Social media presence as in having accounts in your name with you being visible in the profile picture in mainstream sites (Anything Meta, Twitter, Snapchat, Tiktok…). I don’t consider anynounmous accounts on Lemmy, Reddit, Kbin relevant to the scope of this question.
I personally don’t have any except for a LinkedIn and I never feel like I’m missing out. People don’t care, I never ask to follow people. If I care, I’ll get their phone number.
But usually, I don’t care.
Socially it sucked until my friends figured out how to organize things the way we did in the 90s and before again. Otherwise my mental health improved immensely. It was great not having to see all these people I cared about treat all these other people I cared about so horribly in such concrete and evident ways.
no
Not really. In fact, I did a little dumphone detox a few weeks ago and literally nothing changed other than not having access to apps like telegram until I could access my laptop. Oh, and no video calling. I think now that I’m in my late 20s, married, with my little circle of close friends, and work peers I don’t really find a need for social media. Now when I was in high school and witnessed the birth of Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram, it was a big deal to have an account and I didn’t start purging those accounts until a few years ago…
The only reason I have social media accounts under my wallet name is to avoid anyone wondering why I’m not on social media (also: grandparents). Everyone IRL who I care enough about to actually explain know I login once a year in a separate browser (under incognito) and check every privacy setting from my checklist and update if it’s important (like job change). LinkedIn I check regularly, but that’s because a.) I only connect with people from work and a lot of them do think it’s important to have strong networks (and they could be right, no idea) and b.) LinkedIn has an education section that my job really likes because it has free classes and when I get bored at work, I can do a quick class in something (nothing they actually want us to do; I have to work in the nightmare that is Agile, do not make me take yet another class about the benefits of this software development hellscape, thanks).
Honestly, I try to give the impression I’m not into social media IRL; there are like, three people in my daily life who are allowed into my online life and one because we more or less both got the internet at the same time and started a mailing list together. Don’t get me wrong, I know a lot of nice people IRL, but not the type I want to introduce to the friends I made online.
It has huge potential impacts. There are kids who get excluded from social groups for having Android
In my experience, massive impact.
I refuse use Facebook and WhatsApp, and yet >95% of this country’s population rely on those things.
It means that practically all of my potential social circle excludes me. Most people don’t care about reasons to not use those things - “after all, everyone is there and I have nothing to hide.”
Most people hardly even know that their phones can send plain sms messages for free, to say nothing of email. If asked to do so, most honestly don’t know how!
Refusing to use Zuckware is costing me a lot of social opportunities.
I don’t think so. It’s just a little more inconvenient.
For example: I don’t need to see posts from friends to know how their day was. Instead, I just call them or meet them for a coffee and ask about their day.
The old fashioned ways still work well.
As a teenager or young adult, maybe. But as you grow older less so. Adding someone on social media has never really been brought up in my current social circles. Sure the occasional linkedin invite if it’s in a professional setting, but my current group of acquaintances hasn’t really thought about adding each other on every social media platform or exchanged contacts other than phone numbers.
