Cuz the comments throught Lemmy/Piefed seems to indicate that literally every user on here is a FOSS/Dencentralization Purist and has 100% abandoned mainstream platforms.
I wonder if this is actually true or just a small minority of users being overrepresented.
Not even a little actually.
I’m well acquainted with the “I have an account for my social circle but just don’t use it” version of this answer, and that’s not what I mean. I genuinely never saw the appeal.
The only periods in my life where I ever held social media accounts were due to collective years of badgering and bullying by friends. I didn’t get a facebook until 2017 or snapchat until I was basically about to graduate from college.
The moment I lost the social obligation I deleted those accounts with gusto and the sentiment “You know how to reach me.” We all have phones and emails lol
The thing that always put me off social media more than anything, extending all the way back to the MySpace days, is how fake I would watch people I knew irl behave online. Someone could swear up and down that they hated someone’s guts and wished them nothing but suffering in life… but online they’d send them friend requests and heart their little vacation posts. And that’s without even going into the “personas” and curated images I’d see them project online…
I noticed myself almost fall into it once too. I uploaded two different profile pictures within a short timespan, and the one that felt a bit more staged and less like “myself” got a barrage of attention whereas me being myself was ignored. And I almost leaned into that for a couple of months before I caught myself and realized this is how personas start, and stopped trying to curate my photos for social media.
That place is not for human interaction, it’s like one of those labrat drip-feeders, but for online validation. It’s theater without conversation.