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.

  • binarytobis@lemmy.world
    1·
    33 minutes 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.

  • brap@lemmy.world
    3·
    8 hours ago

    Does talking to randoms on Kazaa count? Otherwise various forums, uboot, Facebook (shudder), Reddit, Lemmy.

    • Carrolade@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      8 hours ago

      What counts and what doesn’t is pretty fuzzy. I’m just including everything that could reasonably fit, just to keep it simple.

  • NABDad@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    7 hours ago
    • CompuServe Chat
    • Dialup Bulletin Board
    • 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.

    Jumped off Reddit when my app was blocked.

    Edit: mid-50’s English speaker (well, American English, if that still counts), also remembered that there was a dialup bulletin board back in the day.

  • FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world
    2·
    8 hours ago

    If it interests you to see an in depth what a zoomer’s experience of social media might be:

    spoiler
    • [2015-16] only used YouTube, but a lot, and i was one of those idiots who would get into lomg winded arguments or try to hold conversations in the comments (i was a kid so don’t hate)
    • spent a lot of time watching videos on star wars lore and got more into it because the sequels were coming out
    • discovered star wars forums
    • [2016]forums for minecraft servers i was in
    • [2017] big WhatsApp groupchat with school friends
    • also joined discord because 1 friend refused to use whatsapp or something
    • friends start to move to instagram for some reason, begrudgingly join
    • [2018-19] start to use reddit becauss I was fascinated by the in depth heart to heart discussions, eventuslly realised it had an abundance of easy to access NSFW content, which was terrible for me
    • [2020] start to use instagram professionally for art portfolio
    • [~2021] become more openly anti-porn, which is a large reason I’m at odds with reddit
    • [2021] start to use twitter/X. Completely impossible to actually grow there unless you have a cross-platform content strategy (e.g if you make youtube videos and your twitter acct is the same name)
    • long period of no change, delete twitter accounts over and over for privacy reasons.
    • [23-24] have to use facebook for uni societies, property viewing and various other grown-up stuff. Alao only way for relatives to know I exist.
    • [2024/25] start to use Nitter instead whenever I want to see a twitter thing.
    • [2025] delete instagram because it has high tech demands and is inconvenient to use
    • discover piefed because it’s advertised as reddit but less ccorrupt. Get permabanned from reddit around the same time.

    Other things I’ve dabbled in: pixelfed, twitch.

    Never used: Telegram, Snapchat, BeReal, TikTok, PornHub or similar.

  • Pipster@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    2·
    8 hours ago

    MSN messenger
    Independent forums (like Invisonfree)
    Bebo
    Facebook
    Reddit
    Discord
    Matrix
    Lemmy
    Instagram (originally just for a friend to sell me stuff but I now have some more friends and communities on this)
    Tiktok (only used for a friend to send me things she likes)

  • AstralPath@lemmy.ca
    2·
    8 hours ago

    In order: IRC (very briefly), MSN Messenger, Ultimate-Guitar forums, Facebook, Reddit, Lemmy.

    MSN and U-G forums was peak internet era for me.

    Deleted my FB account in 2017, migrated to Lemmy with the mass Reddit exodus when they fucked with the API. Permanently deleted my account that day.

  • dwemthy@lemmy.world
    1·
    7 hours ago

    AIM IRC MSN chat rooms TOTSE Livejournal MySpace (barely) Facebook (barely) 4chan Reddit Twitter Mastodon Lemmy

  • oni ᓚᘏᗢ@lemmy.world
    2·
    8 hours ago

    Windows Messenger, Facebook, a small SNES forum, Tumblr and here. Never used twitter, instagram, tiktok, pinterest, etc. Those always gave me the laziness. Tumblr is a social media that I always want to go back, I spend the main time of my teens and early 20s there.