It's not just you — no one is posting on social media anymore

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 654 points –
businessinsider.com

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 !

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

God ... so sorry ... just had a coffee and mashed the keyboard ... looooong rant ... IN SHORT ... yes!!

Interesting thoughts here!

  • The BlueSky situation makes a lot of sense. In another thread on here I was discussing with some people how the psychology of leaving a big long term social media staple like Twitter/Reddit is non-trivial. Someone interestingly suggested that most of the "rage" or "rudeness" you see here isn't from a bad Reddit culture coming across but a side effect of the anger and frustration felt and expressed through the whole migration event.
    • Beyond that there's probably more to unpack about the idea, where, I'd guess that building a culture based on leaving a "bad place" is always harder than doing it based on a starting "new and good place". A lot of the "culture problems/frustrations" over on masto seem to resonate with that idea. For me, personally, though I'm not really a social media person and have never really been committed to any platform or anything, masto and ActivityPub kinda feel like let downs, and I think the psychology of "migrating" off of a "bad place" and the way it plays out and affects culture is a major factor behind that. The others being aligned with your other points!
  • I didn't really know the developer community had failed to coalesce ... I'd always figured it happened somewhere I didn't know about. Interestingly, from what I've heard, the lemmy admin/developer community has kinda coalesced on a few matrix rooms and discord servers and it is working well so far. Lemmy is much smaller than mastodon though, so it might just be that there's less room for drama/splits (though obviously it does occur).
    • On the other hand ... how much of this is mastodon culture? I'd bet some of it is ... ?
    • More generally though ... a very scathing critique IMO! I'd imagine people who know about community management would have something to say about it. My intuition thinks about the lack of shared software which means no developer has any reason to cooperate with any other. If there were for instance a commonly used generic AP server or stack, or reference implementation, then there'd at least be a common development forum for people together. But, having just a common protocol and then completely diverging projects building decentralised systems means that separation and independence are the key social structures between developers and admins. Lemmy devs for instance are not fans of mastodon devs due to allegedly poor documentation and the resultant difficulties of federating with masto.
    • Beyond that, I think of where communities have developed in tech, with particular languages being an obvious example, and I think that you need a commonly loved central tool (such as a language, framework, kernel, OS, app etc). ActivityPub is probably not that tool? And masto creating its own de facto standard that other platforms have to begrudgingly work with probably doesn't help at all. I wonder how devs of mastodon forks feel about the code base? Have masto fork devs not formed a community, and if so why not?
    • And then of course is your point which is bang on. I've said it before and also elsewhere in this thread ... the lack of chat rooms on the fedi is probably getting kinda bad now. Your argument is pretty scathing (what are the initiatives you mention ... places on discord/matrix?). I noticed the same when I looked into some defed drama and found the only meaningful conversation to have happened on a Discord server. But beyond that so much stuff is happening on Discord (and matrix and the like), it seems, with IMO plenty of arguments for why such a model is a good form of social media (IMO, (micro-)blogosphere-link-aggregator + chat-rooms (optionally closed) seems like an obvious mix), that the fedi might look a little stuck in the past, especially given that it still doesn't have decent private messaging (apart from dansup's venture).
    • As for whether current fedi platforms are insufficient for facilitating communities ... if true, why is that? How did communities form on Twitter for instance? Is the lack of algorithmic feeds part of this ... like, can we now say that as problematic as they were they actually had pro-social effects by disproportionately promoting posts by those you have stronger connections too??! I feel like I've seen the community/group format work ok with the !lemmyapps@lemmy.world, !fediverse@lemmy.world and !fediverse@lemmy.ml communities.
  • As to your last point ... yea that's interesting. For my experience, part of that is that I'm strewn across 3.5 different platforms (lemmy, masto, firefish and occasionally checking but not really using kbin) and that there's no real place to go to check up on "that community", in large part I feel because masto and the microblogs don't have groups/communities and in the absence of any sort of algorithm that's honestly fatal for true community development. I often wonder how much masto as a twitter substitute will be an overall "bitter victory" for the fedi at large and those who've bought into it. For me, the ideal of the fediverse is to give people what they need to organise online, and, IMO, masto is not that and the ecosystem, because of the reasons you highlight, hasn't worked out how to provide the necessary diversity.

