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Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
Smorty [she/her] @lemmy.blahaj.zone

Is Lemmy your "main social media app"? If not, which one is it?

I have fully transitioned to using Lemmy and Mastodon right when third party apps weren't allowed on Spez's place anymore, so I don't know how it is over there anymore.

What do you use? Are you still switching between the two, essentially dualbooting?

What other social media do you use? How do you feel about Fediverse social media platforms in general?

(I'm sorry if I'm the 100th person to ask this on here...)

146 comments

  • yeah i basically only use lemmy and watch youtube videos, or i pirate media, play games with friends, or do stupid stuff with my computer that i shouldnt be allowed to do

  • Lemmy is my main social media account. I also switched from Reddit when Spez killed third party apps, and I won't go back. I use Sync for Lemmy on my phone and tablet. I paid for the lifetime Ultra account, because that's how much of a "fuck you" I wanted to give Spez. I'll gladly pay the $100 for an alternative ad-free app than use Reddit's free app.

    I also use Imgur, although it's been suffering from enshittification ever since Sarah and the team sold it. I can't even save a post without getting a pop-up asking to subscribe to the user or follow similar content tags. Or downvote without being asked if I want to block the user or related tags. Just let me do the thing and move on! Stop trying to customize my experience! I'm still able to block their ads, thanks to my VPN service, but they built a dedicated ad space at the bottom of the app that I can't make go away. So a section of the bottom of my Imgur screen is unusable black space. I miss being able to use my full screen to browse images.

    I still have Facebook, but only because everyone I know from my childhood until now is there and it's my main way of staying in touch with people. If I dump Facebook, I'll have practically no one left in my life, except for my sister, wife, and maybe two friends. If I need social engagement concerning something going on in my life, I'll post it there. But I don't use it much.

    I have LinkedIn and spent years keeping my profile up to date and super detailed, expecting to need some good references and a solid history of experience and accomplishments. But then I retired at 38 years old and found out I don't need to work anymore, so it's just been collecting dust for the last 2 years now. I still get the occasional request to connect from someone offering to help me find a job (I'm a veteran), but I don't need their assistance. I'm quite happy being retired young.

    I have a Discord server I built for my closest friends to stay in touch, but only 2 people regularly interact on it. I subscribed to maybe 30+ other random servers, but I mute pretty much all of them so I'm not inundated with Discord notifications all the time.

    I have Twitch, but mostly used it to stream the games I'm playing when I'm bored. I'm happy if I get 1 or 2 views. I do it just for the fun of it, not to build a following or anything.

    I have NextDoor, but there are thousands of people in my town who use it regularly, so it's hard to stay in touch with my "neighbors." I mostly ignore it unless I'm trying to find suggestions for something local.

    I made a Bluesky account last year; got an invite from a friend before it opened up to everyone. But I hardly ever used Twitter in the past. I always felt like it was pointless unless you were a celebrity with tons of followers. So I'm having trouble thinking of ways to use Bluesky now.

    I have Instagram, but only because Facebook merged my account with Instagram when they bought it. I've never used it, not even to browse others' content there.

    I made a Snapchat account in high school, but never used it. That was over 20 years ago. Back then, Snapchat was just used to share selfies, and I didn't like taking selfies so I had no use for it. Is Snapchat still a thing?

    I had a MySpace account when I was a teenager, but I guess the site got sold sometime in the past decade or two. I kinda forgot about it, and the last time I went to check it out, it was a totally different site and didn't recognize my login anymore.

    I made an account on Pixelfed last year to share pictures, but I don't really have anything to share right now. I only remembered I had the account because I just now found their app in my phone.

    I use Patreon, mostly just to follow a few people I know and support them.

