Gaia, MySpace, Fark, Facebook, Reddit, here

1990s Usenet

Nothing

Reddit

Lemmy

Neopets

Nexopia

MSN

Facebook

Reddit

Lemmy/Piefed

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.

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

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

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

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.

IRC

ICQ

MSN

Bluelight

Other localised special interest forums

MySpace

Bebo?

Facebook

Reddit

Lemmy

Mastodon

I started with TALK on BITNET. Top that!

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

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

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).

I was a big Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fan in the 1990s, so I really started with h2g2. For those who don’t remember, it was an early attempt to make a crowdsourced online encyclopedia, but unlike Wikipedia, a given page could only be edited by its original creator or admins. I learned quite a bit of HTML from there.

Every page on h2g2 had an attached comment section, and because anybody could make a page, most of us used it primarily as a message board. There was a lot of roleplaying.

From there I branched out into forums. The big one I posted on was TotalGames.net, the joint forum for a bunch of video game magazines, because I read Cube in secondary school and they regularly posted stuff from it to get more people to join. One of the regular members, Android18a, set up her own website at SilentDream.co.uk and had an attached forum which had six, maybe seven posters. That was a nice, intimate community, and we broke the rules of the forum software by regularly posting porn.

I signed up to a few other forums but never stayed long. In college, I joined TVTropes and actively contributed for a bit over 20 years; I just stopped this week because the new owners seem intent on turning it into another Wikia. TVTropes’ forum software is quite good, really solid, and the community is probably the most thoughtful, rational group I’ve ever encountered online (except for that one moderator. If you’re a regular on the TVTropes forum, you know the one).

I was almost one of the first people in Ireland to join Facebook. During college, I did a work placement where I shared a house with two American girls (also a Polish boy, a Romanian girl, and an Irish girl who moved out because she didn’t get along with anybody). The Yanks told me about this great website called Facebook, which I had also seen mentioned on College Humor a lot. It seemed great, but I kept saying “Oh, I’ll join tomorrow” until everybody else was on it, at which point I decided not to join it because it was too popular (yeah). That turned out to be the right decision.

I made a Twitter account after college because I was a fan of Channel Awesome and they all seemed to be on it, and so was apparently every other famous person. I could keep up with Twitter somewhat for a few years because I was unemployed and had little else to do, but actually keeping up with that site is a full-time job. I tried getting back into it on and off, and eventually deleted my account just before COVID when I figured out I have clinical depression and just reading Twitter aggravates it.

I started using Reddit at some point and I liked it, but stepped back when I realised it was addictive and toxic. I look in once in a while, and every time I do, it seems to be getting worse.

Then when Elon Musk took over Twitter, I started hearing about this thing called Mastodon. I made myself an account which I use daily, but I learned the lesson from Twitter not to bother trying to keep on top of everything. Mastodon led me to Lemmy, which led me to kbin, which is now mbin, which is where this account lives.

I also have a Discord account, but Discord confuses and overwhelms me.

Oh, and I also used UseNet a little bit, but its heyday was long past by the time I got online.

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Reddit
Lemmy