network effect
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.
Nextdoor is the Boomer HOA of social media
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.
Lucky that I’m a misanthrope so I don’t care about leaving communities and acquaintances behind.
The only thing keeping me on Facebook these days is marketplace. If that wasn’t the main thing people in my city use to post used items I would have deleted it ages ago.
Yeah kinda hard to get around that
It’s actually EXTREMELY easy to get around that, so many fucking apps and communities for selling things locally.
If you’re still using fb software stop lying to the rest of us, you simply don’t care about how evil the company is.
Absolutely bs to continue giving meta interactions (and thus money) just because a perceived majority use it in your area.
It’s the same goddamn bullshit as “all the people I like post on Twitter so I couldn’t possibly stop using it!!!”. Get a fucking grip on your morales.
I get your point but you have to convince ALL the people selling stuff in marketplace to post it anywhere else that isn’t meta. There is literally no other app or community online in my local area. It is not a “perceived majority” it IS the majority.
You’re not wrong. The inertia people have towards this stuff is unbelievable sometimes. You will be fine without marketplace. You’ll survive if you don’t see fresh content on Reddit every second of your life. People act like FAANG is fucking Kuato growing out of their abdomen, inseparable but through pain of death.
Life existed long before this exploitative shit.
I mean, yes. But fbk marketplace is the quickest and safest way for me to get some local random to come pick up a bird bath I don’t want.
That thread is hardly accurate. Lemmy acts holier-than-thou about social media, so most people that do use Twitter or Facebook didn’t post because they’d be shit on or have memes created about how they use social media owned by evil robots.
I keep FB as a cloud contact list, nothing more
I still use Fb because of the groups/pages there.
There are mentorship and professional groups there that aren’t available elsewhere.
Plus, the local groups for my town/state provide crucial information about weather, taxes, traffic, river safety, etc. In general, it’s a good source of knowledge.
I hate that I’m giving up privacy, but there are also no other social media networks that can compete. I can’t message/Signal my closest 5,000 neighbors to find out which local/free berry patch is ready for picking. But, there’s a fb group for that.
This is the exact same bs people spew to defend staying on Twitter.
There meme pages can be really good if you find the ones that don’t have a racist fuckwaffle in charge
Don’t people use it mainly as a calendar? You can see events near you and get alerts to those you’ve signed up for. There are alternatives of course but I feel a lot firms and people publicize their event through Facebook.
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.
Well most of the people I know are on there as well as on Whatsapp so there isn’t really a choice unfortunately.
Still waiting for good alternatives.
Cancer? Eating feces? Stabbing forks in your own eyes?
There’s loads of alternatives!
No? Quit being an ass.
… I’m just joking, I didn’t attack anyone, only a multi-billion tech conglomerate. I don’t understand howi can possibly be an ass here.
“ItS juSt A JOkE”
No you aren’t. There are so many networks and apps far better than fb, you just would rather not switch. Quit the excuses
The main problem is always “nobody else that I care about uses/will use the alternative”, so it’s a dead end
Well, I tried.
I refused to use messenger for about 6years and I tried to bring people to signal (at least ~most of my family still uses it), but after changing environment and essentially doing a semi-fresh start, I realized I had to give up some (much) privacy to have any social life.
I’d really like not to have such a dilemma, but I dont think I would go very far with ~zero social life (would probably have strong depression, no friends and possibly many other issues).🥲 Fb is ~forcing it to us.
At least while I might have lost some privacy, I help others gain privacy (I help them use/find open source, privacy respecting alternatives to various programs).
Also, Signal really didnt help me convince people use it by requesting a phone number… Its hard to convince people that dont care much about privacy and want ease of access to give their phone number to an unknown app (I know it’s not that big of a deal, but they dont know what I know and dont care much even if I explain it to them).
PS. I’m still not making an insta account tho😅
I use beeper to connect to messenger, it works well. At least I don’t have to use their app
Hm, that might be a good alternative, but I dont think I’ll trust any non-opensource front end and end up sharing my date with more people (though I see it has fewer trackers than messenger and they appear to care about privacy, so hmm).
(Also, I have long and of sentimental value chats there and I wouldnt want to get banned for using any 3rd party client. I know they probably dont care and apps usually hide it, but ugh… (this is a bit conflicting to the fact that I have an exposed module that turns off ads in messenger and I use an open source front end app for fb, lol.))
I’m a hobbyist photographer. Facebook and Instagram are my main outlets to show off my work right now. Fortunately my livelihood doesn’t depend on that hobby, but I’d still rather have the online presence.
Facebook is for my family. LinkedIn is for work. Lemmy is for me. That’s all my social media.
Bands I play in, venues I go to and shows they announce are widely published on Facebook. I tried to stay off but it persists.
Normal people have friends and family and would like to use social media to stay in touch with them. There are network effects that make it practically impossible to switch. This is not something that can be done with the power of love and well informed agent in the marketplace.
One solution would be to nationalize facebook and other social media and turn them into public utility coops that are run democratically by giving the workers that work there a vote for who and how they should be managed. And give the users a vote.
Everything else is just fantasy. Facebook is forever. You’d need many billions in marketing and advertising to get enough people to switch. And then it will be the same shit.
Unless of course Elon Musk buys facebook, then it will be trash in less than a year.
Those same people have phones which have phone numbers and unlimited amount of apps that provide the exact same ability.
There are network effects that make it practically impossible to switch.
Stop making excuses for your lack of morals. If they truly cared about you they wouldn’t mind texting your phone number or using another app.
Let me guess, you continue to use Twitter too
Situation understander has logged on
No I don’t use facebook or twitter. But it’s more for personal disgust than for morals. Nothing you or I or ten thousand lemmings do or not do will change the rising domination of social media on our civilization. Same as our individual choices won’t impact climate change. It’s the same illusion that only serves to prevent actual action against a serious threat. Not even thinking or talking about possible solutions. Corporate control of the means of communication is amoral, and accepting it is problematic.
Maybe I’m wrong and network effects can be overcome through a well crafted alternative like mastadon. But capital translates into power for marketing, development, articles and regulation or even legislation.
Normal people have friends and family and would like to use social media to stay in touch with them.
Normal people stay in touch with their loved ones even if they are not on the same platform. You do not need everyday group chat noise for that.
Ah normal people. My apologies
There are dozens of us that don’t have a FB account!
I created a new one just to use the marketplace. I don’t post or read anything else.
Mine dates to '09. It’s been dead since '14. I only keep it around to use Marketplace since Craigslist is basically dead.
The only reason I keep my fb is so my mum can send me things she finds funny online.
