For better or for worse, while growing up my social life was mostly online: gaia online, livejournal, deviantart, tumblr, and many others. I've heard of social media interaction be described as social junk food & even as I want to defend the many genuine, meaningful online relationships I had, I'm sympathetic: of course it's better to laugh together, to touch each other, to see each other's facial expressions, to do projects together, to tangibly help each other, to be part of each others' physical lives. Of course tech companies prey on our increasing loneliness and need for interaction the way that Coca Cola preys on thirst: claiming to cure it but exacerbating it and making us ill at the same time (and killing workers as they do it). But lots of people are in situations that keep them isolated that they can't easily change: disability, living rurally, working two jobs, living in places where they can't speak the language well, and the internet can provide a solution.
My life circumstances enable me to live the life I've always wanted to live, but it comes at a few sacrifices, the biggest being a social life, particularly a social life with people who share my values and who I feel comfortable speaking intimately with. There are lots of ways I can think of to make friends online, but mostly they involve having conversations on spyware platforms. Now that I'm privacypilled I can't unring that bell. It's as comfortable for me to make a friendship on a facebook group as it would be meeting a stranger for lunch in an extremely crowded public venue and have to scream our entire conversation perpetually. At least if they were willing to switch to Signal or something at some point we could metaphorically go to a quiet cafe and speak freely, but even the dude I talked to who talked about the book he read on techno-feudalism ditched it after trying it for a grand total of five minutes with me.
I fucking hate most tech companies and basically can't tolerate mainstream social media. My IRL prospects are what they are, I could change them only at great cost to myself. But, embracing my milkless cloth monkey mom, I have to admit sociality, love, and understanding are needs: their absence won't kill me as quickly as starvation, but it's probably up there with sedentism. Anybody else in the same pinch? How do you cope?
As much as people here treat "Reddit hate" like a meme, it really does get the connection aspect down, closer to the ideal than most other alternatives. I would say that, YouTube, and Discord uniquely come to mind here. I keep up a server that you might like in this context.
Nah reddit and lemmy has that forum vibe where we meet and talk to people on forum but that's it unless the other person turned out to be a creep and follow you through threads its probably over. We should have a /c/ for this kinda things.
There are at least 5 or so people that I originally met on Lemmy but now hang out with in other contexts too. Depends how you're using it I guess!
Why is the parent comment removed?
seems like that person got banned.
Edit: the reason in modlog says "troll"
You hangout with them on lemmy or other platforms ? I guess you can hangout with lemmings on matrix or something but that wasn't what i was talking about.
Lol no doxxing but in broad terms which lemmy communities did y'all meet in? Interest-based?
Hobby stuff, UK Casual... just anywhere really. You chat to enough people and take a genuine interest and it just ends up going that way. Met a random person from Mastodon irl last year too, that was by accident, we just ended up at the same event, but it was fun!