So, I’m questioning my stance on social media apps. Recently I started talking to a girl on a dating site and after a few days of talking today, she asked for my Instagram ID. I don’t have an active Instagram account because I hate their data-hoarding practices. For nearly 6 years now, r/privacy has been stuffing into my brain that Instagram is inherently bad for privacy. So I avoided it. Now coming back to the situation, I remembered that I created a burner account long back and I hastily reactivated it. It had 0 followers, no name, no bio and was set to private. I changed the username, followed some random accounts and gave this Instagram account to that girl and while sharing my ID I made up a story that I deactivated my account several months ago and reactivated only recently and my followers “vanished” due to deactivation. She immediately got weird about it and asked whether I still used the account to which I replied yes and then she asked if I had any posts on that account, luckily I posted some shitposts and memes on that account and had a couple of story highlights. She softened her guard now and gave me a follow request. After going through my account she got somewhat reassured that I was a real person and was not a bot. This has got me questioning my stance on social media apps, like whether I should follow such a stringent No-No policy or should I follow a lax approach. Last year, the Clubhouse app was getting popular and every single one of my friends created accounts and hopped on to chat rooms but I didn’t even install it solely because of my philosophy of privacy. I’ve noticed that frequenting communities such as r/privacy and /c/privacy tends to make users form a more extreme take on privacy over time and it also makes them more and more anti-social over time. I was a social butterfly 10 years ago and had a ton of friends on Facebook, in 2015 I deleted my Facebook account and in 2017 I passively started visiting r/privacy, I immediately got into digital footprint cleansing and burned most of my accounts. I slowly became more anti-social and didn’t use any social network- no Instagram, Snapchat, Discord etc., This has taken a toll on my social life. And in this debacle, I don’t WISH to be anti-social, I’m anti-social but not in a voluntary manner. I’m in my prime years and I need friends and relationships at this age but my privacy standpoint is mangling with those. We all know that having a social life is essential for dating and that social life also includes the use of social media apps but my extreme takes on privacy disturbs all of this- like I change all my usernames every 3 months. This kind of practice is seen as “weird” and “extreme” by many. In my honest opinion, I think that a user should draw a line between privacy and social life and should stop things and analyse if they think things are going downhill and also consume privacy-related content in moderation.
In this digital age social media apps are part of the social life, if you don’t have them you’re limiting your social life by not partaking in them.
Odd, I have plenty of social interaction and haven’t had facebook in over a decade. I even moved states and made an entirely new friend group, all without having a facebook.
Your problem is you lied to someone you were trying to create a relationship with. What did you expect? That she wouldn’t see through a hasty attempt to make it look like you actually used the account instead of just being a dead account? For all she knows, you’re going to leave her in a ditch somewhere and you’re just hiding your tracks…
Just be honest, and if someone’s not going to want to hang because you don’t have a particular social network already, they’re doing you a favor by not wasting your time.Find better friends that you’ll actually enjoy spending time with and communicating. Get a hobby or something…
Dude, being privacy oriented was not where you fucked up.
You fucked up by lying to her and coming up with some half assed cover story rather than just saying ‘i don’t really use it.’ That is bullshit behaviour, makes you look extremely untrustworthy, and would end in her rejecting you no matter your stance on traditional social media.
You are confusing social life activity with social media engagement activity.
If you wrote that post and came to the conclusion being privacy oriented was your big issue you got a long road ahead.
Your young and dumb and pretty much all of what you did was weird af and creepy. You will learn. Take the L.
social media isn’t social. go out and meet people like a normal human being like we have done for thousands of years. get a jmp.chat number dedicated for randoms.
sounds like you want to use social media but dont want the guilt, so you made this post.
Not having a social life and limiting your social life aren’t the same thing.
I’ve got multiple group chats going on Signal with people I spend time with in real life. I exchange emails and texts with people all day long, and spend time with my friends locally, as well as check in regularly with friends and family that aren’t local.
My social life is rather full, in fact.
And I’ve never had an account with a Meta property.
So don’t worry about limiting your social life, when there’s more opportunities to be actually social with people than there are hours in the day.