- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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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“no one is posting” posted by a bot and commented by AutoTL;DR bot !
dead internet, here we go!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyMNIFZTQkg
in the end it will just be bots talking to bots all the way down
Exactly the point.
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.
But why would you go to a centralized platform for your website?
You can do that too btw, with services like Wix or Squarespace, or specialized services for various niches, like Flickr or 500px if you’re a photographer etc.
You can also put together a website in an editor and host it on a generic service where you control your domain and everything.
How would you define and market a service like MySpace nowadays?
How would you define and market a service like MySpace nowadays?
A quick and easy landing page for something with the ability to engage and interact socially over all of the platforms of the fediverse built right in.
It doesn’t have to be centralised at all … and I’m talking about what features are offered by platforms/software that are compatible with the fediverse such that connecting across it can be baked in. All of the specialised services are the sorts of things I’m talking about in terms of what’s not on or easily possible (right now) on the fediverse, where the advantage of bringing such things to the fediverse is the possibility of easily reaching a wide audience while still owning your content and platform.
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
Try Nostr, it is all the Fediverse wants to be but better
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.
but people who for example were active on Facebook 10 years ago still exist,
What happens when they die?
Posting mostly drops to zero. Sometimes a family member will post on their account.
Death of the account holder has not been well managed.Edit: what happens to the account after the person dies is not well managed.
So are you suggesting that posts are down because the people that were making them are dying off? I have my doubts about that one.
Facebook’s demographic isn’t skewed enough towards old people and it hasn’t existed for long enough for that to be a significant effect.
I mean, it isn’t as if octogenarians and septagenarians were making the bulk of Facebook posts 10 years ago, is it? The bulk of the people on Facebook are currently in the 18-44 range, and the 65+ group is actually a very small fraction. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/376128/facebook-global-user-age-distribution/
I would also like to remind you that Facebook started as a way to connect college kids in 2005. Those kids are now in their 30s or early 40s and very much still around. They’ve just given up on Facebook.
So I was one of those back in 06 and I’m in my mid to late 30s now.
I don’t use Facebook anymore and stopped using Facebook a decade ago because of all the timeline changes.
My guess is they’ve continued to make the timeline stuff worse and worse and that’s why people stop posting cause you don’t actually see each others posts half the time it’s filled with random suggested shit.
You’re talking about people in their 30s and 40s. Death won’t be much of an issue for a few decades.
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.
Right! All good!
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.
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
Nostr
That one is common as people using Lemmy it seems.
Translation: more and more people overcome their social media addiction and adapt a healthy usage pattern.
That’s not really what the article says though. Sounds like people are just doomscrolling curated content instead of creating content themselves.
Yeah. Doomscrolling curated content is a healthy usage pattern. Right? Right?!?
So this entire article is based on a single person’s anecdotal experience, other than this bit:
Bruening isn’t alone. Despite the efforts of big incumbents and buzzy new apps, the old ways of posting are gone, and people don’t want to go back. Even Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, admitted that users have moved on to direct messages, closed communities, and group chats.
This links to another article from the same site, and the only quote I can find related to any of this is this one:
DMs are also crucial for younger users. “If you look at how teens spend their time on Instagram, they spend more time in DMs than they do in stories, and they spend more time in stories than they do in feed,”
This Instagram head guy says nothing about how “nobody posts on social media anymore”, just that teens spend more time in DMs and stories than in the feed. This just in, kids do things differently than previous generations! Mind blown, A fucking plus journalism right there. You’d think you’d be able to properly quote your own god damn article properly lol.
Honestly I don’t even give a shit about this content, I’m just so sick of biased opinion articles based on the writer’s feelings at the time filling my feed like they’ve uncovered something revolutionary. Stop giving these lazy clickbait news sites your views and fix the dumb bot that keeps posting this bullshit.
Welcome to modern “journalism”.
I really hate this kind of journalism. I have a friend who is at the top of this food chain: lifestyle section of the NYT. He is always posting weird calls for help to Facebook. “Is your dog experiencing flatulence caused by CBD supplements you bought online? I want to talk to you about an upcoming article.”
It’s like the article is written before the sources are found. Totally stupid and backward. An endless shitpile of made up articles on topics that make elderly white people feel like they are tapped into “trends.”
I’m 30 and as far as I remember everything always was “in the DMs” for all the different social circles I’ve had. Public posts were always a rare thing for special events or so. MSN, ICQ, Skype, WhatsApp, Discord,…
Megalomaniac billionaires ruined social media in their effort to control the narrative and ruin privacy. It was a neat idea when it was just a way to keep up with people you were interested in.
Well people turning out to be mostly idiots didn’t help
“No one is posting on social media anymore”
Posted by L4sBot…
It’s not just you
Good bot
Wait, what the heck is BeReal? I’ve never heard of it before?
Does that mean I’m old now?
At the start of each school year some niche social media gains popularity, simply because each year wants something new and “untainted”. Last year BeReal benefitted from this. It likely won’t survive for long as they’re losing users now
It reminds me of SnapChat back in the day when every other social network started copying their features. TikTok has “TikTok Now” now which is what BeReal was.
Even us old people should know that he’s the guy from Cypress Hill
Took you a while, but yes.
It’s a new Chaturbate.
I literally had the same reaction lol
Social media is dead
Finally, some good news.
Parasocial or antisocial media would fit the function of these platforms better.
