I’ve never had a Facebook account or any other social media. I know they keep shadow profiles, but I’ve never given permission. I never had any interest and frankly still don’t.
The problem I’m having is that I don’t exist online when people try to look me up. When someone tries to check me out, there’s nothing there and apparently that’s considered abnormal these days. I think it’s starting to affect my life negatively for various reasons I’d rather not get into.
I’d just like some advice about where to start if you wanted to dip your toes in and check it out. LinkedIn, maybe?
I think another divide when it comes to “social media” is the idea of following someone.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc let me follow people (or brands).
Reddit however isn’t about people or brands (and yes I’m away they added that feature, it’s stupid), it’s about topics.
Looking at Mastodon, it is also designed to follow people. They do however have the option to follow hashtags, which as a Lemmy user is something I like.
Similarly as a Lemmy user I don’t care who any of you are. I’m not following anyone in this thread. We could interact every day or we could interact once a year, I don’t care who you are and I like that.
Also, I don’t care if you follow me. I’d prefer if you didn’t. I do have an opinion to share, and I do want people to read it. Is that “social media”?
As other folks have pointed out, this is all more similar to Internet forums. Are those “social media”? I would argue they are not, but if you stretch the definition far enough… I guess?
It starts with something silly like an avatar or profile pic next to every comment. If you’ld have had a flag or a dogpic or so next to your name/comment, I wouldn’t have read your comment in the same relatively neutral way. I dislike the persona stuff, it’s why I prefer forums. Lemmy is a collection of forums to me. I profoundly distrust persona cult stuff, like influencers etc. Sure, I’ll encounter same people here I’m sure, but frankly: I’m mostly unaware, usernames barely register in my mind.
The part about social media I dislike is the real connection between Irl and online, and the “profile”-focus, for now both is no issue for me on lemmy.
I don’t think the definition needs to be stretched very far. In any of such cases, the function is social, it is about connecting people and enabling them to communicate in a wider, multilateral fashion, online. However asocial we might convince ourselves of being, if we truly had no interest in it, we wouldn’t even be discussing anything here.
Even lurkers, at the very least, place trust on a group to bring them matters which they are interested in, and if you consider it, this is the manner in which Reddit and forums are most similar to following influencers. The only difference is that it is a crowd-driven highlight, rather than an individual one, and even then people don’t tend to follow just one single influencer.