Inspired by a comment in another thread, what was the path you took over your life, through the various online social media we’ve had?
By way of example, I started in Yahoo chatrooms, to a little bit of Myspace and private forums, to ICQ and IRC, to no online socials for awhile, to facebook, to 4chan, to reddit, ending up here on lemmy.
I’ve never used twitter, insta, tiktok, etc for any length of time.
If you’d like, your native language and a rough estimate of your age can be included for additional context.
local dial-up BBSs sharing gif and wav clips and chatting about anything that you felt like at the moment
AOL chatrooms
free hosted forums on Anglefire and Geocities
Larger forums(SA, Fark, etc)
FB/instagram
Lemmy/Piefed
I think that would be my path as it relates to communities where I actually ended up having a social community involved. I would say that it also is a direct increase in toxicity as it works downward. I find Lemmy/Piefed just as toxic as any other platform but the lack of a forced algorithm lets me basically mute all of the negative content sources and it’s niche enough that you can actually mute the negative influence, which makes for a pleasant experience.