social media shifts again

[tielan]

A friend has asked for a recommendation to a social media site that's like FB but without the algorithm and the shit that's meta's going on with.

This isn't uncommon among people who are not liking the direction of meta and it's subsidiaries, but it's also a hard order to fill. The thing about social media is that you want it to utilise connections, you want it to be simple for people to use, and you want to be able to control who can come and invade your personal space (not to mention, keep things from going viral).

I keep on having to resist the urge to tell my non-pocket people to come to Dreamwidth...

Truth be told, DW wouldn't work for a whole raft of people - plenty of people who never learned how to code, people who are accustomed to being spoon-fed, low-investment users - and yet, it's pretty much the 'lounge room' experience that many of my FB friends are wanting from their social media!

Conversations that you can control: freeze, delete, manage, banish/block. Lists of 'friends' who you can keep up with, without being inundated with advertising. The ability to join in a conversation anywhere so long as you have an account, and to be able to thread comments.

The functionality is pretty much what a whole slew of people want out of their social media interactions.

The interface? No. And ultimately that's what'll do them in.

And do I really want my non-pocket friends who don't know about fandom fossicking about my accounts? No, I most certainly do not!

Nevertheless, it's a little bit sad watching so many people scramble for something that is essentially LJ/DW from the early 00s, but which is that level too technical for most of them to engage with comfortably and fluidly.

*sigh*

Comments

[conuly]

Can your other friends not utilize a rich text editor?

[tielan]

Hm, yes. Now I think about it, there's the rich text editor...

[conuly]

If they’re not too ambitious they should be fine. At the very least they could try!

[r_a_young]

Unfortunately my friends were mainly the FB -> Instagram pipeline because all their posts are image heavy.

The temptation to ask them to shift to Tumblr is very high, but I also think that's dependent on the groups (for example, my friend has a sewing school that has a little network of folks sharing their sewing projects).

[barbaratp]

Eu fiquei extremamente triste com as novas regras do FB que autorizam as pessoas a correlacionar doenças mentais com pessoas não-brancas e queer sem risco de sofrerem as consequências por esse preconceito. Não sei o que farei com as contas (duas) que tenho naquela plataforma, mas sei que também não gostaria de ver muitas das figuras com as quais interagi ali nos meios fandom como o DW em que estou. E sinto que eles não terão para onde ir por isso muitos lá vão continuar. É complicado.

Bake

[copracat]

I've never thought of it that way, but yes. I tried Facebook back in the 00s but the way they kept changing how it worked to strip away privacy annoyed me enough, finally, to chuck it in, even though I knew then that it would hobble contact with all my non-fan, previously off-line friends.