For context when I say Mainstream, I mean Reddit, FB, IG, Twitter, etc.
With privacy and data concerns mounting more and the change of things in the general overall and day to day, I have started to rethink the use of mainstream Social Media and begin to make the migration away from it.
So far I have taken to the Fediverse with Lemmy, Pixelfed, and Mastodon. This is after Reddit just just shooting itself in the foot and blowing the damn thing right off. Twitter after Elon also just started the using a platform for his pissing context with Zuck. Instagram, I have no real use for now as it has become so hard to get any actual engagement beyond “likes”.
My issues with Facebook come from constantly changing how the timeline works and it got to a point to ONLY seeing pages I had liked and ads and not even seeing posts from anyone on my friends list. I was able to take the time and clean it up, but compared to the alternative of moving away from Facebook, it got old real fast. I continue to use Facebook primarily for the messenger functionality, but even there now everyone who I would talk to on the regular is either via text message or some other platform.
Eventually, potentially by the end of this year, I can see myself completely closing out my Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit so long as I like what I see here on Lemmy. That’s not so say Lemmy isn’t good, but IMO a I’ll has some ways to go.
The ONLY reason I can see keeping an Instagram is because there are some accounts I do find entertaining and have some good bits of information(Costco/Target finds, etc).
I don’t expect for these platforms to be replacements for the mainstream. And I hope they don’t become that, because that’s what making it special right now. The communities are small, instances make things close knit and that’s nice. Oh and also, not seeing ads after every post post is always nice as well.
So the TL;DR here is I plan on migrating away from Mainstream Social Media Platforms completely by the end of 2023 and wondering what everyone else’s game plan is or if they plan on keeping both the Fediverse/decentralized platforms and the Mainstream.
Mine is probably a major nerd/geek move, but it’s basically been taking as many of the organizations I followed on corporate social media, finding their RSS feeds (if they had any), plugging those in to different RSS readers and then by & large unplugging. I hadn’t really used corporate social media for the social part in forever, so it didn’t make much sense to keep putting up with their changes aiming to maximize ad views & exposure as much as possible.
The part that I’ve been struggling with from here however is just how to reach folks anymore as I don’t necessarily want to have to have like 4 or 5 different messaging apps to do so. Unfortunately SMS feels clunky for anything beyond basic texting & I would really like to have a chat app that displays messages on both my phone & PC so I can respond from either depending on what I’m doing.
However the most popular apps with that kind of functionality are either tied into Meta/Facebook (WhatsApp/Messenger), gaming themed (Discord), or kind of clunky for chatting (Snapchat), and they’re all centralized & trying to find ways to shove ads at you or sell you something.
IRC still works, it’s what slack is built from. Unfortunately you’d be hard pressed to get all of your friends and family to use it. It seems that most people won’t use anything that doesn’t have massive marketing campaigns telling them to use it.
Edit: it looks like there’s a client called Element which I guess is a decentralized IRC client for Riot, that has some market share. I don’t know anything about it though, I just found it right now.
I don’t mind the many messaging apps. What I do have issue with is with I delete say, my Facebook, there is no option to keep my account JUST for the messaging aspect. Snapchat now I only use as a Group Chat between My Wife, myself, and our family that is out of State. Whats App I never got into, but I know it has a lot of popularity with folks outside of the US and iirc it is because text messaging rates are different in other countries, so a lot of people use something like WhatsApp to avoid those fees.