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

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?!?

That also means less interesting content in general, which leads to a decrease in doomscrollers

I dunno. According to the article, "While sharing has tailed off, consuming content hasn't slowed". I didn't read the link that sentence hyperlinked to since it was behind a paywall.

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.”

That's 100% how journalism works. If you're an expert in a field a journalist might call you asking to confirm a statement or a fact that they know. If you correct them and tell them they're wrong, or that it's not that simple, they'll just go find a different expert to confirm their narrative.

Now, to be fair, this style of research isn't exactly wrong, so long as the writer really is fairly knowledgeable in their own right, and is just looking for an outside source they can point to so it's not just their own opinion. The problem in the style of writing is when the author does this for things they they don't understand very well or are just their opinions.

I think there’s a difference between consulting an expert on the subject of an article and sending out a call for the very subject to see if you can find it.

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

That effort is the reason social media emerged. The Web before them was sufficient, it had human-curated website directories and RSS (though that I began noticing later), and web rings, and in general was fulfilling its purpose.

Now, the idea was to centralize everything under Zuck or someone else's control. And from the very beginning it was even more ominous than now, cause people usually knew then that in the Web you should be pseudonymous, except for your personal webpage, and also that what gets out doesn't get back in, and that an account on some site doesn't belong to you.

What I'm disgusted with personally is how the transition to social media was spearheaded by clueless illiterate people, and instead of protecting the culture everybody else just decided that they are right and we are wrong.

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

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.

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.

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.

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That's not true. I post on Lemmy and Mastodon, which I consider social media. I don't think that websites that communication based on algorithms aiming to serve unsocial purposes should be considered social media.

Barely anyone else does though, thus the point.

A city and a village are both social structures. I prefer to live in a nice, small village rather than isolated in a horrible city, even if there is only a small number of people who communicate with me. I love this place. Facebook? Not really. Big media? Not at all.

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I think there's two types really. There's the "hey family, look at my photos and shit that nobody else will care about" social media, and "screaming opinions into the void" social media.

Lemmy and Mastodon are the latter. I guess you can use Mastodon as the former, but I suspect there are better places for that, even if they're currently spread across a dozen instant messaging apps.

I was gonna react without reading the article, because the interaction is what I use lemmy for, and what I used reddit for, the social part of social media.

Anyway, I thought the post was talking about things we like sharing with our friends, families, colleagues, and other groups of acquaintances, which was confirmed by reading the first anecdote, which is of someone talking about sharing what they cooked.

I have always preferred messaging groups for such sharing, so to me it's not too much of a shock, but I have noticed what the article claims and have enjoyed being able to withdraw from most vapid forms of social media without disconnecting from friends entirely.

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I'm not in any group chats so I'm just lonely and depressed out of my mind how about that

If you need something to talk, I'm all open ears.

User nutsack needs to confide in user Mcballs1234

I didn't even noticed their username, its balls time

LoL same, but I apparently refuse to throw every ounce of myself into one hobby or am just a stranger so not to be trusted or invited to stuff so I too shall be lonely with you but very very separate.

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

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

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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...

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WTF is BeReal?

Like the other comments say it’s an app which prompts users to post a picture at “the same” time. Its not actually the same time due to timezones.

The idea behind it is that you don’t ge to pick the perfect time for a pic when you’re at that great location or you’re looking especially cute. This means you’ll get an insight in the real life of someone.

Practically that means you’ll just see a lot of pictures of your friends whilst they’re laying on the couch 2 feet deep in a bag of crisps.

BeReal hit #1 on the app stores by promising a more genuine social experience. It was popular for months, but the gimmick got boring and it fell off.

Yeah, my friends and I used it a lot for about 6 months before we just stopped because it would start sending notifications at times when we were busy, but I would forget about it after a few minutes since I didn’t care much about using it. Sometimes I was in a lecture hall busy taking notes, other times I wouldn’t even check my phone and miss the notification to post.

