Asklemmy

why bother opening a pathway in the first place

i've never had an IG account myself, but i think your mistake is in assuming that someone accepting your follow request on a restricted IG account is an indicator of desire for chatting with strangers. accepting your follow request might just mean they glanced at your profile and assessed that you aren't a spammer or bot, not that they want to chat with you.

perhaps just need to find out somewhere in the real world where I could bond more easily with real people?

for sure that is a good idea 😂

but there are also many places online where it is much more reasonable to assume people are interested in chatting with strangers.

What you're doing sounds like a lot of spam that I've been receiving.

That's because those are Branding places. They're places to sell your Brand. It's why business profiles are interchangeable with personal profiles, it's about branding.

Branding isn't just for corporate products anymore, it's for everyone, apparently.

It's the whole "influencer's real lives are a lot less glamorous than their Insta leads you to believe," which is totally true, most of the clothes are rented and they get to stay maybe 24 hours in a nice place just for a photo shoot, then they're sent back to their crappy apartment.

Asmongold is a gross dumb piece of shit but openly living in filth is at least being honest about how most of these influencers actually live.

It's all smoke and mirrors for branding. Real people with real lives don't spend their time managing their "brand" anywhere, whether it's Instagram or LinkedIn because, by definition, we have real lives and real connections with real people already.

One thing I think about is the incredible poverty of text.

When you look at a word you get a meaning. But that meaning, it comes mostly from your entire life's experience, your memory, what you've been taught. That's huge. And the word is very very small, comparatively.

So when you're reading, 99% of the content is coming from you. So reading is basically you just talking to yourself. And social media is a million people talking to themselves.

And that's pretty weird.

Perhaps social media has had an impact, but IMO the larger issue at hand is that people (especially in the US) have both less time and fewer places to have casual conversations. People are working more across the board and have more distractions and things vying for their attention (mostly because of the internet and social media, ofc), so even when a situation appears, there is a higher cost to interact, whether that's in real life or on the internet.

Fwiw, direct messages can be a swamp of nonsense, especially for people who post a lot publicly on social media platforms. They may not be intentionally ignoring you, but you get lost in the mess. Women especially get harassed via DM on basically every platform so there is a tendency to ignore DM functionality. Platforms that are already set up to facilitate random chats like forums, discord, etc are going to be way better for having a real conversation that could even become a friendship

i struggle to call those social media... they arent very social at all. theyre all just people yelling into the cloud. its already mostly a one-way event.

forums like lemmy/reddit.. discourse channels like IRC are true bidirectional social systems.

youre just using the wrong tools

Any form of site where people can communicate, be it, lemmy , Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc is creating a problem of people going that sort of thing

I think it might be an instagram thing where people just want to have lot of connections so they look popular so they make an tinder account to farm more people and that thing with exchanging few messages might just be for convincing you that the person you are writing to is real human not void or bot or nowadays ai so you dont unfollow that is my theory but i dont have anything to back it

Have you tried Discord? I've met a ton of people on Discord servers or in games that have a focus on Discord, and we talk at length on a regular basis, both in text and in voice. Hell, sometimes I'll sit in a voice chat with them and talk about nothing in particular all day or literally just sleep in digital proximity.

Instagram or any social media with DMs is probably shit for chat because it's literally not intended as a chat client. That's a function that's tacked on as an afterthought and usually pretty poorly.

Something like Discord, Element, or IRC is probably a way better bet. It's the same as trying to hold a conversation over email or Livejournal in the late 90s or early 00s rather than using an AIM, ICQ, YIM, or MSN client. Or like, IRC or even Palace or just some small web-based Java chat. You're just kind of doing it wrong, I think.

Maybe.

But schools also don't let kids socialize except maybe during lunchtime. So smartphones and social media definitely doesn't help. Its not really just "social media" to blame. I mean, with stuff like video games, why even hangout with classmates outside of school for fun, when you can just play videogames instead?

If you are outside, and aren't with someone, and also aren't on your phone, you just look "out of place" so what you see is people are constantly on their phone when they are out and about and by themselves, because otherwise it make them look "weird", ya know what I mean. If the social expectation is to just be on your phone, then its really weird to talk to strangers when they are on their phone.

So this is why we live in a society where people don't talk to each other anymore.

Mainstream social networks have created an environment of "non-committal" interactions. If you are in person with someone, it would be very awkward and impolite to not continue with the conversation if someone talks to you. On instagram and the like, you can simply stop replying and there is no direct "consequence", you go on with your life as if nothing happened.

In a way, all social interactions have become "entertainment to consume" that can be discarded at any time.

People use social media for different things. I never used Instagram to meet people, personally. I've posted art and I've uploaded photos just as a way to show long distant friends what I've been up to, but those friends and I mostly talked over text so I don't know if I ever even looked at my DMs.

I do actually think social media has made me bad at talking to people irl though, but for different reasons. The way I made friends on Tumblr was I'd post a character design and wait for someone else who designs characters to comment, and then we'd talk back and forth about our characters for hours.

Now I'm trying to remember how to make friends in person and it's so much more intentional. You have to actually ask questions and broadcast your interest in people instead of assuming they're going to infodump on you. You can't take five minutes to think up a reply because there's no going afk. You have to have interests other than a gay man you made up.