Advertisement Delivery Network
I signed up for Facebook for the first time ever, to comment on a local page about a local issue, and was first banned by Facebook for nothing in particular. Had to put in a phone number to reactivate. Also found I wasn’t able to post if I included a link, a link to a government website, but I guess that’s a very basic spam filter for new accounts. Then made some comments back and forth with no one really talking to me. Then about a week later with no activity, my account had been banned again, and now Facebook wants a photo. I don’t even have photos online, and I don’t see how they could use that to verify my identity, so that’s where I stopped.
It’s standard practice for Facebook and it’s been for several years now. It’s simultaneously a way to combat bots and a way to start collecting data about you in case you turn out to be a juicy real human. They want your pic and your contacts so they can start establishing your real identity and recognize you in pictures posted by others. If you don’t help them do that you’re worthless to them so they block you.
My mum was briefly banned on FB the other day and she’s the most inoffensive person on the planet. This is an account that’s maybe a decade old. They reinstated her account after she appealed so something seems broken with their banning system.
This is a serious problem I think isn’t actually talked about enough. There is a ‘ring of trust’ on most social media now that in my opinion goes far too far; if you don’t have enough algorithmically determined ‘trust,’ you’ll be booted off without a way to appeal. Reddit shadowbans the vast majority of new accounts, but hasn’t been able to cut down on spambots; Facebook by its nature needs ridiculous amounts of personal information but even then doesn’t actually use it to assign more trust since bot-owners can supply generated information that’s equally as valid; really all social media, especially if you do anything at all to protect your privacy, assumes you’re a spambot first, then only lets you participate after you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt you might be a human. I understand we’re already half way into developing a dead internet, but there’s no reason we need to go full throttle into it by limiting actual humans from signing up past a certain point in a product’s lifespan.
Removed by mod
You have a great way with words
My Fantasy and SF book lovers goup on Facebook has more posts per day than I can read and gets new members every day. My music groups on Facebook have even more posts and content. Linkedin has more and more social posts (not a good thing, but hardly on the decline)
Article is clearly written by someone with no initiatve or personality or insight.
Bruh they used “BeReal” as if it belonged in the same conversation as Instagram, and Meta. That alone puts them way out there.
Good point!
Linkedin has more and more social posts (not a good thing,
True that. I hate every part of LinkedIn that is chat or posting. Resumés, job openings, private chat, fuck everything else.
LinkedIn might have one of the worst cultures of any social media, with all that gross performative grindset stuff.
Facts! I’d rather hang around 4chan at least they are somewhat entertaining. LI are sociopaths in a giant circle jerk for validation and clout.
Now I understand why my narcissist brother was always on LI
LinkedIn might have one of the worst cultures of any social media, with all that gross performative grindset stuff.
“He’s on LinkedIn, Lemon. He might as well be dead.”
- Jack, 30 Rock
Maybe because people write everything like cringy edgelords when in reality, it’s like hey I got laid off or hired. But it spills out like a life altering manifesto for the that’s so transparently about clout and validation. Hard pass.
Wtf is bereal ? Lol
My Zoomer sister-in-law told me about it. It’s an app that will randomly prompt everyone to take a picture using both the front and back cameras and you have a limited amount of time to do it. The idea being that because it’s random you can’t really prepare anything beforehand so the content is more “real” and everyone can see what they all do day to day
I’m a fan of the reality part but not so much a fan of allowing your life to be timed by a social media company
That is the zoomerest shit that ever zoomed.
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Not to mention most pictures end up being the same. Everyone sitting at their desks or pictures of their dogs.
With the right algorithm (upvotes and downvotes, top, hot), the majority of posts you would see would be real and also interesting. I guess it would also need to be less exclusive by default, so that the highest rated posts are always the most interesting ones.
Asking for a friend, what is there to prevent wanna-be influencers getting some shots set up, for quick selection of a paired set and uploading that? Bereal, by it’s very name, is a challenge to game the app.
As far as I know, it only uses the camera, and doesn't use stored photos. Idk, I've never downloaded it but that's my guess
Never heard of it either, it wouldn’t surprise me if this is some kind of PR for it!
Same - but after diggin’ a little i found that there’s already a new app called beFake. With beReal you have to take a photo when prompted - it takes 2 photos - back and front - so people can see you and what you are looking at. Filters are now allowed.
I think the point of this app, is to show yourself as you are in the location you happen to be in that moment, unfiltered
If you don’t take the pics when prompted, you loose points, credit or karma ( don’t know what they call their virtual point system )
beFake ist the opposite, the logic is the same - yo get prompted to take the pics - but here you have an AI Image generator, to which you have to tell in what fake world you want to be portrayed in and you can ( or must ) filter yourself to the max lol
It kinda had a small viral moment in my social circles about half a year ago or so…
So, we need MySpace. A fedispace.
OurSpace
🐰
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-> Nostr
My time capsule of cringe will remain closed, thank you very much.
Don’t know if this is sarcasm, but I happen to agree to some extent.
I’m 100% serious. Friend based, no feed, group chat, “homepage” style profiles with tastefully-disgusting design. “Top 10” friends (I want that drama lol).
Nice! Meanwhile I’m in another thread where someone is telling me I’m backward thinking that some might want something remotely like myspace back.
Then this product isn’t for them, and I hope they stay away.
Is there an ActivityPub version of Facebook or Instagram?
Frendica and Pixelfed.
Pixelfed?
That’s basically Friendica imo
Social media is dead. Long live decentralize social media!
I quit looking at Facebook so, so long ago and stopped posting anything myself well before I stopped visiting. In my experience the only people still posting are people I didn’t want to see anything from or just sponsored content, ads and people pushing their businesses. Everything’s so monetized, curated and awful.
