I've been on Reddit for over a decade. But I'm done with that site and want to do something else. What do normal people look at on their phones? Is it all social media? Streaming?
Around me I see people watching the videos that just keep coming. Next video before you even had time to form a thought about the last one. I don’t think you should follow their example.
I ride the public bus every day, and I can tell you its basically all social media, messaging, YouTube and phone/video calls.
But you don't have to do the same thing everyone else does. You can play digital card games, chess, read a book, or put your phone in your pocket and listen to podcasts or music. And if you're not commuting, you can plug your phone in and do actual stuff.
I feel like any time anyone is using their phones in public they're scrolling Instagram.
If you want to give an appearance of normalcy while maintaining a living soul, just get a Pixelfed account, follow a bunch of photographers, and scroll endlessly.
Idk but wtf are people always doing on their phone in the car. Am I the weird one where I can’t even think of anything I’d like to do on my phone while driving? I can change media and text my wife all via voice control if I need to.
Normal people? Probably mostly Facebook, Instagram and candy crush. You can just take a look at the top free apps in your app store but I'll give you a spoiler: it's 99% junk.
Okay so I actually checked. The top 3 are Temu (a ripoff shopping app), WhatsApp and Tiktok in my region
After quitting Facebook and Instagram, I spend a lot more time reading books on my phone. I have found two apps to read and listen to free books through my library.
Dunno about normal, per se. I have adhd and when I'm not forgetting what I was about to do in the time between having the thought and picking up my phone, I am often diving down some rabbit hole. This might be a quick Google search in a definition, or to figure out where I heard a word. For example, a friend recently mentioned acid reflux. So my brain thought "GERD?", "GERDY??", "THE HERDY GERDY?!?" which led me to Wikipedia, then to a handful of rather cool videos on Youtube of people playing the instrument.
Er...
My point being: Use it as a helpful miscellaneous tool. Like a physical widget that can go along with near any activity.
I have Feedly app and a bunch of RSS feeds about tech, world news, board games, video games, robotics, space, and pop culture. It’s great! Sure I get a few duplicate articles from multiple sites covering the same thing but it’s nice little digital newspaper. And if one site keeps publishing stupid shit I can unsubscribe from it and it’s gone from my feed.
I'm one of those psychos who flash custom roms just because I can, so that is a big time consuming activity I have with my phone, other than that I usually use Sync for Lemmy, Sync for Reddit, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Feeder/Feedly and Firefox Beta, among other apps.
My phone has an FM tuner, so I usually listen to local radio stations. Sometimes I watch TV shows or movies I downloaded on the SD card, but I prefer watching videos on a larger screen when possible. Cell service is crap around here, so streaming is not very practical.
Lemmy. Or Google news... Or like.. Snapchat I guess.. Snapchat maps is cool to see what people post all over the world. One night I spent like a few hours over Hawaii and Japan snaps.
People in Saudi Arabia mostly post themselves driving with loud music.
I read the news. Feedly rss reader which opens the articles directly into Firefox with no script, ublock and bypass paywalls add-ons. Very easy to concentrate on the article content when there are no nags or ads on the screen.
I am the wrong person to ask about this, but I read ebooks, play games, go on fora.
My wife cruises Facebook marketplace and other similar sites and buys furniture which she then resells at a profit. But I doubt that's very common either.
I practice chess on lichess and look up sports scores. Or else I go on Lemmy. I look at my phone a lot less now. Finishing games I never got to finish. Talk to my family more. Stuff like that
Libby. If I am sitting for awhile, then I'll make progress in whatever book I'm reading. I keep my library card churning with novels, science fiction, cookbooks and whatever book a friend has recently recommended. I mix in audio books while I'm driving. Average about two books a month or so.
Occasionally I'll browse recipes and silly cat videos on Instagram if I'm just killing 30 seconds in line at the grocery. And then lemmy about once a day just for current events.
I'm reading ebooks with ReadEra (adfree and unrestricted in the free version, bought it during some 50% sale to support the dev).
Else I'm reading news (news.google.com with a highly curated blocklist of >150 sites) and play a bunch of word games like Wordle, Dordle, Quordle, Octordle, crosswordle, fibble, symble, thirdle, warmle and whatever else.