How do you use social media?

[grovyle]

It's really interesting to read everyone's replies! I started multi-quoting and realised I wanted to quote everything hahaha

I do really want to stay away further from instagram and find other alternatives for archiving purposes, and it's been enriching to read what y'all use for that stuff! Also using social media in a social way (as in, speaking to actual people) has been increasingly more difficult for me in the past few years, and I haven't really made any new friends, so to hear about the ways in which you do has given me some new ideas :) Thank you for stopping by and sharing!

[Memory]

uh. I don't!
I mean, I'm on YouTube, but I'm not actively interacting with people on there. and I use Discord, which could almost count but I'm not sure it really does. way more like an MSN parallel than a Twitter parallel, even with their efforts leaning slightly more towards the latter these days.
it was very recently that I made the choice to delete my accounts that I had on the major social medias. I didn't use them much anyway, and social media is really boring unless you've got people to interact with... which, I never had. so I just let 'em all go. I even finally got rid of my Facebook account after all these years.

[Absentmind]

Messenger and Discord, Instagram to chat to friends and Instagram, Tiktok and Linkedin for business. When I made the separation between personal and business, things like Instagram and Tiktok became less fun and more "work" so I don't consume the same way you might flick endless through memes like you might on instagram and tiktok

[Memory]

I'm at that point where I'm not that interested in using social media frequently these days, especially when I have better things to do! Don't think I would abandon social media altogether since I use that to keep in touch with online friends, but I don't have the motivation and energy to scroll down for more posts and whatnot.
When it comes to Twitter, I barely check in and the only time I post is when I upload new art and covers, but even then I just don't feel like using Twitter anymore. My experiences with Twitter have not been very pleasant over the past couple of years, but I have been more strict in curating my feed by blocking and muting many things that are bound to piss me off.  Maybe the time will come when I will eventually deactivate my accounts or just leave them behind.
As for Tumblr, I don't really use it that much other than to look at pretty stuff then leave. Like with Twitter, I just post whatever I made on there. It's also where I host my UTAU site since I like to maintain a blog there. Personally, I enjoy using Tumblr more than Twitter, and I like to see what my friends are up to. Bonus points for being more easy to curate than whatever Twitter has going on.
...And there's TikTok. To be honest, I do use this app a lot, but good GOD I genuinely hate the drama that brews in there. I came there for the funny cat videos, not for the drama that'll piss me off...but that's algorithms to you I guess. As for Discord, I just use that as a messaging app to contact my close friends.
I've been thinking of looking at using RSS feeds to see what's up with the online communities I partake in. I love being in the communities I'm and I love contributing to them, but the fact that they are based on social media like Twitter, which often encourages a toxic landscape, makes me not want to interact with those spaces anymore and I would rather do my own thing if anything.
TL;DR: I still use social media but not that much these days (except for TikTok) since I'm just so disillusioned by the constant shit that goes on on those platforms. I'll probably turn to using sites like protopage to see what's new without the crap.

[wygolvillage]

I think one of the worst things about social media for me lately is how aware I am of how addictive it is and yet I can't seem to kick the habit. I just use Tumblr but it's so easy to find myself scrolling through it idly and not even really being "actively" thinking about it... A couple months back I uninstalled the app from my phone but ended up using it in the browser instead which is a little frustrating, so today I actually got a site blocker... I can only use Tumblr for 20 minutes before it's temporarily blocked, and I also set it to block the site after 9 PM which I hope will help me be more considerate of how I use my time and why. I'm planning to implement something like that on my PC as well.

I hope at some point I'll be at the point where I can comfortably stop using Tumblr but Discord is a different story, it feels like most of my talking and communication is on there. I turned off sound and vibration for my notifications because I noticed I was getting seriously pavlov'd by them, feeling my phone vibrate in my purse or whatever. I don't think I want to quit Discord necessarily (if only out of necessity) but I do want a healthier relationship to how I use it.

So hopefully these steps will help me distance from it a bit, especially because every social media platform feels like a sinking ship nowadays.

[grovyle]

so today I actually got a site blocker... I can only use Tumblr for 20 minutes before it's temporarily blocked, and I also set it to block the site after 9 PM

This sounds really useful!! Mind sharing how you did it? Was it through an app, a browser extension, or some other way? The app-blocking thing that comes on my phone only lets me set a max time of use per day, not per session. And I also have it set to block everything after 9 PM until next morning, I find that extremely helpful

[wygolvillage]

This sounds really useful!! Mind sharing how you did it? Was it through an app, a browser extension, or some other way? The app-blocking thing that comes on my phone only lets me set a max time of use per day, not per session. And I also have it set to block everything after 9 PM until next morning, I find that extremely helpful

It was through an app, I tried a few different ones before I settled on one that had the right settings I wanted. I think it's just called "Block" lol.

