in favor of using ONLY MESSAGING SERVICES, public messaging services, sorta like discord if i want to make friends, because i realized that making friends is already hard enough and therefore it’s harder to make friends in social media!! mostly because of the complicated ui!! dang it!! but yea if i were to ditch everything and instead use messaging services, PUBLIC messaging services like discord or even matrix, i think i would make friends more easily, that would make me very ok, plus i could show off more stuff that i’ve been working on like programming and get feedback and stuff, woa!! anyway what do you think please??

  • NebLem@lemmy.world
    1·
    4 days ago

    A few problems of chat only:

    1. Time differences mean you’ll likely only socialize with a limited group and miss out on cool people and discussions not synchronous to your active times.
    2. Ephemeral nature of chat discussions make it hard to keep track of long running efforts where today’s discussions could benefit from knowing the previous discussion points.
    3. Chat apps tend to be closed networks, which might make it difficult to reach the people you’d like to interact with.

    None of these are show stoppers, and there are benefits to limiting your digital presence.

    That all being said: Real friendships tend to require a lot of work and most people can only usually put the work in for a handful. In general, keeping in touch with those you want in that handful is best as follows: real world in-person > 1:1 synchronous video/virtual world/chat > group chat platforms (discord, etc) > letters > emails > blogs > microblogs.

    Outside of those few, its good to still get out and do social networking regardless of the technology. For people I want to collaborate, collaboration platforms (Codeberg, etc) and messaging can work great if in-person doesn’t work for whatever reason (typically time & distance). For interesting online acquaintances, filtered blog/microblog feeds seem to get the best time/benefit ratio.

    It’s also really good to do event based networking, such as hackathons, board game nights/bars, and community service. Letting people find you has its benefits too, I recommend looking into the IndieWeb on how to best do that if you want to be found.

    • toofpic@lemmy.world
      2·
      4 days ago

      Nope, chat only works. I am a person who lives like that (social contacts in messengers or IRL, no Facebook, no insta, no TikTok account).
      Me and my friend group are all over the world now, because we moved out of Russia (mostly because of war, but there are other cases). So we’re all pros at staying in contact to not go crazy because everyone started their social life over. And I’m a part of several small-ish (20-80 people total, 5-30 active) group chat communities. In all of them, there are ongoing discussions, traditions like “friday selfie”, and inside jokes/themes.
      In addition to that, I’m a part of some local group chat communities where I’m living now. It’s mostly in Telegram, but there’s also a big (400 people) Discord nerd/expat server), and a boardgame meetings group in WA.
      It absolutely can work. More than that, local online groups activities result in some RL meetings - going to bars, barbecuing, book clubs and such. When I was moving I was afraid we’ll have no friends, but now it’s too much, we have to make choices where to go (or if we’re going at all)