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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@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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