Some people are moving back to anonymous communication with limited audiences.

Twitter is anonymous, but 100% public. There is no way to limit your audience to a smaller group.

FB is not anonymous and mostly public. Private groups do exist, but you still mostly need to have an actual name on your account.

TikTok & Snapchat are mostly for people who show their faces, not anonymous.

WhatsApp shows everyone everyone's phone numbers if they are in the same group, not anonymous. You can also be forcibly added to a group of hundreds of people you don't know without permission.

Telegram and Discord are more like old-school IRC was. Just a nickname and that's it, no personal info needed. (IRC did have the hostname, but some networks masked it)

Both telegram and discord need phone numbers though - telegram upfront and discord after your used it for about ten mimutes.

Telegram uses phone numbers just as UIDs, they're not shared to anyone without your permission.

As for Discord, I've got a few accounts and have been asked for telephone numbers 0 times. It's only needed when a specific server demands it, haven't seen any yet.

If discord has too few selectors (IP, email, browser fingerprint, useragent, behavior) to identify you from or they are too generic, they will demand that you use a phone number. Low-reputation IP addresses do this especially, you'll be locked right out of an account for using one. I'd rather be able to just pay them money for an account than have to go use a VPS or residential proxy in order to avoid the phone requirement.

Unless it has changed, the phone number verification is server-based. If an admin sets the verification level to Highest you will be prompted if you attempt to join their server:

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/216679607

Telegram accepts Google Voice, and Discord doesn't seem to require a phone number (I never added one to either of my accounts).

Google Circles was a good concept but I presume poorly implemented. Facebook fails outside the school/university environment because most people do not want their private social lives to be public, and the start of Facebook was limited to young people.

LinkedIn is what the adult version of a social media would be, because most people are happy to share some aspect of their professional life to the public, and professional life is usually fake and a mirage.

Aside from locking your account so that only followers can see your tweets, I’ve been offered the option to restrict the audience of tweets on twitter (although I’m not sure if that was a transient experiment or if I’ve blocked my noticing the offer of the option or if I’ve asked it to stop asking).

That’s Twitter Circle:

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-circle

> Twitter is anonymous, but 100% public. There is no way to limit your audience to a smaller group.

This isn't true anymore. You can choose your audience now and there's even more features like that in test.

No, but you can limit the conversation to only the people you follow or mention. That reduces the discussion blast radius.

Interestingly, I mostly see this sort of limiting or disabling of discussion when the information in a tweet is clearly false.

Twitter is no more anonymous or than FB, Twitter requires a phone number these days. And they verify if it’s an actual number or voip.

Reddit is anonymous and doing well..

web3 is taking a stab at reinventing this without the need of phone numbers.

see

[1] https://spkz.io/

[2] https://nftychat.xyz/

[3] https://gm.xyz/

*disclosure i'm a co-founder of #2

Lol, the reason the phone number is used as an identifier is because because it's a pain to have more than 1 or 2. It's an anti spam measure not a technology problem. You can key a database by anything unique. Icq used chronological numbers for fuck sake. Blockchain doesn't solve anything here.

It's not the ID, it's that a phone number is relatively difficult to obtain (not hard, but still a limited resource) and unique. A crypto stake / wallet / something of value on the blockchain could easily meet such a criteria if well designed.

Yes could, but why? Why when any topic comes up “Blockchain zomg!!!!111”?

I used to be real hardcore into bitcoin, around the $1-10 range. You people need to give it up already and quit annoying the rest of us by trying to force fit an insanely inefficient technology into every aspect of life.

“Preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

ok, I'll bite, how does blockchain solve spam, and how does it do it better than that same process using an email as an identifier?

A development I'm quite thankful for. It's nice being able to participate to the degree expected of me by the people I actually know without being a terminally-online internet personality.

Yeah same for me. If I want to talk to someone, or share info with friends, I create a Messages group. If there’s more than a few people, then it’s a Telegram channel. If it’s work related or networking with colleagues then it’s Slack. If it’s gaming related then it’s Discord.

I look back at my Instagram and my last post was 2 years ago. All of the people that I used to see pop up, the people that would like my photos, and I would like their’s, those people seem to be gone. Friends from college, and high school have all been replaced by short videos of strangers, ads, and influencers.

I think the biggest missing piece for me is keeping up with people I know, but wouldn’t otherwise talk to (by any means listed above). It was nice to see those people pop up sometimes, but I have no way of serendipitously finding them anymore. That’s what social media was to me.

time is a flat circle, were back to forums. tbh they never left, forums rule

Watch Facebook/Meta ruin that as well soon. It's just to the monopoly of 1 company that we need 3 apps to communicate versus having a common protocol like email for IM

Group chats are the last place that is chronologically ordered, advert free and semi private.

I'd say move back even. We simply got back to basic usage. The web2 didn't improve relationship more than the technological novelty phase.