[klingonopera]

The problem with being a Facebook-user is quitting it while trying to keep in touch with your friends. Presently, this only works if Facebook itself would fail.

I believe if it were still possible to keep in touch with Facebook friends and content without being a Facebook-user yourself, we can subvert the Network Effect, which in the first place is what Facebook owes its dominance to.

A solution may be to force social media companies by law to adhere to a standard on information exchange, much like e-mail and http protocols.

If there is such a thing as "OpenBook" and it still allows me to communicate, comment, view and react to FB-content, I'd ditch FB in an instant.

[landryraccoon]

This is weird. I’m not on facebook and I keep in touch with my friends. Whats this weird jedi mind trick where Facebook has convinced people they can’t keep in touch off of it?

[throwanem]

It's sticky. People do forget. I've seen it happen too, when everyone I knew got on Facebook and I didn't. Over the course of a year or so, people just gradually stopped returning emails, texts, and calls. And Facebook event planning meant I never even found out about stuff until long after it happened, as for example with the two weddings I wasn't invited to because people used their Facebook friends lists as the only input to their invitation lists. They apologized when I ran into them after the fact, but they didn't change their behavior.

I don't blame them, because Facebook is designed to modify human behavior in exactly this manner. You can be present on the platform to have revenue extracted from your social life, or you can be punished as a means of encouraging you to get on the platform so revenue can be extracted from your social life.

Whether anyone intends this dichotomy is irrelevant. The purpose of a system is what it does. And this is what Facebook does.

[landryraccoon]

I hate to tell you this but those people aren't your friends.

I have plenty of friends. What's more, I know they're real.

I mean, how real are your friendships if they won't respond to an occasional text? What even does friendship mean then?

[throwanem]

These were the people who rallied around to help me start recovering from a decade-long abusive relationship, once I finally wised up and got out. Maybe that by you doesn't qualify as friendship. I don't care what does.

[landryraccoon]

And those same people wouldn't answer a text message or pick up the phone if you called them?

[throwanem]

Yeah, that checks out - some variety of this line of questioning plays out every time I have this conversation, so it's just about time you got here. Let's see if we can save some time here:

"Your friends must be terrible people!" - no, as we've already covered, they're not. They helped get me through some rough times. Terrible people, and I've known my share, don't bother.

"Well, then, you must be a terrible person!" - if that were the case, the apologies I got wouldn't have happened, much less been heartfelt. They weren't snubbing me on purpose, or deliberately cutting me out. I've seen my share of that, too, from both sides. This wasn't it.

"Well, then, what you're saying just doesn't make sense!" - sure it does. We're all busy professionals, no longer young, many with young families, all with significant demands on our time and mental energy. People drift apart, it happens. That's probably what it looked like, from the perspective of people on Facebook: me drifting apart from them. In a sense, I suppose it's even true.

Just that it didn't happen that way because I wanted it to, or because they wanted it to, but rather because Facebook wanted it to. Because as you grow ever more accustomed to communicating with everyone you know via Facebook, it gets ever easier just not to think particularly about communicating with anyone any other way.

There's an activation energy barrier to everything, not just to joining the mailing list for some SaaS startup. The more you get habituated to Facebook, the higher that barrier gets with everything else by comparison.

And eventually you get tired of feeling like you're carrying the relationship, and tired of feeling stung by hearing after the fact about another fun camping trip or dinner or wedding that you didn't get an invite to because the whole thing was planned on Facebook. Eventually you just give up, and maybe it takes a few years to realize that you weren't at fault, and neither were your friends. You both got screwed out of each other's company by a machine that is designed to do exactly that, because it can't make money from social interactions that occur outside its hegemony.

That's that punishment I was talking about. It isn't a metaphor. It is a consequence imposed by design to convince Facebook abstainers to do otherwise.

And to forestall your next objection, no, I don't think anyone sat down and planned it that way - probably not, anyhow; I don't put much past Silicon Valley, these days. But even if it's an emergent property rather than an intentional one, that's still no excuse. The purpose of a system is what it does. And this, again, is what Facebook does.

Anything else?

[jedberg]

It's the difference between broadcast and point to point.

