due to anything they did, but just them being from a period in my life I’d rather forget or move on from. In some cases it might be people whose main shared interested with me was what we did for work, which I no longer do.

Wtf is bereal
- It's a breakfast food item that you pour beer over.
- Bereal is great, you get a notification and take a picture, front and rear camera, that's all you get for the day, then you can see what your friends are up to.
  By far my favorite social media.
  
  I get it but man, I'd never want to post pics of myself on the Internet for anyone to see. I also don't think anyone would wanna see me anyway. ¯⁠\⁠(⁠°⁠_⁠o⁠)⁠/⁠¯
  
  Prove to me you're still alive today.
  
  The principles are cool but none of my friend wants to bother with another social network
- My thoughts exactly... This might be why nobody is posting there
  
  We're just to old, my niece and nephews in their teens are all using it.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-Real

Big shock considering everything we post online is being weaponized in various ways.
- I know this conversation is had nearly daily here, but by fuck am I glad that the fediverse is so much less astroturfed than every other social media site.
  
  we need to work on keeping it that way. we have the advantage with no corporations to silently manipulate us and we own the infrastructure, but we still gotta root out bot accounts and malicious instances
- feds, bots and shills

Does Lemmy count as social media?? lol
- Yes but I’d classify it as a different category more akin to old school forums. It’s less a place to post photos of yourself and more one to discuss and read about stuff you enjoy (or memes). I just want a place personally to discuss movies, video games, technology etc
- In broad strokes, yeah. I'd even consider older, more traditional forms like forums and IRC/BBS to be proto forms of social media. As long as the internet exists there will be social media, what form it takes is malleable depending on the desires of the userbase at hand.
  
  At that point the operational definition is just "website where you can post stuff"
- Not to me.
  Just like Reddit, it's more anonymous and the people you are interacting with don't really matter, you don't know them, they don't know you.
  You just interact for a few minutes and never see each other again.
  
  I'm not sure "they don't matter" is something I could get behind. We still have every reason to remember that there's (probably) a person on the other end, one we should extend common courtesy to, and with whom we might exchange perspective-changing ideas, even if rarely.
  That said I agree the "reddit" format is the one I always liked best. It just makes more sense for people who want to discuss the same things, to group up online, rather than into arbitrary parasocial masses around a select few persons, as well as the people you know IRL and may or may not have any interest in actually interacting with.
  
  Hi, bye.
  
  Yeah the way you describe it makes it sound like we could build an AI forum where each user is the only one in there and all the rest are ai bots whose only purpose is to generate the content and interaction we're looking for.
  I think Reddit is just the beta version.
  
  I prefer it not be this way.
  I kind of hate getting replies here and I can tell the person I'm talking to isn't paying attention to who in the thread they are talking to. It's like people aren't seeing each other as people.

I've been trying to cut down social media use ever since 2020. I don't blame people for not posting most social media platforms are either boring or a toxic shit holes.
- George Floyd showed me that the hope I had for this nation is lost. People are just argumentative assholes and have zero perspective. Hearing people defend the police and everything that followed made me dump it.
  Granted I know there are those trying to do their job. It wasn't them. It's the keyboard warriors that have never been close to a cop, trying to defend a dude killing another over a written check just got to me.

If a company ever puts ads in my group chats I will jump in a volcano
- No no no... We need to throw the CEO's in the volcano. We don't need CEO's but I'm sure someone needs you.
  
  I'm the CEO of ExxonMobil but thanks anyway
- Sent by my iPhone™
- Don't use a MIUI phone then.
- please dont give them ideas, maybe some CEO is seeing this and decides to implement it
- So? Jumping in a volcano is completely harmless if you dive in the right way.

Group chats were for sharing before social media. It just out lasted them.
- I'm pretty big into the mechanical watch community. Insta used to be popular in that community, but the best content and discussion has long since moved off "social media" and into various private Slack and WhatsApp groups.
  I've heard of a similar movement in other hobbyist/enthusiast communities.
  For people I actually know IRL, it's virtually all WhatsApp.
  
