At least in my circles and where I live it’s pretty normal to shit on mainstream apps. Most people still use them, but if my opinion of those platforms comes up I never feel judged. In fact, since the social dilemma came out and after Facebook’s most recent controversies and name change I’ve heard more and more people speaking poorly of social-media, smart phones, and algorithms in general.

In my experience it’s almost as if using social-media is perceived the same as smoking was in the 80s-90s: everyone knows it’s terrible for you, but it’s normal. Now, in conversation there’s almost a prestige in saying “I don’t use Facebook” that causes people who do use Facebook to immediately justify using it by saying things like “Yeah, I only use it to keep in touch with family”, or “I don’t check it very often”.

Many of my friends and family half-joke about their addiction to their phones and apps, it seems pretty widely recognized now.

I don’t believe alternative apps, services, and platforms are necessarily better, so if I bring up the fediverse it’s usually in the context of me advocating for government forcing interoperability between social media sites to weaken the tech-giant oligopoly. Most people’s response is basically “huh, I didn’t even know that was possible”.

For using Linux I used to catch flak from my friends when trying to play games with them, but we don’t play games nearly as often anymore and anything we do play generally works on Linux now, so I don’t get teased anymore. Amongst every single non-techie friend I have they could not possible care less that I use Linux.