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.

  • rossman@lemmy.zip
    2·
    3 hours ago

    Aim, msn, Xbox live chat, qq. Xanga. Asian fanatics, soompi, digg. Once Facebook came along that was the thing.

  • 「黃家駒 Wong Ka Kui」 | (aka: 鳳凰院 凶真 Hououin Kyouma)@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    2 hours ago

    I first got internet access in 2010. Phones didn’t exist in 2010s… well I didn’t have one at least.

    So I just… made a facebook to talk with school friends when I’m at home… I only ever had like single digits of people to add… like I didn’t speak much English and hard to connect with anyone that didn’t speak Cantonese (or Mandarin). (still typed English on the chat tho.

    Eventually I left nyc and I just deleted my facebook because I think I just didn’t feel close with them anymore.

    I don’t think I even ever “posted” much if at all… I just used it for facebook games, which I eventualy grew out off.

    Then I re-made an account to connect with someone back in nyc, then later I just feel like its too awkward to continue chatting since we havent talked for months/years (forgot how long) and I deleted it again after just exchanging a few “oh school in Philly is crazy lots of fights”.

    Then I spent some time on some game forums.

    Then I found reddit. I just scrolled through the top platforms and a pseudo-anonymous platform is exactly what I wanted… being an introvert.

    I mostly scrolled, never posted much. Didn’t have an account most of the time, only occasionally made throwaways to comment then nuke it in a month or so… don’t even remember any of the usernames I used.

    Then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked on June 12, 2023

  • Crackhappy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    4 hours ago

    BBS with FidoNet. Then Usenet and gopher before the web was invented. After that it was IRC, then forums.

  • binarytobis@lemmy.world
    2·
    4 hours ago

    When I was in school back in the early days, I tried typing a random “wherearemypants.com” and it led to this forum run by some random guy in Texas for him and his friends. I made an account and just insinuated myself into this group of adults, and honestly, it was the golden age of social media for me. Absolutely nothing was monetized, just people sharing links and chatting about stuff.

    Eventually he shut it down and I ended up on myspace>facebook>reddit>lemmy.

  • mech@feddit.org
    6·
    12 hours ago

    ICQ †
    StudiVZ †
    Facebook †
    4chan †
    WhatsApp †
    Reddit †
    Feddit
    I’m an elder millennial German

  • Infrapink@thebrainbin.org
    2·
    9 hours ago

    I was a big Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fan in the 1990s, so I really started with h2g2. For those who don’t remember, it was an early attempt to make a crowdsourced online encyclopedia, but unlike Wikipedia, a given page could only be edited by its original creator or admins. I learned quite a bit of HTML from there.

    Every page on h2g2 had an attached comment section, and because anybody could make a page, most of us used it primarily as a message board. There was a lot of roleplaying.

    From there I branched out into forums. The big one I posted on was TotalGames.net, the joint forum for a bunch of video game magazines, because I read Cube in secondary school and they regularly posted stuff from it to get more people to join. One of the regular members, Android18a, set up her own website at SilentDream.co.uk and had an attached forum which had six, maybe seven posters. That was a nice, intimate community, and we broke the rules of the forum software by regularly posting porn.

    I signed up to a few other forums but never stayed long. In college, I joined TVTropes and actively contributed for a bit over 20 years; I just stopped this week because the new owners seem intent on turning it into another Wikia. TVTropes’ forum software is quite good, really solid, and the community is probably the most thoughtful, rational group I’ve ever encountered online (except for that one moderator. If you’re a regular on the TVTropes forum, you know the one).

    I was almost one of the first people in Ireland to join Facebook. During college, I did a work placement where I shared a house with two American girls (also a Polish boy, a Romanian girl, and an Irish girl who moved out because she didn’t get along with anybody). The Yanks told me about this great website called Facebook, which I had also seen mentioned on College Humor a lot. It seemed great, but I kept saying “Oh, I’ll join tomorrow” until everybody else was on it, at which point I decided not to join it because it was too popular (yeah). That turned out to be the right decision.

    I made a Twitter account after college because I was a fan of Channel Awesome and they all seemed to be on it, and so was apparently every other famous person. I could keep up with Twitter somewhat for a few years because I was unemployed and had little else to do, but actually keeping up with that site is a full-time job. I tried getting back into it on and off, and eventually deleted my account just before COVID when I figured out I have clinical depression and just reading Twitter aggravates it.

    I started using Reddit at some point and I liked it, but stepped back when I realised it was addictive and toxic. I look in once in a while, and every time I do, it seems to be getting worse.

    Then when Elon Musk took over Twitter, I started hearing about this thing called Mastodon. I made myself an account which I use daily, but I learned the lesson from Twitter not to bother trying to keep on top of everything. Mastodon led me to Lemmy, which led me to kbin, which is now mbin, which is where this account lives.

    I also have a Discord account, but Discord confuses and overwhelms me.

  • Schwim Dandy@piefed.zipEnglish
    4·
    12 hours ago

    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.

  • cRazi_man@europe.pub
    3·
    11 hours ago

    IRC

    ICQ

    MSN messenger

    there was a site where you could post 2 choice questions that people could answer and comment on, I forget the name but I used that a lot

    Facebook

    Digg

    Reddit

    Lemmy… I had a Lemm.ee account and that died. Had a lemmynsfw account and that died. Apparently lemmy.ml has a bad reputation. Instances defederate from each other. I just want to see memes without the drama. Don’t know where to post to get more than a handful of people to see my post. I’m rapidly losing interest in the fediverse.

    Back to books, podcasts and RSS… Social media has nothing worthwhile for me.

    • LeapSecond@lemmy.zip
      2·
      10 hours ago

      A good rule for picking an instance is to find one with very few blocked instances and a big number of communities. You see almost everything and It’s less likely to be deferated/disappear because it has a lot of content. Lemmy.zip is a good example. Lemme.ee was just unfortunate.

  • NABDad@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    11 hours ago

    CompuServe Chat USENET Facebook Reddit Lemmy

    Facebook was a horrible mistake. I jumped off when I realized I didn’t want to associate with the people there.