It’s 2023 and there are more open source, decentralized social media options than ever before like Lemmy, Mastodon, and more. However, I still find myself using some big tech platforms like Twitter and Google News fairly often. While federated social networks are compelling, the content curation and discovery on platforms like Twitter seems better for my interests. The echo chambers of Twitter feel preferable to the noise of something like Mastodon. What about you all? Have you moved completely to open source social platforms, or do you still rely on some big tech ones too? I’m curious to hear your perspectives!
I do watch videos from YouTube because of its massive content, but I tend to use invidious or piped links - because I don’t want to provide YT any more traffic than they need.
Could you please explain what piped links do exactly? I see them here all the time but they rarely work for me. I’d like to understand
I will try to do an ELI5.
Piped is what is known as a “proxy”, or rather an interface to YouTube.
There is a very popular piece of code called NewPipeExtractor, which is used to scrape data from the YouTube website.
Piped utilizes NewPipeExtractor to set up an “intermediary”, a proxy website that looks and feels pretty much like YouTube.
The good thing about watching videos through the Piped proxy site is that YouTube doesn’t get to know your IP address. Which is why it is very popular among privacy advocates.
That is it in a nutshell. If interested, you will find more information in their GitHub page.
https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped
Hope this helped.
Thanks a lot! This is very helpful indeed
I still use WhatsApp, because I have friends that won’t switch to Signal.
Other than that: I quit Facebook years ago, was never really interested in Twitter and recently stopped using reddit and switched to lemmy.
Edit: Oh, and YouTube… I totally forgot about YouTube.
Virtually everyone in my country uses WhatsApp. I’m essentially living off-grid if I don’t use it.
I still use WhatsApp
Sorry to break it to you but that’s still Facebook
I’m aware of that, that’s why I would like to get rid if it. And “technically” it’s not Facebook but another “Meta”-product 😉
Discord and YouTube are my two holdouts. The YouTube algorithm understands me too well and the amount of content on the platform is too insane for me to quit, but I could leave Discord (I’m never on it anyway)
for me Discord is very easy to replace, but impossible at the same time.
What I mean by this is, I know that Discord offers much more than past competitors, so everyone switched. But these days there are a bunch of Discord clones that are just as good, some of them FOSS. Discord is also very simple, if you want, code ur own.
In the mean time, just thinking about making all my contacts switch… It’s impossible! happened with guilded, I know one bigtech to another, but it’s THE SAME with more free options and features. I think I managed to get one guy registered, that not even a single Discord server ported. And now imagine if I actually tried to make the jump to FOSS: “Delete Discord, come join this xyz, it’s slower, buggier, has less users, has bearly features, but open source!”. No chance. :.c
I still use YouTube because of the massive amount of content that’s on there. And Instagram because none of my irl friends are on the fediverse.
Have you told them about our lord and savior Pixelfed?
No long form video content platform better than YT yet, I’ll be switching as soon as someone can make something better.
Technically yes, but in very limited ways.
I watch Youtube, but I do not post or comment. I am on Linkedin but I do not post, and infrequently comment. I am active on Discord, and will remain until they too get greedy and I have to abandon the product.
Ditched Facebook a number of years ago.
Never really clicked with Twitter, even with trying Mastodon it just seems difficult to view content in a format In familiar with.
Looking through others comments I guess YouTube is considered here and is probably my most used.
I’m probably going to over-answer this as I think “out loud” but here goes anyway.
I’ve never done FB because FB is evil. I did sign up once for just long enough to report some kid for being too young to be on FB but that is all I’ve ever done there. It is pretty tempting to sign up for reals, tho because it would be the best way to reconnect with some people I have lost touch with over the years.I did Reddit for a while, signed up during early COVID. I’ve been off Reddit for a while now and I do miss some of the smaller more niche communities. But overall, Reddit has changed recently for the worse. I’ll still browse /all most days and the content has really gone downhill. Slo-mo car wreck in progress there, I think. Reddit can be fun, but reactions seem wildly random. I think that’s due to there just being a whole fucking lot of ppl there so you never know who will respond to any given comment.
I’ve been on kbin since leaving Reddit and I feel more at home here than on Reddit. More like being in a bar here as opposed to a huge stadium on Reddit. And I’m not in a rush to change that.
youtube for content finding
reddit because the boardgame discussion on here is dead, boardgamegeek doesn’t do well unless you’re looking at a specific game (and CasualUK is pretty decent)
Facebook because that’s where the church tech discussion is and I can sell boardgames so fast on there on the main group for my country.
Both sites main feeds are dead to me though, if Lemmy ever picks up significantly I can see me moving over full time
Twitter/Instagram/Snapchat/LinkedIn have all never been used or deleted.
I have a Facebook account as the organisers of the park run I do only make announcements through their Facebook page. I don’t use it for anything else.
Other than that I use WhatsApp as pretty much everyone in my country uses it to communicate exclusively rather than SMS or regular phone calls due to a very savy scam by service providers. Most of them stopped WhatsApp counting towards data usage on their contracts for a few years and heavily advertised that fact. Then they stopped doing that quietly and now heavily advertise that their contracts have unlimited text messages and phone calls. People had got used to using the WhatsApp features like group chats and video calls so still use it. Most assume it still doesn’t affect their data usage or that unlimited texts and phone calls applies to WhatsApp as well which means people are burning through their mobile data faster due to always having it turned on just so they can receive messages. I gave up trying to convince my family of those facts long ago.
I use facebook for friends, family, running and hip hop groups and also for following artists
implying I ever did in the first place
I still use whatsapp for most family members and schoolmates, and Snapchat for one friend
No