  Too bad whatapp spies on you just as much. For whole communities to be in private chats seems rather counter productive for new people to find it.

Don't mourn social media. It was always too easily astro-turfed.

The fuck even is BeReal? LOL
- It's kinda niche, but it's where you and your friends can only post once a day at a random time. But it's all at the same time, so you kinda get a slice of life of what everyone is doing. I like it, it's much worse for influencer type stuff, so everyone I know just uses it with their friends which is nice. It starts conversations that might not happen otherwise.
  
  My students will jump up in class when they get the notification. My only rule is that I get to be in it.
  
  That actually sounds kind of cool and unique.
  
  Holy crap that sounds godawful. Do what you’re doing and dance on command when the randomly timed notification comes in? Sounds fun to do on a lark when you open the app because you’re having a boring day or something, but as a daily thing?
- My guess is they misspelled BeeReel, the social media for apiary and native plant enthusiasts.
  
  I would watch the shit out of a bunch of bee videos. I love bees and butterflies.

I would argue that the quality of content is in decline more than numerical users. Also, the quantity of ads are much much higher, which hides what little good content there is.
Mix that in with political splits in social media sites (from left leaning Lemmy to the Facebook right), and you generally find yourself in an echo chamber with little to surprise you, and a lot of things confirming what you already know.

I've been enjoying using Signal for "social media". I can share things with my friends without being subjected to ads or having my data mined.
There's also a promising Alpha app called Circles from Futo that uses Matrix to do something similar.
Every popular social media wants to maintain complete control and just shove content down your throat, rather than allow you to curate your feed at all. Even subscription-based ones like Strava give you absolutely no control over what's in your feed.
- Speaking of Circles, remember Google+ Circles?
  
  Yep, one of Google's many graveyard projects
  
  Ah, Google+! The fast follow up to Google Buzz. Guaranteed to turn the Social Media space on its head.

The three things cited in the post summary? Never been on them. I never ever heard of one of them. It seems to me that it's more that these few platforms are struggling, and other (twitter/x, reddit, facebook, and other) just keep sailing smoothly.

Indian aunties were on the group chat trend before it was cool.

I don't post because I know no one will see my posts, and I don't want to give them my data without feeding my narcism in return.

I have Instagram installed but frozen with "Ice Box" android app.
I open once per day or 2 days to catch up with some friends status. But I don't see those neverending reels anymore.
- What do you mean by frozen? What does it do?
  
  It freezes the app preventing background usage.
  It's like the "disable" option that you have in system apps. But for user apps. In fact, once you disable them if you search them in play store they appear with an "enable" button.
  The advantage is that your userdata is still there. And you can quickly open it (unfreeze) from the Ice Box app.

I deleted all my big tech accounts, and lots of people are posting on the fediverse.

Social media was fun until my family joined and scrutinized my posts, and then I lost all my friends

Twitter's so annoying, they constantly show me the same ads. Was it different before Musk?
- The ads went out of control in like 2019 when the post 2015 social media boom started to cool. One of the knockoff effects of 2020 pandemic is it artificially extended the life of social media companies for like 2 years.
  The funniest part of the musk buyout of twitter is the company would probably be doing very similar bullshit if he didnt buy them out, probably in a slightly more savvy way, but they'd still be dripping money.
- Dunno, quit after Musk took over so no idea what it's like now or why you'd stay on it.
- I heard it used to have very solid ad management options. It was good for business too, as direct feedback/curation = more appropriate ads = more valuable ads. But i guess as algorithm shit and data harvesting "automated" the process it went downhill, and advertisers fleeing twitter post $8 checkmark was the coup de grace

Good. Let it die.

Well, it sucks. A certain South African Dutch chump with a Napoleon complex is 90% of the reason why.
- And I can't be alone in finding Instagram's UI to be terrible. They have to share some blame.
  
  I keep telling myself that I'll spend time on Instagram, but I can never force myself to actually do it. Yeah, that interface is a confusing mess.