    I worked as an IT guy in the military, and we were explicitly banned from using TikTok when it became popular, because it was a Chinese spyware program and they didn't want it stealing data on US military members. When you installed it, we found that it embedded itself in your phone in a way that was extremely difficult to fully remove, then granted itself full access to your phone and started trickling your data to Chinese servers. It was a massive security vulnerability, which is why President Biden pushed to block TikTok from the US. But the app was so popular, he got a lot of pushback and it never got blocked. It's still wildly popular, but I'll never touch that program.

  • I use Lemmy almost exclusively. Mastodon and Twitter never appealed to me, as I simply don’t see the point. Unless you use it for receiving info from local authorities and such.

    I do still use Facebook for all the local and niche communities, which you can’t find anywhere else. I wish Mobilizon was more equal to Facebook Groups and had an actual mobile app.

  • My only use for Reddit now is reading r/hfy stories, though I'm doing that through a local Redlib instance, hoping that those glitter sniffers don't lock website content behind accounts like almost every other social medium does (but we all know that if something can get worse to make more money, it WILL get worse to make more money).

    • It's very sad to see general social media platforms go that route. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are unusable without an account.

  • Lemmy is my main one, yes. I browse Pinterest every now and then, though I'm not sure how many would consider it social media in the traditional sense.

    • I feel like that would compare two very different types of social media:

      • Consumption oriented: Platforms which mainly tailor to consumers, like Tiktok, Pinterest, Instagram and Youtube.
      • Collaboration oriented: Platforms where engagement with the content and discussions are encouraged, like Lemmy and Mostodon and their proprietary equivalents.

  • I primarily use Lemmy. It's the only place to really find intelligent conversation. I hop over to reddit on occasion for topics that just aren't here yet. But almost every comment thread is either full of bots or those with little reading comprehension.

  • I went full Lemmy for a while but have to admit I'm reading reddit again, but without their dumb app. Just the web browser.

    Looking through a few subreddits, see what's new for five minutes. I don't post anymore, don't have an account.

  • Lemmy and youtube are my mains. Which is used more really depends on my mood and how active is lemmy that day.

  • Lemmy and Mastodon as well for me. With a little bit of discord and matrix for my projects' realtime chat

  • It is for me, I use an account on Lemmy.ml for general browsing (and correcting misconceptions about Marxism, if I'm being honest), and a Hexbear.net account I pretty much only browse locally if I just want to relax and not have to worry about getting into an argument.

  • Mostly Lemmy. Mastodon sometimes – I have to spend more time there muting RSS bot accounts to find stuff of my interest.

    Dipping my toes into Bluesky as well. So far it's been good – very polished experience.

    I also lurk quite a bit on Tildes.net.

  • I only use Lemmy. Never had accounts on any of the other social media platforms apart from Facebook more than a decade ago. I've been checking reddit, reluctantly, here and there recently to have something to post to my communities. Apart from that, it's been Lemmy only since the exodus

    • Very interesting. I do still see many posts originating from Reddit around here, presumably exactly because of that reason.

      But I must tell you, making your own funis and ideas and putting them onto Lemmy feels really great.
      It feels like an invitation to discuss the topic with others and come up with new ideas, instead of feeding other peoples algorithms and keep them hooked on the site.

      It feels much more like interacting with real actual people, even if there are less on here.

      • I hear you. The thing is, the communities I mod are quite niche (in relation to Lemmy's population, that is) and apart from the corresponding subreddits I used to lurk on for years, I'm not really exposed to anything new that would prompt me to make new discussion posts and memes. I've watched all video essays there are about the games, I played through all of them repeatedly, new content is not on the horizon for any one of them. The best thing about them is the discussion in the community which has been missing ever since I created the communities in the first place.

        Believe me: I've tried. But keeping three separate communities alive all on your own without community members ever feeling the need to contribute gets exhausting and doesn't feel worthwhile. So making my own content, which I do when I have a cool idea, feels like more of a loss when the engagement is just as high, sometimes lower, as with content off reddit.

        Lurkers will be lurking, I guess

  • It is, I don't go on Reddit anymore, it's insanely toxic. I've gotten all I could've gotten from there anyway. I only use Lemmy nowadays.

