what social medias do you consider to be "usable"?

[loren]

What I meant was that I couldnt access the eternal-september website.

i think the link should be https://www.eternal-september.org/ ! gotta get that www in there

[DiffydaDude]

i think the link should be https://www.eternal-september.org/ ! gotta get that www in there

Thank you very much, now I can access the site. Just a few more questions though; how  do you use usenet? do you just access it through the website, or do you need a usenet client after making an account?

[starbreaker]

My fault. They insist on the www subdomain. Try https://www.eternal-september.org/

Thank you very much, now I can access the site. Just a few more questions though; how  do you use usenet? do you just access it through the website, or do you need a usenet client after making an account?

You need a client after making an account. If you use Mozilla Thunderbird for mail, you can also use it for USENET. You'd just click "followup" instead of "reply" when commenting on a post. And make sure you're set up to send plain text, not HTML.

[KatKing]

i dont really consider discord social media. I just use it to talk with my friend group, and follow a couple indie game discords like clangen. but id much rather use a forum than discord for that. i wish more people would start a forum rather than a discord for hobbies and stuff. discord isnt a great place for community and conversation, oddly enough. it is really good for having a space to talk with a group of freinds though i like it for that

i actually liked instagram alot because it was the best way to follow artists. unlike twitter or tumblr, you can see all their art in one easily accessable spot. i also really like stories. i dont like how they added reals though, and its pointless scrolling through your feed now a days. you see 2 posts from people you follow and then random veiw bait posts.

i dont use instagram at all really anymore, not seeing posts from artists i follow was kinda the last straw. but i liked it a few years ago. i can see why people wouldnt like instagram and find it unhealthy though, its really easy to present a manufactured version of your life on there. but since i just veiwed art, it never effected me.

i didnt grow up on tumblr, and i think its kind of hard for outsiders to get into it. i keep trying to use it more, but its kinda hard to find people to follow, and i feel like i keep getting shown the same posts over and over. espically if its getting circulated alot. there have been times ive seen the same piece of art 7 times in a row. its to the point i start getting annoyed by fandoms i like lol. also i think the algorithm is kinda weird? like i will follow alot of accounts from fandom A, and a few weeks pass. then i might follow alot of artists for fandom B, and im suddenly only getting shown fandom B content. but i like tumblr as a concept

[Swiftpaw]

Discord is a social media and I mostly use it because that's where a lot of online communities are, but if it had better alternatives I wouldn't use it. I think the only usable social media for me are forums.

I did grow up on Tumblr and for me it's still also a social media I'd consider usable, but I only use my system account on it, I don't have one myself.

[Bede]

While I wouldn't consider Discord social media, I would consider it usable. I also consider tumblr quite usable at the moment (as much as the staff is trying their damndest to make it not...), and, if we're gonna count Neocities as social media due to its following and dashboard function, that as well. I also enjoy Artfol as a type of art-related social media.

[larvapuppy]

Social medias I still reluctantly use: Facebook and Instagram.
I only consider these to be somewhat usable because I have a ton of blockers for ads, trackers, and the like. Also, I only use them for specific things. Facebook is for messaging my fiance, my mother, and one of my school friends, because I don't have a cell phone so I can't text them. I also use it to check the marketplace, but I never post anything.
Instagram is for keeping in touch with my online buddies on there who don't have Discord.
If I could do these things without having an account on these platforms, I gladly would...  Edit: Facebook and Instagram are way more annoying to use on mobile, and I find myself occasionally getting sucked into watching their reels. Watching reels is such a waste of time, and feels really bad.

Social medias I still use but am mostly ok with: Tumblr, Toyhouse, and Discord if that counts.
Tumblr is actually pretty fun. I follow a lot of blogs that post web graphics, so it's helped me grow my collection. I also like using my blog to save cool art or other pictures. I'm no longer social on there because all the people I used to talk to moved to Twitter years ago. The big downside of Tumblr is that they're trying to Twitterify right now, but I have a bunch of extensions installed to counteract this.
As for Toyhouse, it's not one of these huge corporate social platforms, so I don't mind it at all.
Discord... well, it's not the best for privacy, but my friends are on there, and it's fun. My main complaint is that they're always trying to get me to buy their premium membership.

[Tiffany]

I think usable is a stretch for even some of the social media I currently use. Facebook Groups is not great to navigate especially after the update they did a year ago, but that is where a lot of my fandoms groups are at. Twitter is where other fandom groups are at & I'm not going to rehash those issues. Reddit had other groups and communities but is the search not great, and their admins also not great. Instagram has a lot a few communities there, but it's clustery, not fun to navigate, etc. I think what sucks is all these groups and communities are all on different social media when I would prefer them to be on a forum or just the same social media site.

[Absentmind]

Call me an old man, but I honestly quite like Linkedin, it's a obviously for networking/business and that's all the content you'll see, but it's honestly quite tame, positive and you never see any outward toxicity on it at all because everyone is trying to save face for employability reasons haha. The conversations are respectful and informative which are important for me in my career. Just some food for thought . I don't imagine any young-uns hopping on to see what their friends are saying on there, the memes are pretty F tier, a downside!

I've noticed platforms like Instagram become rife with toxicity recently. So I've stopped using it as much, I'm kinda held hostage by it a bit since a lot of my "non-internet" friends use it to DM me.

