network effect
Lucky that I’m a misanthrope so I don’t care about leaving communities and acquaintances behind.
Yup. I quit everything but Reddit several years back without a second thought in all that time because I lived in a big metropolitan city.
Now I live in a small suburb where all the towns and businesses post to FB, neighbors have tradeposts and active interest groups on there, the schools and Police post info there too. My wife has connected to “friends” we otherwise wouldn’t exchange info with.
All that has had me wanting to create a new account - just to connect. I was completely ignorant to the role it plays outside of big cities beforehand. Nextdoor is a really crappy alternative.
I tried nextdoor but nobody was on it compared to the thousands in the local facebook group.
The few people on ours are local real estate agents and severe weather alerts lol
Not missing much. It’s full of WASP-y pearl-clutchers.
Nextdoor is the Boomer HOA of social media
Yeah, it’s always surprised me a little bit just how strong they still are. While the often-online do tend to shy away from it, it’s actually still a preferred platform for the less-online, due to how easy it makes coordinating real life events. Also not the sort of segment that usually cares much about data privacy.
Never used any bar Reddit, then binned that for Lemmy.
Same. Lemmy is the only social media I use as well after I dumped reddit.
Obligatory: fuck Spez.
Also reddit - why still keep using reddit
Way, way more content. Lemmy isn’t even close.
But at what price!
Soon this will be a literal question with the paid subs and all coming
Must. Consume. Content. 🤖
I mean that’s why you’re here too. Lemmy would be all I needed if all I cared about was Linux and Star Trek memes. But lets say I want a live thread with hundreds of people all watching the same sporting event I am and chatting about it, I’m going to need to go somewhere else.
Besides from the Turkish shooter meme, there was barely any engagement in the Olympics here. Our interests here are so niche not even the largest sporting event in the world can get our attention.
Niche interests and/or local stuff. My city has basically no activity over here, so I still browse the local subreddit regularly.
Reddit has communities without active alternatives here 🤷
I have switched to using a WPA version with Adblock
I don’t integrate it with anything else, but facebook remains my best option for getting current contact info for anybody from my past. Even after the enshittification, it remains an effective Rolodex. Rolodex…I am old.
You’d be surprised how much you’re integrating it with everything else. Facebook has installed trackers on most major websites, and without the right tools blocking it, they are essentially following you everywhere.
that happens regardless of whether you have an account.
Fair point, but I still need a quick way to tell people about upcoming funerals. On the plus side, I’m between the wave of friends’ baby photos and the wave of grandbaby photos. Which is nice.
And yet your life would be almost literally no different if you didn’t speak to a single one of them again after dropping the charade of cordiality and reminiscing.
You clearly haven’t met all of my friends.
Sure I haven’t, Bob.
Hahaha! It was a good bet on my part.
That’s how I’m connecting with friends and family for the most part.
Yes because none of them have a goddamn phone number, can’t talk to em unless you have a facebook account!!!
Jesus fucking Christ what a bunch of bullshit
We are your friends now and we are your new family
Cool can i borrow a few thousand dollars? Thanks
Sure! You first have to send me a comparatively small sum of 500$ so that I have your address and than I will send you 7000$ at a not specified moment in the relatively near future.
If that sounds shady, it’s not, I’m a Persian prince and therefore not allowed to do scams. It’s forbidden by law here in Persia.
<3 ily xxxooo
That’s unsettling
It is at first but you will soon get used to it
True, brother
Rockandstone.mkv
Half of that is why I ditched it in the first place
Everyone seems to make this excuse for using Meta like it’s no possible without meta. They’re a piece of shit company, we shouldn’t be making excuses to stick around.
Come up with a reasonable replacement product, and do it through an ethical company, and people might switch. But you’re not gonna convince people to give up the convenience they’ve relied on for a decade without a really good reason, and “this company is evil” is way too esoteric for most people.
"this company is evil” is way too esoteric for most people.
Good point, and to push their argument further… what company isn’t? If they used that rebuttal i would have nothing to say.
Companies have forced everyone else out of what was previously a functioning non-commercial space. We have more choices than “evil company” vs “nothing”
That’s all well and good to say to me, cuz i agree with you, but that line is useless to someone who is on a social media platform because others are, and it is easy, and what they know.
These extra choices, the free ones… They gonna work as well as what they’re using? No. We’re not talking about netsavvy folks here. Can you rephrase your previous comment into one that is convincing for someone like that?
Hell, related topic: even Lemmy.world, the largest instance i know of is affiliated with Meta in some way. Do you block Lemmy world? I don’t. I used to but was missing too much. So who would i be talking down to these folks?
Oh come on, that’s like “all politicians lie”. There is “I record every millisecond of your private life to sell to anybody with a fat enough wallet” evil and there is “I am raising prices this year because I can” evil. The two are not the same.