  • "Dualbooting" is a nice analogy, haha. No, I switched completely over from the previous main ones: No Reddit and no Twitter. But I still use dedicated forums for specific topics/software, such as a Romhacking (retro game modding) community or RetroArch forum. Unfortunately not everyone is on Lemmy (or Mastodon, but I stopped using Mastodon too). So for me it is Lemmy/Beehaw and a few standalone forums.

    Wait I also started using Discord from time to time, but dislike this as a main application. There is an alternative called "Matrix", which is similar to what Lemmy and Mastodon are respective to their technology. But its not that widespread, so stopped using it too. Maybe will comeback to it. I know there is BlueSky, which is a main competitor to Mastodon. Just didn't have enough interested into it yet, as there is Mastodon already.

    • Reddit <> Lemmy and Kbin
    • Twitter <> Mastodon
    • Discord <> Matrix

    (I’m sorry if I’m the 100th person to ask this on here…)

    Fine with me, as I didn't saw any of the 99th person asking this before.

    • I feel that Matrix and Lemmy go really nicely together. There are already some integrations, which let you link from your Lemmy to your Matrix account.
      It's nice that Lemmy directly tells you "These messages are not secure" and recommends Matrix.
      If this were driven by a cooperation, they would say "blablabla it's so secure you can trust us with your data blablabla" but no! This is the fediverse, where people can do what they want to!

      Over here, they are self-aware and link to Matrix, which is so refreshing. This kind of open collaboration between projects is beautiful I think.

      Also yeah, Mastodon feels weirdly... empty? I use it sometimes and despite it's apparently larger userbase, I cannot seem to find a good starting point.
      Then again, I also didn't quite understand Twitter, so maybe that's it.

      • I think Mastodon is heavily "following" based. I mean you need to find people to follow. I think you can even follow hashtags, which is pretty neat. So lookup if your favorite content creators may have a Mastodon account and follow them. And make sure to enable or disable the "world" view and not just looking at your own feed, if you don't have much yet. Just some random thoughts. If you are already familiar with this, then apology.

        As for the Matrix collaboration, I didn't think about this working between Lemmy and Matrix. But it make sense. Because there is also some sort of "bridge" setup you can do between Matrix to Discord. I'm not much familiar with that, just read about it.

        All of this is neat. But its biggest strength is also its biggest weakness: Being not centralized. It's kinda like on Linux (and I don't mean the distributions only). I just wish the entire Fediverse would already cooperate. The lack of a centralized place that has all instances and technologies that are based on Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, video platforms and so on) is a huge missed oppurnity.

        Even Instagram, a technology not even based on Mastodon or Fediverse, can cooperate with Mastodon. I never used Instagram, so not sure how this looks in reality. But I thought its worth mentioning here.

  • I use rdx.overdevs.com to read reddit still as it has a lot more fashion, art and vegan content than here, but the only places I interact online in that way anymore are the Fediverse and Fragrantica, but the latter only really for perfume related stuff.

  • I am so sorry, but several of my favorite journalists are still on Twitter.

  • I use Lemmy and Mastodon about equally. I find I like Lemmy for discussions, while Mastodon is good for news just because there are a lot more users overall, and you can follow different news feeds on it.

  • I'm on Lemmy essentially 99% of the time. When I'm on Reddit it's because of niche hobbies that have more presence there. It's very rare. (Or search index results.)

    I never use Mastodon. I was only on Twitter for very niche and interactive hobbies that do not have enough people to engage with on Mastodon. I mostly use BlueSky now but still use Twitter on occasion. It's like 50/50 at the moment, but that's a lot considering my BlueSky account is only like two weeks old.

    Lemmy has enough content to keep me entertained for general browsing and most of my hobbies.

  • Yes. For over a year, from Reddit. Although I like Bluesky more than I expected. Also Discuit is awesome.

146 comments