I use Discord mainly for all my internet needs. I've tried things like Escargot for MSN/AIM but honestly, It feels just like a bit of a gimmick with no meat behind it anymore.

[kittypools]

I use tumblr, been on it for years and im very familiar with its culture and history. Its the only form of corporate-owned social media i use, i wouldnt consider Discord social media that much its just a messaging app to me. I basically post all my art on tumblr and the reblog system is so nice because your posts spread around forever unlike other sites where interactions stop at a certain point. And the choice to not have posts algorithmically fed to you is nice too, love just seeing who i follow's reblogs and my mutuals. Staff does make a lot of stupid decisions though but many users have fixed their bad changes (like the desktop layout change) with extensions which is good. yeah its neat but its mostly the community that makes it neat!!!!!

[grovyle]

Tumblr is the answer for me as well. Not because it's particularly usable but because the other alternatives aggresively aren't lol.

I use instagram and these past few weeks I can feel the toll it takes on my mental health. Not only from people only uploading the best parts of their life and comparing myself to them, but because it's so easy to doomscroll. Your feed doesn't end when you've already seen all the posts from people you follow, and reels are like a black hole to me. I set a timer to use it 45 minutes per day but I still feel like I would need to lower that time because I spend easily half of that just scrolling down reels that I don't care about.
Facebook I've stopped using for social purposes like eight years ago. I post on marketplace when I find something I want to sell, but I haven't shared a post in like. Five years. Probably more.
Twitter I stopped using when Elon Musk announced he was going to buy it, and I refuse to look for alternatives. I don't like the person I was when Twitter was my main social media. I liked a boy and used to regularly tweet screenshots of my conversations with him so people would laugh!!! What!!!!!!! That's not how I am!!!! And I fear that by moving to Mastodon or Bluesky or whatever I'll become that person again. Not interested, thanks.
I never got the hang of discord, I don't understand how people build communities there and most of the large-scale servers I was in would work better as forums. At this point I kinda refuse to learn how to use it. I would consider having a server for a friend group, though, but my social muscle has been really sore these past few years and I just haven't had the need to do so.

There was other thread some months ago where we debated if Youtube counts as social media or not. If it doesn't that's cool, I don't personally engage in conversations with other people there. But I enjoy watching videos and having my silly little playlists and learning new stuff, even if it's just fun facts.

So, Tumblr! I feel like the staff is slowly trying to kill the website, not enough people reblog things anymore and the recent Twitter horde moving there sure makes for a fun time!!!!! (not). But I've been using it for more than a decade now, follow 2000+ blogs, have two side blogs that I'm very passionate about, and I've turned into a completely maladapted member of society because of its sense of humor lol. I've never made a friend there so it's not social-social-media for me, but it's still the one I enjoy the most. I laugh multiple times a day because of it! I find nuanced takes on things the way you could never find on Twitter! My blorbos are there! Etc etc etc

[Numberedpaws]

Pretty much none of them. I do not enjoy social media because no matter how good an alternative might be it always suffers from:

1. Nobody joining it, leaving it a desolate wasteland that causes artists to suffer.
2. Becomes infected by drama and constant rule changes due to certain folks joining and stirring up trouble.
3. Just isn't inhabitable for a person like me.
4. Lack the features that make it engaging.

I use multiple platforms now, and do my best to avoid the stuff I don't like. Doesn't make me any less pissy that much better sites get popular for a day before dying off because the people who talked about how good it is all left for twitter again.

[starbreaker]

The only social media I consider usable is the World Wide Web itself, plus email and instant messaging over XMPP.

No more walled gardens, please.

[KittyTheKat]

The way I see "Social Media" is more like interacting asynchronously with other people through posts, whereas Discord is instant chat in almost every case. Tumblr, as others have said, is the one social media I consider to be usable anymore. Social media sites will always fall to getting too big and becoming profit-oriented IMO, so the best way to interact with other people is IRL or through more niche avenues like small Discord chats or forums like this one.

[devils]

Oh, social media. Admittedly, I'm not entirely against it, but it always ends up bringing some sort of drama into the Internet- mainly because of the character limits and algorithms that encourage people to dunk on others.

My mainstream social media accounts are Discord, Instagram and Tumblr. Instagram is terrible, I really only use it to keep up with artists and acquaintances... Tumblr is a bit better, though the latest issues with the layout changes and moderation decisions leave a bad taste in my mouth (I need add-ons to browse the site how I want to, I mean c'mon). Not to mention the sexy ladies (bots) that keep annoying me with spam. Discord is fine for the most part, though I hate how they're focusing on monetization via profile decorations as opposed to fixing their Linux and Android versions.

I'm a big fan of Mastodon. The character limit is in the thousands, which is amazing in my book. However, it takes a while to find an instance that truly sticks with you and that can be a little bit annoying for a lot of users.

I use Buzzly, a DeviantArt alternative, too. It's very nice as well, I think, the community's a lot smaller though. I also sometimes reply to/update people on the Neocities feed (which I don't really like for a myriad of reasons).

Besides that, I've been trying BlueSky as of late, it's alright for now. I don't have much hope for it as most users are Twitter refugees, but I'm just enjoying it while the peace lasts.