I don't get group chats. It seems like the worst parts of IRC had a baby with the worst part of internet forums and created a thing destined to make you always late to the party.
- And woe betide those who get into a group chat with a bunch of chatty people who never stop texting. Then you turn off notifications for it and you miss all kinds of things.
  
  OMG this. Every chat app needs a way to rate-limit notifications, but I've yet to encounter a single one that does.
- what did it take from internet forums that IRC couldn't have realistically already done?
  Most group chats to me are pretty much the same as IRC was back in the day, unless you examined the protocols themselves. Upload limits are also much larger (except for that brief period skype was popular and you could upload gigabytes)
  Honestly the only thing group chats are bad at is archiving, and it's mainly because it's designed for real-time conversation (so people are spamming more) and sites can't search the stored text at all.
- I must not understand what group chat is. I have two friends where the three of us group text each other daily and it’s pretty neat.

I have been wanting to get back to making stuff on social media but due to work and no longer being the IDGAF teenager I get nervous on what to talk about.
Like I was hoping to do a podcast for my Facebook friends but I only uploaded one episode cause I want to do a few about how work sucks. But then I worry it'll be depressing.

I really like that Signal let's you do group stories, it works really well for this.
Some of my groups have great participation and it's a great place to send all the random links we send.

Take me back to MSN Messenger.
- nudge
  nudge
  nudge
  hey u there

Who posted this
- No one, it said so right in the title.

We've run a private chat server for friends 10+ years now with channels and that's where most sharing goes on, whatsapp chats with some, and I've basically moved to Discord for other interests and still use forums for some. Public social media is more for profile curation, displaying a highly curated identity.

Hopefully interest in forums starts to pick up again. Not be the main thing, but at least an alternative.

Why does this seem to only be about Instagram?

I see tons of posts. What is this about ?

For specific definitions of "no one."

More people need to know about pixelfed. It is basically very much the old IG.
- So og IG that it doesn't have an Android app?
  That might be too vanilla of insta.
  
  There's an android app. I think you have to download it from their website rather than the play store cos it is in beta.
  
  There are several of them

Are these social media or scam media?
I consider kbin, Lemmy and Mastodon (or better, the Fediverse) so much healthier.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
Other apps like Dispo, Poparazzi, and Locket have all used various gimmicks to try and recapture social media's halcyon days — each had a moment in the sun at the top of the US Apple app-store charts — but none have truly broken through.
For instance, the content creator Nina Haines launched a group called SapphLit, a self-described "sapphic book club born out of the queer BookTok community."
Victoria Johnston, a 22-year-old software engineer, imagines the ideal social-media platform as a "safe space where people can just connect and you don't feel pressured to have a big following or a presence or be really well known."
And as more users and creator communities migrate toward closed spaces, the behemoths like Instagram are also trying to capitalize on this reality by introducing features like paid-subscription services that offer exclusive group chats.
Lia Haberman, an adjunct professor at UCLA Extension and an advisor for the American Influencer Council, said that Gen Alpha, the age cohort of 13 and younger, are "not embracing traditional social-media platforms and customs."
It's hard to know how the change will affect the online atmosphere over the long term — some evidence suggests the shift will create a healthier digital experience, but it also risks further dividing people into like-minded echo chambers.
The original article contains 2,197 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 90%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Mostly repost of things they didn't make in an attempt to grab some ad revenue...
Like why do I need to see 2 or 3 arborist reposts from ~3 accounts not owned or affiliated by such arborists?

Is it? Don't like to play devil's advocate but I'm pretty sure my Instagram is pretty much alive and my BeReal feed is an at all all-time high, with several new joins lately too.
I agree that it's much worse, that on anything that isn't BeReal it's harder to find your friends posts, that the ads got way too many - but at least here people are absolutely not stopping to create content for them.
- if you red even the first sentences, you will see that the author doesn't claim that there are NO posts. they say that most of the posts are not social media anymore but corporate designs

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