If it’s unclear, this is a hypothetical conversation between me and a Facebook user. Is there something you could say to an existing Facebook user to get them to change? Context is “convincing, effective arguments”.
Facebook is the absolute worst of the worst though. They have proven time and time again that they will always be as anti-consumer as the law allows - and then some. It only takes a peek at their wikipedia page to see how true this is.
I can’t convince all my acquaintances in my group chats to switch platform.
They don’t got a goddamn phone to SMS with???
Let me guess, you still use Twitter too
They don’t have email?
It’s 2024. People don’t socialize over email anymore.
Social media has barely been around for 20 years, we kept in contact with those we wanted to just fine before it. But now with social media you’re in contact with all of them all the time, even the ones you aren’t particularly excited to see once a year on the holidays.
But… But… Marketplace something something
I actually tried to use marketplace a few weeks ago. It was an unmitigated disaster. People either didn’t respond, had stale posts for items, or couldn’t get their act together to have a conversation (even with 12 hours between messages) about how to get shit out of their house. I have never yearned for old-fashioned yard sales so much.
I’ve used Marketplace many times without issue.
Haven’t used Facebook in probably a decade, but as a photographer Instagram is still the most active platform I’ve tried. Vero is weird. PixelFed is pretty empty, mostly people’s snapshots. Others either cost money or aren’t really good on mobile.
How about cara.app or is this more like art and not photos?
That is what I’ve heard. Like digital painting and stuff.
Only for marketplace. Haven’t posted anything in years, and before that never anything meaningful.
I have a bare bones FB profile for neighborhood info (were those gunshots?), school stuff, local businesses, etc.
Dang. Friend, I think you need a new neighborhood.
Spoiler alert: it’s never gunshots
I don’t know anyone under 65 that uses FB unless it’s their only contact method for a friend / family member.
In comparison to things like Twitter and Reddit, Facebook has actually been the most difficult to completely abandon because of Messenger. All my friends use it, and an attempt at switching everyone to Signal didn’t manage to stick. I would delete my Facebook account right now if it were possible to separate the two services.
Facebook is for boomers resistant to change. Or the tech-illiterate.
Well craigslist in my area is kinda dead so Facebook market place is the only place to do local buying and selling. It also acts as a lowest common denominator, I find someone on facebook send a few messages until we agree on some other social media to continue communicating on. Then My family uses What’s app and has done since before they were acquired by meta. Getting them to switch is something I push for, but I’m not holding my breath.
There’s also Nextdoor, but fuck that noise with all the nimby and boomers on that platform “omg I saw a weird guy that was…. walking! Should I call the police?”
Edit: I typed “doomers” and it autocorrected to “boomers”, I’m leaving it
Well, using FB since something like 2008, but for years now it’s only for groups, like retro toys group, spotted group, neighbour group, camping group, moped group, etc.
I don’t have friends anymore who post stuff like their dishes or things like this, nor do I post. The feed is basically ads and far-right conspiracy nowadays,
I’m using Marketplace a lot too, this is the shit here, everyone is using it.
I’ve spent nearly 2 decades connecting with friends, family, coworkers, and associates through Facebook. I hate Facebook, and actually use F.B. Purity to remove 90% of the content, ads, promotional junk, games, marketplace, etc. from it. But as the main way I’ve stayed in touch with people I’ve known over the course of my life, I just can’t dump it.
Besides that, I have Lemmy (of course); LinkedIn, which I’m not really using anymore since I retired young; Imgur, which I mostly just use for browsing memes; and Discord, which I only use to communicate with a few close friends whom I game with weekly.
I created accounts for Instagram and Whatsapp, but I’ve never used them. They were too self-promoting for my taste. When they first became a thing, they were all about taking selfies and sharing your face with your friends. I wanted discussion and interesting content, not to see selfies. They created the generation of “social media influencers” who think they’re entitled to things in life because X number of people follow them on social media.
I also avoid TikTok like the plague. I was in the US military (working as an IT guy) when TikTok became popular, and we discovered it embedded itself in your phone so deeply, you couldn’t fully remove it even when uninstalling. Plus, it gave itself full admin rights to your phone, then started trickling your data to Chinese servers. Which is why the president made such a big deal about TikTok being a national security threat. It’s not because we didn’t get along with a Chinese company; it’s because a foreign government was collecting personal data and building profiles on American citizens. I will never touch that program as long as I live.
I’m 40 years old, by the way. A lot of people say Facebook is only used by old people, and yes, I just turned 40 and am finally becoming an “old person.” But I’m still relatively young compared to people’s expectations of Facebook users. And I have a lot of Facebook friends who are much younger than I am.