[shevek]

I can personally recommend the Cold Turkey Blocker. Lets you block websites, whitelist sites or parts of websites (so for example, you can block all Wikipedia except 1 site, or all of Reddit except that one sub, etc.), and can also block applications via exe.
You can set different methods; a blanket ban, or blocking from a start time to end time, x minutes a day you can use up like a flatrate, or a pomodoro timer where it is unblocked every x minutes for y minutes.
To prevent you from simply unlocking the blocks, you can set several deterrents too; my favorite one is the random letters. You can set how many characters of random letters you have to enter before you can unlock your block, and it shows you how long that would take on average.
Additionally, you can set it so it force logs you out, or force shutdowns your computer at a specific time; this is called Frozen Turkey.
There are also protections against deinstalling the blocker while you have blocks active, but if you really really need to delete the thing and have access, the developer will gladly help you.

I've been using the pro version for years (no subscription; one time purchase!), but the free tier already does what most people need. The developer behind it is 1 person but despite it all, Felix has always answered me quickly with amazing tech support over the years; recently he was able to help me with an issue where Cold Turkey Blocker force closed my Brackets Live Preview all the time.
The product code you get can be used on as many devices as you want.

___
Maybe I should also answer the thread I technically have a tumblr still, but it is mainly around to archive a password protected blog I still wanna incorporate parts of in my smolpub, and the chats with my girlfriend that happened on there.
I basically never log in anymore, but I think I will soon to change my pinned post.

I have no other social accounts aside from the forum account.. except if you count Steam or Spotify, but I don't use the social components there much. I still have Discord for ease of use, and recently made Matrix. Came in handy when Discord was down a while ago.
I am otherwise a lurker. I used to lurk Reddit via Libreddit a bit on the front page or the Steamdeck sub, but with everything that's been going down, I have ceased to use it. Now I lurk on HackerNews, Tildes and Kbin with no account. Since the content on there often more high quality (longform, or more difficult and technical topics and insights) as well as simply not the huge volume other social media sites have, it's enough to check it like twice a day for 10 mins or so. Smaller communities and the things they produce are naturally limiting the users in regards to overconsumption, in my experience.

In my teens and early 20s I was on a lot of social media and very very active, basically it was the only thing I had going on.
What I wanted out of the platforms, and the platforms itself, simply changed, as did I. I prefer slower, deeper, longer communication now, with the same known people over the months, and I prefer a low stakes environment where mistakes are not clowned on with snappy one liners to screenshot and gain likes on for clout. I prefer spaces that can teach me stuff. And I prefer text over images and video, pages over infinite scroll.

[elliebees]

This was a super interesting thread to read the different ways people are using social media 

I use a couple of the big sites, mainly Facebook and Tumblr. Facebook I use Messenger to chat with friends (as well as Discord) although I'm trying to convince some friends to get on Escargot. I also use Facebook for Marketplace and my local Buy Nothing group, as well as keeping up with updates at my volunteer/work-place. I also make sporadic jokey/funny posts on there for my friends, as its a good way to do that without it being public like on Tumblr or Twitter.

I've been on Tumblr continuously since 2011 and have about 15 different side blogs on there, which sounds like (and is !) quite a lot, but I mainly use it as a kind of scrapbooking/archive site, and I very rarely if ever actually interact with anyone on there. It's probably the one site I'd like to try using a bit less as even though I don't really treat it as 'social' media, I do find myself scrolling on there a lot (on my computer with infinite scroll turned off, not on mobile). I'm quite attached to the site as it has quite a unique and insular little culture on there and I've been a part of it for over 10 years !

I technically have a Twitter but I don't really go on there much. Occasionally I'll open it to see what people are up to, which is inevitably arguing about things that don't matter, so I just close the tab and do something more interesting to me.

One extension/add-on I can recommend is called Facebook News Feed Eradicator. You can still visit Facebook if you'd like to do something in particular or make a post, but it makes the default home page news feed invisible so you can't get stuck in that endless scroll. 

[Badgersaurus]

I used to have an Instagram that I used quite heavily but I BALEETED! it around this time last year. Never felt better!
Other than that I do use Discord to talk with friends and a couple semi-public servers. I also have Steam and Spotify if you count those but really they're storefronts more than anything, so I don't.
Oh yeah and Youtube but I mostly watch it logged-out on a TV anyway and I've never uploaded anything there.

I tried out Mastodon yesterday and was reminded that, aside from the usual stuff about privacy that gets bandied around here, the other big reason I left Instagram and never looked back was that the overall culture of the place is ridiculously annoying to me. Everything has to be boiled down into snappy one-liners and the design of these sites is actively opposed to writing any more than that while discussing a complex topic (let alone a simple and irrelevant one, like I usually focus on), and to back-and-forth conversations. Also, the sheer amount of posts about current events bothers me too. If I want to read about the news I like to do it through one of the half-dozen newspapers I have delivered to my RSS feed hot off the presses every morning, not through a convoluted telephone-game of 500-character posts from random people.

