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.

  • 「黃家駒 Wong Ka Kui」 | (aka: 鳳凰院 凶真 Hououin Kyouma)@sh.itjust.works
    3·
    20 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

  • Ryanmiller70@lemmy.zip
    2·
    19 hours ago

    Bebo

    Myspace

    Facebook

    Twitter

    Reddit

    Bluesky

    Lemmy

    I guess if you want you can throw in stuff like YouTube and some random MMOs I played, but I’m not counting those. Maybe Skype and Discord if you want.

  • rossman@lemmy.zip
    3·
    21 hours ago

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

  • Crackhappy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    22 hours ago

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

  • binarytobis@lemmy.world
    3·
    22 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
    10·
    21 hours ago

    ICQ †
    StudiVZ †
    Facebook †
    4chan †
    WhatsApp †
    Reddit †
    Feddit
    I did make a video for Instagram once that got several million views, but that was on my employer’s account.
    I’m an elder millennial German

  • dkppunk@piefed.socialEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    Not all of these are social media sites, but this list is my social internet path

    Bolt dot com & SciFi channel chatrooms

    AIM & Yahoo chatrooms

    ICQ & IRC

    Soulseek (I count it because I used to hang in the chatrooms quite a bit)

    Eyeball chat, then followed friends to Camfrog chat, before both were enshittified

    MySpace

    Facebook and dabbling in Instagram

    Reddit, left after Apollo went offline

    Mastadon and dabbled in Snapchat

    Threads

    BlueSky, still here

    Lemmy then Piefed, still here

  • Ryoae@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    My start was all the way back when WebTV was around in 1996. I was using IRC-like chat rooms provided by Talk City. There, we had fun trivia games, some friendly chatter and vice versa.

    Then, I moved on to MSN Chat sometime in the early 2000s. I would make my home there until the day MSN decided to make MSN Chats subscription based sometime around 2004 and I ended up leaving. These chat rooms were where I had some of my earliest periods roleplaying.

    From there I would go to MySpace and I stayed there for quite a bit of time, felt like maybe 5 or so years before I just gradually lost interest. By that point in the middle, when Facebook got out of its college-only phase, I joined about a couple years after that in what felt like 2008-ish.

    In 2007 also, I was in DeviantArt chat rooms and I was there up until 2014. I would join Gaia Online too in 2007 until 2016.

    I didn’t start using things like Reddit until mid-2010s. I got into Second Life by 2013. Didn’t use Twitter until much later and left long before Musk even got it.

    Oh and somewhere around my ventures of the 2010s, I did in fact hop into mIRC servers for a bit.

    And finally by about 2023, I jumped into the Fediverse for the first time via Lemmy, discarding Reddit for good (not that it mattered because I kept getting shadow-banned anyways). I do have a TikTok but it’s only for associating with a friend on there. I’ve never regularly used AOL or Yahoo!'s chat rooms. I never had ICQ but I did have AIM, MSN and Yahoo!'s respective messengers. I’ve gotten into Instagram for a cup of coffee before bowing out like a couple days.

    So, these days, all I use now is PieFed, Facebook, Second Life and Discord (if one can even call it social media).

  • Schwim Dandy@piefed.zipEnglish
    5·
    1 day 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.