It’s amazing how people convinced themselves they need all these platforms in their lives. Meta, X, TikTok, YouTube - they can do whatever they want to their users, and the users just take it.
I’ve learned to drop social media platforms as soon as they pull shit I’m uncomfortable with and live a happy life, somehow.
“They make communicating with your friends and family easier!”
Um, E-mail has been doing that since the dawn of the Internet. There is absolutely nothing at all that has made communicating any easier since even instant messaging. All that social media has turned into, is nothing but megaphones for the idiot masses.
They literally don’t. X pushing things to the top of ur feed, Facebook polluting your timeline with random video shares, it all makes it harder to see the content you actually care about
Facebook before the algorithm was awesome. It was just the most recent stuff your friends did in that literal order. There was nothing wrong with it lol. Or at least I didn’t think so.
I’ve just started going through and telling it not show me any of the recommended stuff.
It’s kind of fun watching the algorithm cycle through waves of guessing. “Ok it’s going to be all wrestling for the next two days. Hmm, that didn’t work, let’s try MMA for a couple days. No, alright, how about a bunch of memes about being a mechanic…”
On the other hand the clicking “don’t show me this” doesn’t seem to actually do anything. I’ve told it not to show me Pixie and Brutus at least three times.
I do actually care about the content they “push”. Most fediverse apps are pointless to me exactly because they don’t have an algorithm. Unless you already know EXACTLY everything you’re interested in from the start, finding new stuff is the primary and best feature of the “algorithms”.
No they’re not… Those algorithms push stuff meant to manipulate you into making you click more. It doesn’t even expose you to anything new, just stuff you either already agree with or that makes you angry.
You want to find new stuff? Find or build a directory website. But wanting it found for you is the root of the problem. You don’t get to just be served in life.
I’m not trying to defend what it has become but social media can be good to keep updated or in contact with people. You’re not gonna email everyone pictures of your vacation or whatever. Or to keep up with people you don’t see nearly as often as you’d like because of, well, life. People do take it way to far and either post way too much info or take everything too serious.
In my opinion, it’s a very passive way to keep in contact. It doesn’t require remembering people or interacting with them in any way. If you post photos, it shouldn’t be expected that people see them. If you post about a party, it’s not a replacement for an invite to people.
It’s shouting into the wind and then pushing the responsibility of that relationship to be on the person viewing the post to reply to it or like or whatever.
I got off social media for that exact reason, it was very seriously impacting my mental health. Now I may have fewer “friends” but the ones that do are the ones where we are important enough where we actively interact with each other.
Um, E-mail has been doing that since the dawn of the Internet.
I always see people saying “but I have some friends across the world and Facebook is the only way we can keep in contact because they don’t have a phone 😭😭😭”
Like… my guy. You both have email addresses and used them to create FB accounts. Cut out the middle man.
One big difference I see, between email and various messengers on the on side and social networks on the other side is, that emails are me pushing my information at people while a social network is supposed to be them pulling information from my feed. This allows me—when it works—to share stuff with people instead of potentially sending spam. Not all communication is a digital postcard. Social networks allowed a new form of communication. I enjoyed OG facebook until the first big privacy scandal. It was a (mostly) good thing and it was very accessible even then. I‘ve never got such a large part of my tribe on a pull service since then. Sure we all have messengers and groups and what not… but it is not the same. I dream of self-hosting something from the fediverse but we‘re not exactly young anymore and I doubt my tribe will assemble.
What was better than e-mail? Instant messaging and AIM gave us that.
What was better than just instant messaging on your PC? Doing it on the go, on your phone. Great!
What was better than just instant messaging on the go and on PC? Being able to share content like video and pictures. Being able to make group chats and all.
But where else can I post a picture of my dinner and have millions of random strangers see it, thereby validating my personal fragile ego, before I even take the first bite?
My preferred method of communication is a good ol’ phone call, or an SMS to say things like “be there in 5.” I don’t really get the hype with a slew of different text based messaging platforms.
I was all about Signal until they dropped SMS support (totally understand why). None of the people in my life use signal except for the select few that enjoy their ahem extracurricular activities, so it’s kinda moot. And I just don’t have the energy to crusade for people to give a rats ass about their privacy. If I need to have a combo that requires a degree of discretion, I just do it in person.
i use the phone (ya know… for its original and intended purpose) for nearly all ‘not face to face’ communication. i don’t even have data on my mobile and sms is disabled at the carrier.
I hate that it is now Meta’s, but WhatsApp is a damn practical app. I wouldn’t share as much with my social circles if it wasn’t that practical compared to emails.