No idea. This feels like a stealth ad for whatever that is. They're putting it up there with social media people actually use so maybe people will consider it, but this is literally the first time I've seen the name.

It's an app that encourages users at a random time to share an image of their immediate surroundings, trying to kind of push an authentic feel. I remember hearing about it from some memes a year or so ago

So lots of pictures of feet in front of toilets...

Clearly it's Cypress Hill's lead voice ... oh wait... I'm old

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.

For a long time I’ve posted actively to Facebook and then at the end of the year I have my pictures and top posts printed up in a nice “yearbook.” There’s a service that does this (but I’m not here to advertise them). Anyway I am raising kids through these years so sharing milestones and pictures with faroff friends and family is very rewarding.

But I’ve stopped posting so much that I don’t think there will be a yearbook for this year. It’s just not worth it anymore. Not enough people are going to see my posts, either because they’re no longer visiting or the fucking algorithm has something catchier to show them. Whatever I put up gets the same likes from the same 8 arbitrary people and that’s it.

It’s sad because my kids love those books and leaf through them all the time, like a kind of family album. I guess it’s time for another solution.

Related footnote: the “people you may know” feature is just pure comedy now. It’s been forever since it actually connected me to anyone real. It’s showing me coworkers’ adult children now and my neighbor’s dentist and realtor and shit like that. I still look at it, but only for the laughs.

I get a yearbook from my iphone camera without posting to anything, just from taking photos. Social media isn't needed for that feature.

Yep I will probably go for something like that. The Facebook based one offers more than just the pictures though. Also comments and text posts and link posts, etc.

I think now is a good time to forgo or reduce posting the images to Facebook and simply curate the photos yourself from your collection and make the photo album yourself.

If it's for your kids, I think it's worth it to make regardless of if it's worth it to post it.

The entire concept of just sharing images of your kids online is weird to me to me begin with. Just make a photo album like everyone else did prior to social media.

This person is upset the same 8 people are liking their photos, give up on the need for attention and just live your life.

Doesn't Google Photos produce something similar from stored photos? I don't use it much myself, as I don't take many photos, but I've used it to view screenshots & such on my phone & I seem to recall something like that.

If so, would definitely be an option to avoid posting while producing a similar yearbook/photo album.

It does. One Drive does too.

I can’t imagine Google doesn’t have such functionality, since Apple has had it for years and they’re nearly never first to market with a feature.

wtf is "Be Real"? I never even heard of it. Am I that old already??

Yes. Its a social app that will randomly ask you to post about what you are doing and it will use both front and back cameras for the post.

That's creepy af

It was suppose to portray a more causal, carefree experience. As opposed to insta where people stage or try to show off. That's how it was explained to me.

it works well for small family groups - my parents are older and its cool to see what they are up to during the day, and they get to see their grandkids too.

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Uh yeah no thanks, if I wanted surveillance like that I'd just move to north korea

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

Other apps like Dispo, Poparazzi, and Locket have all used various gimmicks to try and recapture social media's halcyon days — each had a moment in the sun at the top of the US Apple app-store charts — but none have truly broken through.

For instance, the content creator Nina Haines launched a group called SapphLit, a self-described "sapphic book club born out of the queer BookTok community."

Victoria Johnston, a 22-year-old software engineer, imagines the ideal social-media platform as a "safe space where people can just connect and you don't feel pressured to have a big following or a presence or be really well known."

And as more users and creator communities migrate toward closed spaces, the behemoths like Instagram are also trying to capitalize on this reality by introducing features like paid-subscription services that offer exclusive group chats.

Lia Haberman, an adjunct professor at UCLA Extension and an advisor for the American Influencer Council, said that Gen Alpha, the age cohort of 13 and younger, are "not embracing traditional social-media platforms and customs."

It's hard to know how the change will affect the online atmosphere over the long term — some evidence suggests the shift will create a healthier digital experience, but it also risks further dividing people into like-minded echo chambers.

