Social media presence

[mtbc]

Dreamwidth is about as mainstream as I get in terms of social media. I have never had accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. To some extent, I get away with this because my family here do have such, so they can report to me any particularly notable local news.

In moving back to the US alone next month, to a new place in which I hope to settle, I should consider increasing my engagement with social media. I am sure that I will learn a little through chatting with coworkers but I should probably do more than that.

Many years ago I found Meetup useful for small casual social stuff around the city, e.g., if I wanted to watch some old television show, maybe if I brought some food over then someone else was putting on a small showing in their apartment. I also found craigslist useful, for both finding apartments and disposing of unwanted possessions. Local free news/sales papers, even grocery store bulletin boards, carried useful information about events and suchlike.

I wonder what might now allow me sufficient local awareness while not wasting my time with clutter. Perhaps local papers and bulletin boards remain useful. Online, Meetup and craigslist might remain popular even now; I wonder what else? Local newsgroups, in the NNTP sense, are probably obsolete. Is Facebook still the thing, and actually useful? Maybe there is now some alternative that I might should consider. Organizations announce through Twitter but they also seem to clutter their feeds with varieties of repetition and mutual backscratching.

Comments

[dewline]

As someone entrenched and entangled in both Facebook and Twitter, I'm not sure that I'd recommend either as something you'd want to directly involve yourself in right now.

I am tempted to look at Usenet again, if I can get at it somehow.

[mtbc]

Local newsgroups were certainly worth reading. My Usenet access comes via http://www.eternal-september.org/. These days, many groups may look full of clutter but, even in some of those, an on-topic post can draw worthwhile responders from the woodwork.

[dewline]

And that website gets flagged by my browser's onboard security system as "not secure".

I expect that my ISP can arrange a workaround.

[mellowtigger]

I started relying exlusively on Meetup for joining events around town. In 2020, however, some groups are imploding and disappearing. Meetup is simply too expensive to keep around for occasional online events. If they would just reduce their prices, it really would be a great product.