After being on fediverse it’s been great how refreshing and natural real decentralized social media is rather than the astroturfed, money and soul sucking dreck that is the big corporate socials are.
I almost wish there was a way that we could encourage growth and somehow let it scale to critical mass through grants and donations. But eventually if the fediverse got to that size then there would be grifters and corporations to ruin our fun.
Right! The fediverse is 100% a happier place. I love Lemmy and Firefish and Pixelfed. I’m deleting Facebook as soon as I collect enough email addresses.
Much more customizable and in my opinion far easier to navigate, and for some reason way cuter. You can also download the app right from Firefish when you sign up, there’s no dealing with the app store. I don’t quite know but it’s super friendly, all sorts of strangers greeted me and followed me when I joined, which definitely didn’t happen with Mastodon. I just find it strangely adorable and full of cool people and very positive, and for some reason I don’t find Mastodon that way.
Yeah, I mean, Lemmy and other fediverse instances need to play their cards carefully. If they are to be the future, then they need to not cave into what has plagued the other social media platforms we’ve long used before them.
Thats not how any of this works though. Corpos and governments are free to spin up their own instances of any federated service right now. It is the future, but the future is small bubbles that communicate with each other. So we don’t have to be on Meta’s instance, or Wal-Mart’s, or even the US’s national instance. We can stay where we are and keep it like this.
Some people really can’t grok this. I remember trying to explain Diaspora to a friend several years ago, and he said “Yeah, but if Diaspora got as big as Facebook, then they would turn evil, too!”
I had to patiently re-explain how instances work, but I still don’t think he got it. We’ve been living with big corporations running the Web for so long that some people can’t even imagine it being any different, and that’s scary.
lt was so easy for me, personally. I have to reassert my own biases everytime I talk to someone about federation because it just makes sense to me. Its equivalent to a bunch of email servers talking to each other. I can send an email to whoever I want, as long as my provider has not blocked them or I myself have not. Picking an instance is like picking gmail/outlook/yahoo.
How well does that explanation work? When a bunch of people were migrating to Mastodon last year, I remember some were still very confused, even after the comparison to email.
With enough time and enough pressure, I think that the vast majority of people would figure it out, though. They figured out email, and if you tried to explain that to anybody in 1990, they would’ve looked at you like you had an extra head.
Tbh its hit or miss, and I’m all out after that. I’m too deep in the tech sauce to return my brain to 0 and explain it from the outside. So when people don’t get it after that I often just leave them to their walled gardens.
Hmm to be fair with YouTube you don’t think this is now a repository of incredibly valuable resources? If YouTube went down and we lost all videos, we would be losing many important resources, from historical documentaries no longer easily found in media, to guides on woodworking.
It’s a bit scary. Once you remove the crap, it’s an incredibly valuable library resource and time capsule.
Absolutely. There’s nothing special about YouTube’s frontend - it can be replicated by someone with no coding experience, in an afternoon, for free, via a Softaculous module. On the inside, it’s the Library of Alexandria. And unfortunately, it’s owned by a company that understands that reality only as a means to a nefarious end, which is to develop a detailed psychological profile on its users that can be sold to advertisers.
My hope is that the cost of server storage and delivery will become inexpensive enough that YouTube can be forked and maintained by a nonprofit like the Wikimedia Foundation, who sees user generated content as a means to the enrichment of human experience. I’m not optimistic though, the history of the Library of Alexandria is instructive.
There is already something like this via the Wayback Machine (who indeed do copies of video media but more typically VHS and other things) and things like the Russian Library genesis, which is kept in torrent format.
The problem really is that storage for video media is insane compared to storage of document or even photo data.
If people here haven’t read into it, it’s incredibly interesting to look into the way the Internet Archive works. In particular you have to begin to concern yourselves with how long it takes for HDs, SSDs, and other media to degrade in time.
The problem really is that storage for video media is insane compared to storage of document or even photo data.
Yep, and add to that, 500 hours of video is uploaded to youtube every minute & they serve over 2.5 billion monthly users. The scale really is unfathomable.
If people here haven’t read into it, it’s incredibly interesting to look into the way the Internet Archive works. In particular you have to begin to concern yourselves with how long it takes for HDs, SSDs, and other media to degrade in time.
Where can I read more about this? It sounds interesting.
Another super interesting story is about Marion Stokes, who recorded around 71000 cassettes worth of television media from 1975 to 2000s. She houses them in 9 apartments. I need to watch the documentary about her. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
I remember I started reading about about this when I wondered what kind of media is “safe” for storage. It sounds like a simple question but it’s not. Digital media, unlike print media, is so easy to lose.
