MAKE NEW FRIENDS BUT KEEP THE OLD

[nightangelca]

~* INTERNATIONAL FRIENDING MEME*~
Posted by elfy

I occasionally bemoan the end of the wild west days of the internet when I had a tendency to meet a lot more new people... largely because I was less cautious with my content and also didn't have much of a choice but to meet new people because most of the people on the internet were strangers, not people

Comments

[nightangelca]

It really is a lot of inactives! There was a time when my f-list was super-active, but I think it was around the time of the LJRP migration that people began really splintering off. Most of my former LJ friends are now on plurk and/or tumblr, but I really don't like either of those platforms for much the same reasons that you mentioned -- I'm very text-heavy and enjoy longer conversations, so neither is really functional for me.

I'm actually mostly on Facebook these days, as it's the most active social media platform with the largest volume of my friends. (Which I think is partially related to working in theatre. There's a lot of theatre people with a lot of FB friends on FB, I think because you meet a lot of people just by being in the business, most jobs are relatively short-term, and there's so much geographical spread. You might make really good friends working on a two-month-long gig in a city where neither of you actually live, scheduling means that you generally don't get to see people whom you aren't currently working with very much, etc.. And it's partially a networking thing, since the personal/professional line can be really hazy sometimes.) These days, it feels kind of like old-school LJ to me -- people can't seem to get enough of posting their "Which [series] character are you?" quiz results lately! XD

[baka_yu]

I am on tumblr too, because I just enjoy looking at pictures, but it's the one website I could easily just walk away from as well. LJ (and twitter since it's something I use to communicate with friends all over the world in a quick way) is the one thing I would most definitely miss since it's the one way to really look into the lives of my friends. If they are active as well that is, which, sadly, isn't always the case. But there is a pretty stable amount that keeps posting and others do it from time to time. And it's easiest to share my stories with a larger group as well because I know some may not post much, but they do read what others are writing.

In that context I completely understand why you are on Facebook and are primarily there. I have an account too since there are some friends I wouldn't be able to reach otherwise. Funnily enough, writing them a mail is a lot slower than going there to write, for some reason. Personally, I only ever go there if I get a notification that someone wrote me or after some conventions since some of those people are part of the group who I can only reach there.
I just don't like the website much and it's more of a necessary evil to me. There's so much going on over there, I like the fairly clean concept of LJ much more.

[nightangelca]

I tumblr all wrong and just have a couple friends' tumblrs that I check individually. XD It's honestly mostly a time-management issue for me. I know (...based on past experience...) that I could end up tumblr-trapped for far longer than I can afford! And Twitter for me is mainly creating/consuming linkspam and following a few chosen celebrities -- like with LJ, I have a lot of friends' personal accounts on my life, but only a couple are active anymore. (Gosh, nearly everyone I know/knew really has gone elsewhere...) In your experience, what would you say that the demographics of LJ use are these days? Are there particular fandoms that are especially active on it?

And, well... I've learned to tune out the Candy Crush invites. As genuinely useful to me as it is, Facebook has also led me to get very good at the discipline of "scrolling past"... >.>

[baka_yu]

95% of the blogs I follow on tumblr are my friends to. With the added 3-4 artists, 2 people who reblog very nice Marvel things and one person that has a very nice selection on nature/artistic/animal pictures. I follow around 30 persons there and since I do use tumblr savior as well, I don't have that many posts to scroll through. I know I could have the same problem as you, getting stuck there, so I try not to increase my list of people too much to avoid any temptation.
I use Twitter almost like texting, only that I can reach more than just one person there. With the occasional tweet if something good or really annoying just happened that wouldn't make an interesting entry in LJ, but might amuse people when I put it in 140 characters ;)
As for Fandoms, I'm not in many to begin with. Marvel seems to be kind of steady, not enormous or anything, but it's there. Sherlock / Sherlock Holmes seems to survive most of the time. Other than that, it's a little come and go with new films and series that are very popular for a few months but may vanish again, to be replaced by something new.

Thankfully nobody invites me to games anymore after they realised I'm not really there. I heavily filter on Facebook what I see on the rare occasions that I am there, so I could probably catch up even a few weeks in an hour, tops, if I really want to. Because even though I can scroll past as well, I just don't like to bother to seperate what's interesting and what's not, so I look at the kind of things people usually post and then decide if I want to look into their feed at all. Not many people are in the custom group I made that I glance into when I'm there anyway.