I see people scoffing at the notion that leaving FB is hard because that's where their family talks. That if you really cared, you'd go to the effort of being more directly in touch.
For me this misses how much social media enabled connection with a wider circle of people. And how those wider, looser connections matter.
As a concrete example, take my mom's cousin Barb. I had met her a few times over the years. When my mom was dying, Barb really showed up and helped, and it mattered a lot to me. After, we connected on Facebook. I got to really appreciate her and what she did for her part of the world, a hardscrabble slice of rural Michigan.
When her husband died, I heard about it through Facebook and immediately made a substantial contribution to the funeral fund. Before social media, I would at best have heard about it weeks later through the family gossip network, and I might not have heard at all.
Dropping connections like this is a loss, and pooh-poohing that is an ugly look.
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Yes, I too want everybody off of Facebook. And Twitter. But I think the only way we get there is by having compassion for the people still on those platforms.
We need that compassion so that we can understand what makes those platforms valuable and build alternatives that truly satisfy people's needs.
And we also need it in talking with those people who remain. Do you feel smart because you saw the problems early and got on to Mastodon? Me too, and good for you! Feel smart by all means, but please don't act superior. Approaching people with contempt has very limited power to make people change, and can easily get them to dig in.
And personally, I think that low-compassion interactions driven by status and dominance are a big part of the systems that Musk and Zuckerberg succeed in. Using those tools carelessly might change who's on top, but they won't solve the problems.
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@williampietri
I guess personally Facebook stopped working as a means of connection years ago. What you describe is familiar to me and is similar to my experience of Facebook maybe 10 years ago, but in the past several years Facebook has become really bad for connecting with people or staying connected.
Which is not to say that no one has anything to lose. It just surprises me to hear about people actually being able to use Facebook as a means of connecting when it's been so broken for so long
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@artemis Personally, I use the Feeds tab and the Friends sub-tab. That gets me a time-ordered list of posts from my "friends". It works for me. I drop in every few days and catch up.
I think other people who get value out of it just spend a lot of time scrolling through the default feed.
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@artemis I do agree that it's less effective than it was 10 years ago, as fewer of my connections use FB. Which is great! But I think that's more about my particular network. I totally believe that it's still quite valuable for others.
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@williampietri Thanks for mentioning the "feeds" tab! Now I can get all the junk off my feed and still see the local community groups!
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@williampietri Also for people with disabilities it may be the only way to contact businesses, many only have menus on FB. Same for contact with disability specific groups where a lot of folks get help and support. Yes you can start groups like that on Mastodon, others have but it will take time to grow. For many fb is a literal life line.
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@williampietri @uastronomer Strongly agree. Speaking as an immigrant. Whose family is spread out over the world (SouthAfrica/UK/Australia/France/Zambia/USA/UAE/Switzerland), not to mention good friends in even more countries. Facebook is the ONLY way to connect and stay up to date with such a geographically spread out extended group. For close family/friends, we speak, txt, call. Of course. But for the dozens/hundreds of extended family&friends spread out across all those countries, FB is an invaluable (and one of a kind) tool.
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@williampietri Not to mention that many organizations use FB for their primary channel of communications. I belong to a few local car communities that don’t exist outside of FB, at least not in the communal way it does inside. I’d need everyone to migrate somewhere else to avoid losing access to that community if I leave.
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@williampietri Thank you. I do feel it’s a necessary move for my conscience; but I will miss some of the groups on fb where I was active. Some of them were appealing to me from a professional or hobbyist standpoint. I’m sure I can find the information elsewhere; but not the sense of community. One group was a haven for people who were friends with a deceased political writer with a large following. I never met him in RL; but felt a strong connection from knowing him online for 20+ yr
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