Sorry, I think you misunderstand that I’m talking about a large scale problem rather than a personal problem. Of course people can individually download videos to preserve.
Imagine losing YouTube’s videos next week. You would have effectively lost nearly two decades worth of media chronicling human and technological development (more if you take into account that YouTube has repositories of older media).
Someone described it like the Library Alexandria. In terms of density of information, I think the comparison is apt.
A good comparison that might be too old for some readers. Back in the 80s and 90s, the early internet was populated via usenet discussions. Google eventually bought this data and merged it into Google Groups. However Google Groups was disbanded. This meant that some archives can no longer be accessed because to do so requires some active component no longer in service. We have effectively lost gigantic chunks of early 90s internet history. A lot of this history was quite important in many facets of life.
I’m totally with you on that. That’s why I support the Internet Archive. But it’s important for people to realize that not everything on the Web is forever, so you should make backups. It is a large scale problem, but individuals can mitigate it. If there’s a copy of the file somewhere, then it can be preserved and archived.
Absolutely, I only had FB and I was late to the game on that as well compared to others. I gave it up completely in 2016 thankfully right before the crazy political crap took over and never looked back. I did reddit which was fine because I didn’t know anyone and it let me actually follow everything I loved no matter how small it was. Now I am here because of what they pulled. Wonder how longer this place will last…
I can only speak for myself but I’m not on Twitter because I deem it essential for my life and I can’t leave. The reason I’m not leaving is that these changes have had almost zero affect on me and quite frankly I just don’t care. Only change I had to make was to move from the Flamingo app to using it via browser which doesn’t really matter since I almost exclusively use it on my laptop anyways.
It’s amazing how people convinced themselves they need all these platforms in their lives. Meta, X, TikTok, YouTube - they can do whatever they want to their users, and the users just take it.
I’ve learned to drop social media platforms as soon as they pull shit I’m uncomfortable with and live a happy life, somehow.
“They make communicating with your friends and family easier!”
Um, E-mail has been doing that since the dawn of the Internet. There is absolutely nothing at all that has made communicating any easier since even instant messaging. All that social media has turned into, is nothing but megaphones for the idiot masses.
They literally don’t. X pushing things to the top of ur feed, Facebook polluting your timeline with random video shares, it all makes it harder to see the content you actually care about
Facebook before the algorithm was awesome. It was just the most recent stuff your friends did in that literal order. There was nothing wrong with it lol. Or at least I didn’t think so.
OG Facebook was honestly great.
It didn’t make as much money from sponsored videos until they forced it to be in your face via the algorithm 😀
Now if you go on Facebook, you barely even see posts from your friends. Just videos and posts from random groups you aren’t even in.
I blocked all the “suggested for you” posts on facebook through uBlock origin.
Now when I load my feed, I see it block one post after the other, so many of them, literally more posts than the ones I get from friends.
Afterwards my feed is as clean as a whistle, lol
When I visit Facebook, it’s about 8:1 “recommended for you” vs people I actually know.
I see exactly one post on Instagram from anyone I follow before it’s all ads and random algorithm shit I’m not interested in
I’ve just started going through and telling it not show me any of the recommended stuff.
It’s kind of fun watching the algorithm cycle through waves of guessing. “Ok it’s going to be all wrestling for the next two days. Hmm, that didn’t work, let’s try MMA for a couple days. No, alright, how about a bunch of memes about being a mechanic…”
On the other hand the clicking “don’t show me this” doesn’t seem to actually do anything. I’ve told it not to show me Pixie and Brutus at least three times.
deleted by creator
I do actually care about the content they “push”. Most fediverse apps are pointless to me exactly because they don’t have an algorithm. Unless you already know EXACTLY everything you’re interested in from the start, finding new stuff is the primary and best feature of the “algorithms”.
No they’re not… Those algorithms push stuff meant to manipulate you into making you click more. It doesn’t even expose you to anything new, just stuff you either already agree with or that makes you angry.
You want to find new stuff? Find or build a directory website. But wanting it found for you is the root of the problem. You don’t get to just be served in life.
I’m not trying to defend what it has become but social media can be good to keep updated or in contact with people. You’re not gonna email everyone pictures of your vacation or whatever. Or to keep up with people you don’t see nearly as often as you’d like because of, well, life. People do take it way to far and either post way too much info or take everything too serious.
In my opinion, it’s a very passive way to keep in contact. It doesn’t require remembering people or interacting with them in any way. If you post photos, it shouldn’t be expected that people see them. If you post about a party, it’s not a replacement for an invite to people.