(The link up there goes to a Homestar Runner cartoon, I don't know if we have to explain links in this forum to let them stay up or not. Sorry if we do!!)

[humdrum-oracle]

In Jan. of this year, I was doing the Artist's Way (a 12-week program to "unlock your inner artist"). One of the tasks of the week was a media blackout, no internet, no socials, no reading even. I was scared, but it was a blast. My wife (who joined me) and I did a ton of fun things we wouldn't have otherwise done. Life went on as normal, but we got interested in what we were missing out on when socials and techy distractions took up so much of our down time (which is a lot of mins/hours, we found).

Beginning of June, we quit all socials. Uninstalled, deleted accounts. Writing letters and emails and making phone calls instead. Its sweet. When we started I immediately was like, "I'M GONNA START A BLOG!". So I looked for free website stuff, found Neocities, and then found all you folks doing the same damn thing. Pretty cool.

So no social media in the usual sense. More like "slow social media." Web surfing, forums, comment boxes. I wasn't big on socials anyway, rarely posted and just watched Instagram stories on the potty or whatever. Nothing to miss. This is much more fun, deliberate, and engaging.

[Swiftpaw]

It's a bit weird thanks to this body being shared between multiple people for its entire life. As a collective the only social media we use together are forums that don't allow multi-accounting, Tumblr which we've used since 2012, and InsaneJournal which we're still used to. Beyond that we let ourselves have free reign of a website doesn't have a policy against multi-accounting.

We've left a couple dead accounts as we've learned more about ourselves and moved on, but steadily we're getting more consistent with what we want to be online. We probably should go through and delete old socials but we can't remember most of them.

For me personally whenever I use the body I go between MelonLand, Xanje, and Discord. Xanje is my favorite website though a bit obscure and not always the most active. Most communities I'm interested in are unfortunately on Discord.

I've tried Mastodon, but the Twitter-format doesn't do it for me because I like longer form discussions like what's done on forums. I loved the format of Spacehey but it got hard to use after TikTok teens started to flock to it.

[sokil]

as far as standard social media goes, i mostly only use discord and tumblr; i still have a twitter account that i use to check news (i limit myself to about an hour a day on there) and instagram for keeping up with some friends abroad. i was never really a fan of facebook or tiktok, and i basically stopped browsing reddit after they killed off third-party apps.

i've been replacinig twitter with mastodon and reddit with lemmy, and i like both of them a lot more. they're much more peaceful alternatives. i don't check them super often - a couple times a day at most.
tumblr i've had for about a decade and it's just a space where i can post about my interests; i also have a lot of cool resources/guides/masterposts saved to my likes. i may go back to sharing my art on tumblr if i ever get back into an art groove. discord is where i chat with most of my friends.

[shevek]

I can personally recommend the Cold Turkey Blocker.

As a small update for anyone who might need it, I've been trying out one sec (an app for iPhone and Android) today because one of the other apps I use mentions it in their settings because the devs are friends. I am not sure if anyone mentioned one sec here in this forum already, I thought so but I can't find it in the search

I've only ever had Forest for blocking the entire phone for studying durations, but one sec offers a bit more. It basically gets between you and the app or website you try to open (you can set which ones, of course) and you can set what it does then; its main focus is giving you a bit of time to consider if you really wanna do this or did it out of reflex, just a few seconds.
Either just a blank screen waiting it out, or telling you to take a deep breath, tilting your phone around three times, following a dot on the screen; stuff like that.
You can also set it to show custom made alternatives you should do instead, like a reminder to paint instead, or meditate, or do chores.. whatever you entered, basically. It can also ask you why you did it (boredom, stress, anxiety..) or offer you to journal instead in the mornings or evenings.
Lots of that can be customized and turned off or on at will. Reinterventions and reminders to not get lost/not doomscroll can be enabled too.

So if that's something anyone here might need for their social media use on the phone, there you are (edit: why did I write that? *here you go!). While there are subscription options, you can also use it for free (no signup) or do a lifetime purchase, which is neat. I always hate when apps make you sign up or want you to enter a 7 day trial before charging, before you can even see the content of the app.

[wygolvillage]

One Sec sounds brilliant tbh!!

I'm currently taking a two day break from Tumblr (partly because I saw someone trying to organize a log off event and... while I don't think it'll change anything about the site I did think it was a good opportunity to unplug a little) and it's been... pretty peaceful. And kind of nice, not constantly being like "ough i need to look at my notifications". Which makes me more confident about eventually quitting Tumblr... We Shall See