The original article contains 2,197 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 90%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I am not suprised in the slightest. They are extremly pointless ,i simply do not really care that somone is on bahamas or whatewers. The only thing i even used facebook for were a specialized groups and Messenger. The only real social media i cared about was reddit and similars simply beacuse they encouraged discussion about stuff and provided anonimity ( and anonimity helps massiviely when your opinions arent exatcly popular ).

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Don't care, never will. I have abandonned all interest in social media, and centralized platforms that rely on targetted advertisements and that just keep selling your identity to corporates, through lemmy I have learned that MORE control (over your life) an some times bring MORE peace of mind. Right now i have quit fb and instagram, and for it im a happier and more cerene person

He says on his social media website

I think the reason group chats are gaining is because we are so numbed by all the public platforms. Between doom scrolling and ads noone pays any attention to personal posts anymore.

For me personally I would even go one step further and say that I'm really annoyed by people force-feeding me their peronal life/experiences.

Now they start (ab)using group chats for it:

A group created for organizing rock climbing activities: All of a sudden filled with photos of this summers vacation. OK, we are friends and know each other, but still...

Another one was for a specific training of a mountaineering club, people who just met for this one occasion: Half a year later someone starts posting photos of their latest trip. And then the next, ...

Maybe in my case it's the generation that started sm (lol) with attention seeking extrovert posts that do not get any attention on fb/x anymore, so they go to group chats.

What might still be true for younger people is that with all the noise on the internet a group chat may be a place that gives you a manageable chunk of content with a private touch that makes perosonal involvement worthwile/doable again.

And now let's watch it get abused&destroyed by corporations.

This was a very interesting read. Hard to predict how social media platforms will look in 10 years

I still miss Google+, my friends and my sharing is based on the subject not my relation to my friends.

Fake, nobody misses Google+

I'm guessing that we are around 1% of the general population 😉

Not enough for a big company to build a community on though. Of course, it would have helped if Google hadn't restricted sign-up. Just because it worked for Gmail, but a social network is a different beast than email, that already had a critical mass of users.

I'm in a few sea kayaking Facebook groups which are pretty active, and being based around a common interest, there is some genuinely good conversation happening.

It's a shitshow outside our little walled garden though, I just post about my trips and that's it.

A lot of my groups have moved to Signal from FB, feels a lot less dirty using a community platform vs a filthy advertising company. Now I just need to get a phone not developed by an ad company i.e. Alphabet Inc.

I got a Doogee S96 pro, it's an indestructible brick with pretty decent specs.

I think they meant Android, the OS on almost every non iPhone phone. I personally don't think Apple is much better either, but that might be what they want to get.

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At this point facebook is like a needy ex that won't let go. I haven't posted or logged on there in a long time but it keeps on sending email and push notifications

I know, I can turn that sort of thing off, but omg will it STFU already

Anecdotal evidence, but in my group of friends, the only platform where people, me included, post regurlaly is bereal and I suppose it's because it's more like a group chat when you only watch what your friends post. We are older than teens though.

I don't understand this thing because of its limited format. Like... You can't even express yourself much like you would with text posts or regular video. You can just state "well here is what I have right here" Not to mention that from what I understand, it pretty much incentivizes you to post your FACE online which is a no-no.

But I don't know anyone to be in a group chat with! That's why I use social media 😭

Honestly, this is an actual problem. I had friendships formed from proximity before I found my current group of friends online, and I wasn't as happy as I am now when I was limited to friends in my proximity.

No one's posting on BeReal

No one's even heard of BeReal. That could be part of the problem there.

The only reason I check "social media" is to hear about local events, so to see ads I actually want to see.

Same. I am happy using discord or family/friend group chats to keep up with them, but I need a 'town square' where I can go and learn what events are on nearby, what restaurants are doing special nights etc. But I don't want that town square to sell me ads, I just want to look at the notice board and see what new stuff takes my fancy. So how do we connect the consumers to the businesses without having an overlord who will try to sell things to the consumers by charging the businesses?

I still post on 𝕏, as I have a large follow base on there.