It’s shouting into the wind and then pushing the responsibility of that relationship to be on the person viewing the post to reply to it or like or whatever.
I got off social media for that exact reason, it was very seriously impacting my mental health. Now I may have fewer “friends” but the ones that do are the ones where we are important enough where we actively interact with each other.
I always see people saying “but I have some friends across the world and Facebook is the only way we can keep in contact because they don’t have a phone 😭😭😭”
Like… my guy. You both have email addresses and used them to create FB accounts. Cut out the middle man.
Facebook as taught them that they can be lazy and reduce their effort to remain in contact with a like or emoji reaction.
Ironically, I upvoted your comment.
One big difference I see, between email and various messengers on the on side and social networks on the other side is, that emails are me pushing my information at people while a social network is supposed to be them pulling information from my feed. This allows me—when it works—to share stuff with people instead of potentially sending spam. Not all communication is a digital postcard. Social networks allowed a new form of communication. I enjoyed OG facebook until the first big privacy scandal. It was a (mostly) good thing and it was very accessible even then. I‘ve never got such a large part of my tribe on a pull service since then. Sure we all have messengers and groups and what not… but it is not the same. I dream of self-hosting something from the fediverse but we‘re not exactly young anymore and I doubt my tribe will assemble.
AIM was a game-changer tho
It was.
What was better than e-mail? Instant messaging and AIM gave us that.
What was better than just instant messaging on your PC? Doing it on the go, on your phone. Great!
What was better than just instant messaging on the go and on PC? Being able to share content like video and pictures. Being able to make group chats and all.
Did it all without the need of social media.
But where else can I post a picture of my dinner and have millions of random strangers see it, thereby validating my personal fragile ego, before I even take the first bite?
There are subs on Lemmy where you can do that. :3
My preferred method of communication is a good ol’ phone call, or an SMS to say things like “be there in 5.” I don’t really get the hype with a slew of different text based messaging platforms.
I’m pretty close but I prefer signal just because SMS doesn’t do group messaging very well.
I was all about Signal until they dropped SMS support (totally understand why). None of the people in my life use signal except for the select few that enjoy their ahem extracurricular activities, so it’s kinda moot. And I just don’t have the energy to crusade for people to give a rats ass about their privacy. If I need to have a combo that requires a degree of discretion, I just do it in person.
i use the phone (ya know… for its original and intended purpose) for nearly all ‘not face to face’ communication. i don’t even have data on my mobile and sms is disabled at the carrier.
I hate that it is now Meta’s, but WhatsApp is a damn practical app. I wouldn’t share as much with my social circles if it wasn’t that practical compared to emails.
After being on fediverse it’s been great how refreshing and natural real decentralized social media is rather than the astroturfed, money and soul sucking dreck that is the big corporate socials are.
I almost wish there was a way that we could encourage growth and somehow let it scale to critical mass through grants and donations. But eventually if the fediverse got to that size then there would be grifters and corporations to ruin our fun.
Right! The fediverse is 100% a happier place. I love Lemmy and Firefish and Pixelfed. I’m deleting Facebook as soon as I collect enough email addresses.
This is the first I’ve heard of Firefish. What’s the advantage of using that instead of Mastodon?
Much more customizable and in my opinion far easier to navigate, and for some reason way cuter. You can also download the app right from Firefish when you sign up, there’s no dealing with the app store. I don’t quite know but it’s super friendly, all sorts of strangers greeted me and followed me when I joined, which definitely didn’t happen with Mastodon. I just find it strangely adorable and full of cool people and very positive, and for some reason I don’t find Mastodon that way.
Yeah, I mean, Lemmy and other fediverse instances need to play their cards carefully. If they are to be the future, then they need to not cave into what has plagued the other social media platforms we’ve long used before them.
Thats not how any of this works though. Corpos and governments are free to spin up their own instances of any federated service right now. It is the future, but the future is small bubbles that communicate with each other. So we don’t have to be on Meta’s instance, or Wal-Mart’s, or even the US’s national instance. We can stay where we are and keep it like this.
Some people really can’t grok this. I remember trying to explain Diaspora to a friend several years ago, and he said “Yeah, but if Diaspora got as big as Facebook, then they would turn evil, too!”
I had to patiently re-explain how instances work, but I still don’t think he got it. We’ve been living with big corporations running the Web for so long that some people can’t even imagine it being any different, and that’s scary.
lt was so easy for me, personally. I have to reassert my own biases everytime I talk to someone about federation because it just makes sense to me. Its equivalent to a bunch of email servers talking to each other. I can send an email to whoever I want, as long as my provider has not blocked them or I myself have not. Picking an instance is like picking gmail/outlook/yahoo.
