It’s 2023 and there are more open source, decentralized social media options than ever before like Lemmy, Mastodon, and more. However, I still find myself using some big tech platforms like Twitter and Google News fairly often. While federated social networks are compelling, the content curation and discovery on platforms like Twitter seems better for my interests. The echo chambers of Twitter feel preferable to the noise of something like Mastodon. What about you all? Have you moved completely to open source social platforms, or do you still rely on some big tech ones too? I’m curious to hear your perspectives!
I have a Facebook account as the organisers of the park run I do only make announcements through their Facebook page. I don’t use it for anything else.
Other than that I use WhatsApp as pretty much everyone in my country uses it to communicate exclusively rather than SMS or regular phone calls due to a very savy scam by service providers. Most of them stopped WhatsApp counting towards data usage on their contracts for a few years and heavily advertised that fact. Then they stopped doing that quietly and now heavily advertise that their contracts have unlimited text messages and phone calls. People had got used to using the WhatsApp features like group chats and video calls so still use it. Most assume it still doesn’t affect their data usage or that unlimited texts and phone calls applies to WhatsApp as well which means people are burning through their mobile data faster due to always having it turned on just so they can receive messages. I gave up trying to convince my family of those facts long ago.