For better or for worse, while growing up my social life was mostly online: gaia online, livejournal, deviantart, tumblr, and many others. I’ve heard of social media interaction be described as social junk food & even as I want to defend the many genuine, meaningful online relationships I had, I’m sympathetic: of course it’s better to laugh together, to touch each other, to see each other’s facial expressions, to do projects together, to tangibly help each other, to be part of each others’ physical lives. Of course tech companies prey on our increasing loneliness and need for interaction the way that Coca Cola preys on thirst: claiming to cure it but exacerbating it and making us ill at the same time (and killing workers as they do it). But lots of people are in situations that keep them isolated that they can’t easily change: disability, living rurally, working two jobs, living in places where they can’t speak the language well, and the internet can provide a solution.
My life circumstances enable me to live the life I’ve always wanted to live, but it comes at a few sacrifices, the biggest being a social life, particularly a social life with people who share my values and who I feel comfortable speaking intimately with. There are lots of ways I can think of to make friends online, but mostly they involve having conversations on spyware platforms. Now that I’m privacypilled I can’t unring that bell. It’s as comfortable for me to make a friendship on a facebook group as it would be meeting a stranger for lunch in an extremely crowded public venue and have to scream our entire conversation perpetually. At least if they were willing to switch to Signal or something at some point we could metaphorically go to a quiet cafe and speak freely, but even the dude I talked to who talked about the book he read on techno-feudalism ditched it after trying it for a grand total of five minutes with me.
I fucking hate most tech companies and basically can’t tolerate mainstream social media. My IRL prospects are what they are, I could change them only at great cost to myself. But, embracing my milkless cloth monkey mom, I have to admit sociality, love, and understanding are needs: their absence won’t kill me as quickly as starvation, but it’s probably up there with sedentism. Anybody else in the same pinch? How do you cope?
Discord, particularly small hobby communities.
I’ve found people around the taskmaster franchise (British game show with a host of international adaptations, randomly got drawn into a subtitle making discord and love it), a geoguessr community (browsergame), and a location based discord where I’m at.
But I have no reason to believe Discord is even an iota less evil than Facebook.
I wish I could loosen up and enjoy malicious tech but like I said, I just can’t unring that bell, even though it makes my life meaningfully worse. Iykyk
I was surprised to see someone namedrop Gaia. I still log in daily out of habit.
Honestly I’m in a similar situation. Discord seems to be the way to go, but it’s hard to look past the privacy issues and enshittification. IIRC you can rig up Matrix to work with discord “servers” but I don’t see how that would solve the root problem.
Here’s hoping we’re find a solution.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Sorry, I can’t hear you over my sitting down and standing back up repeatedly xD
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
If you can’t trust any social platform then u guess you are doomed to not being social…
I love taskmaster. It’s probably the only show that makes me actually laugh out loud when I’m watching it at night while the wife and kids are already in bed.
Yep, it’s awesome. Have you watched any of the international versions? New Zealand and Australia are in English (US is crap and got cancelled after 1 season), Norway and Portugal are the best after UK IMHO and the subtitles are excellent.
I’m having a lot of difficulty finding healthy online social mediums. I tried going back to IRC, which I enjoyed greatly as a teen, and chat even feels different these days-- difficult to carry on even the briefest conversations. I hear Discord can be pretty lively, however I absolutely hate their software.
I can vouch for Dreamwidth as a good online space. Bearblog is another one. On both platforms you have to do the work of reaching out, esp. on bearblog you have to email folks to get acquainted
There are still web-based forums for all sorts of niche communities. I’m a big Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan and I love hanging out at the official forums where we chat with each other, help each other through hard times and, most importantly, make each other laugh. I would definitely call (almost) all of the people there friends.
I’m not saying you should go to specifically that community. You wouldn’t get our endless inside jokes about that TV show. But maybe there’s something similarly niche for you?
I’d be quite happy with a small WhatsApp group of intellectually honest centrists to chat about world events, share links, talk about stuff we’ve been up to and just in general shoot the shit. I used to have group like this but lately it seems like it’s just me trying to start conversations while the other friend occasionally engages with some of it and the another one hardly ever and even when he does it’s almost never have anything new, interesting or even surprising. He has basically turned into NPC and I just find me distancing myself from both them.
Perhaps it’s me whose the issue. I just often find myself feeling quite alone despite having people around me. There’s something about my mind that seems so different from everyone else. I just wish I had someone to have the kind of discussions with than the people on the podcasts I listen to have.
One of the recent Facebook whistleblowers said her version of social media was her & her friends sharing news articles in a Signal group chat. That’s, like, my wet dream.
Instagram and discord
In specialised Reddit communities. Either you bound with people over a hobby or something pretty simple. Like you’re in the same bumper group or are both into that sub about blue heeler dogs. That kind of thing. You’ll usually find regular people there not some type nutjob you can find in some ultra niche community. But you’ll also have to accept not many people are as versed as you in privacy nor willing to comply with all your request for private communications and you might have to dial it down.