How well does that explanation work? When a bunch of people were migrating to Mastodon last year, I remember some were still very confused, even after the comparison to email.
With enough time and enough pressure, I think that the vast majority of people would figure it out, though. They figured out email, and if you tried to explain that to anybody in 1990, they would’ve looked at you like you had an extra head.
Tbh its hit or miss, and I’m all out after that. I’m too deep in the tech sauce to return my brain to 0 and explain it from the outside. So when people don’t get it after that I often just leave them to their walled gardens.
Hmm to be fair with YouTube you don’t think this is now a repository of incredibly valuable resources? If YouTube went down and we lost all videos, we would be losing many important resources, from historical documentaries no longer easily found in media, to guides on woodworking.
It’s a bit scary. Once you remove the crap, it’s an incredibly valuable library resource and time capsule.
Absolutely. There’s nothing special about YouTube’s frontend - it can be replicated by someone with no coding experience, in an afternoon, for free, via a Softaculous module. On the inside, it’s the Library of Alexandria. And unfortunately, it’s owned by a company that understands that reality only as a means to a nefarious end, which is to develop a detailed psychological profile on its users that can be sold to advertisers.
My hope is that the cost of server storage and delivery will become inexpensive enough that YouTube can be forked and maintained by a nonprofit like the Wikimedia Foundation, who sees user generated content as a means to the enrichment of human experience. I’m not optimistic though, the history of the Library of Alexandria is instructive.
🤔 We all should build a nonprofit to foot the bill for new hardware to run a public Youtube fork, or PeerTube instance.
There is already something like this via the Wayback Machine (who indeed do copies of video media but more typically VHS and other things) and things like the Russian Library genesis, which is kept in torrent format.
The problem really is that storage for video media is insane compared to storage of document or even photo data.
If people here haven’t read into it, it’s incredibly interesting to look into the way the Internet Archive works. In particular you have to begin to concern yourselves with how long it takes for HDs, SSDs, and other media to degrade in time.
Yep, and add to that, 500 hours of video is uploaded to youtube every minute & they serve over 2.5 billion monthly users. The scale really is unfathomable.
Where can I read more about this? It sounds interesting.
This wasn’t what I read but this looks excellent.
https://archive.org/details/jonah-edwards-presentation
Another super interesting story is about Marion Stokes, who recorded around 71000 cassettes worth of television media from 1975 to 2000s. She houses them in 9 apartments. I need to watch the documentary about her. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes
I remember I started reading about about this when I wondered what kind of media is “safe” for storage. It sounds like a simple question but it’s not. Digital media, unlike print media, is so easy to lose.
Thanks for the links, I’ll check them out. Persistence of data seems like an interesting issue.
Video rippers are a thing. If there’s a video that you’d miss if it were gone, download it.
Sorry, I think you misunderstand that I’m talking about a large scale problem rather than a personal problem. Of course people can individually download videos to preserve.
Imagine losing YouTube’s videos next week. You would have effectively lost nearly two decades worth of media chronicling human and technological development (more if you take into account that YouTube has repositories of older media).
Someone described it like the Library Alexandria. In terms of density of information, I think the comparison is apt.
A good comparison that might be too old for some readers. Back in the 80s and 90s, the early internet was populated via usenet discussions. Google eventually bought this data and merged it into Google Groups. However Google Groups was disbanded. This meant that some archives can no longer be accessed because to do so requires some active component no longer in service. We have effectively lost gigantic chunks of early 90s internet history. A lot of this history was quite important in many facets of life.
I’m totally with you on that. That’s why I support the Internet Archive. But it’s important for people to realize that not everything on the Web is forever, so you should make backups. It is a large scale problem, but individuals can mitigate it. If there’s a copy of the file somewhere, then it can be preserved and archived.
Absolutely, I only had FB and I was late to the game on that as well compared to others. I gave it up completely in 2016 thankfully right before the crazy political crap took over and never looked back. I did reddit which was fine because I didn’t know anyone and it let me actually follow everything I loved no matter how small it was. Now I am here because of what they pulled. Wonder how longer this place will last…
I can only speak for myself but I’m not on Twitter because I deem it essential for my life and I can’t leave. The reason I’m not leaving is that these changes have had almost zero affect on me and quite frankly I just don’t care. Only change I had to make was to move from the Flamingo app to using it via browser which doesn’t really matter since I almost exclusively use it on my laptop anyways.
Welp, sounds like it’s time for you to grow up