On Facebook I can make a post and all my friends see it. They can make a post and I will see it.

As nice as it would be, I just don't have the time to have a one on one conversation with every one of my friends and update them on all the goings on in my life. And they don't either.

I even have data on this. I had a friend who was Facebook. She would post updates there, and then when we had lunch, I was all caught up and we could talk about stuff that's just relevant to the two of us. Then she deleted her FB account. So we shifted to texting more, but when we got together most of the time was spent having her tell me about the stuff she'd already had to tell everyone else.

She got so frustrated repeating her stories over and over to her friends that she signed up for another Facebook account, so she could go back to the broadcast method.

Facebook serves a valid purpose. There are many friends who I only get to see once every year or every few years in person, but I see on Facebook all the time. When we get together we don't have to spend time catching each other up, and can instead enjoy the time we have together to be in the moment and talk about what is happening right then.

[Cd00d]

That's absurd.

I left FB for the very reason that people weren't sharing the real details of their lives. At all. Most were post-less creepers. Many just posted links to media sites. Some posted in-crowd updates that didn't make sense without context. Nobody gave universal and honest updates about their lives.

So, I call BS on the idea that meeting face to face is exhausting because you're retelling a story over and over. Maybe after a major vacation, but in general, I share different parts of my life experience with different friend sets based on where we overlap. I may tell the same story several times, but it's because I either need multiple responses to process or I enjoy sharing the story.

Finally, you don't have data. You have a single anectdotal experience.

I'll accept your FB experience is more fulfilling than mine was, but I am highly dubious that there are a lot of people really learning what their true friends are living and experiencing and going through via FB.

[deaddodo]

I mean, the majority of people today keep in touch via IG, Messenger or WhatsApp. All of which are owned by Facebook.

If you've avoided all of those as communication means; more power to you. But the Network Effect is real.

[mattmanser]

It's a critical mass thing, if all your friends use Facebook to organise parties/events, you will eventually start missing stuff.

I know because it's happened, quit FB for a year a few years ago and missed at least 2 get togethers/random dos just because people forget to invite you off Facebook.

Although now I've got some friend groups that organise stuff on whatsapp, and others on FB, which is probably part of the reason FB bought them.

[marcusverus]

It is easy to stay in touch with your core network without Facebook. Facebook just extends that ease of contact to everyone you've ever met.

[bronco21016]

This is the most non-sensical argument of all of the "I would but I can't" Facebook apologists. I've quit Facebook while many of my friends have not.

I still trade memes, hear about going-ons in the neighborhood, get invited to parties, and generally have a functioning social life. I keep in touch via iMessage, Signal, Facetime, and GASP! SMS, the plain 'ol telephone, and e-mail.

You do not NEED Facebook to have a functioning social life. It simply removes some of the friction of maintaining a social life in exchange for wildly valuable information about yourself and your friends. Meanwhile, it seems to be contributing to the destruction of Western society.

So yea I suppose it seems like a fair trade just so you know about that weekend party milliseconds sooner.

[LeifCarrotson]

Or if your friends are willing to interact with you by phone, text message (not Messages(tm)), email, in person, or whatever platform your group selects.

It depends on your age, friend group, and location, but as a Midwesterner in his 30s, all of my friend groups - soccer, work, running, neighborhood, family, old classmates - have our primary group conversations over tools other than Facebook.

I'm one of (not the only) person in those groups who doesn't use Facebook, but everyone has a phone, text messaging, and email, so we use those instead. I'd say ~80% of my friend group does have it, so I'm sure I miss out on some interesting photos and posts. But there's enough people that don't to make it unreasonable to exclude people who don't want it.

Do you think your friends would stop talking to you if you said "Hey, I'm shutting down my Facebook, call me at ###-###-#### or email me at klingonopera@ if you want to get in touch"? They wouldn't. The network effect just isn't that strong, you wouldn't miss out on as much as you think you would, and I think my social life is better overall for the lack of Facebook.

[ryandrake]

If someone is willing to forget you exist and stop communicating with you just because you dropped off their favorite social network system... well, my guess is they aren't really your friend after all.

[Nextgrid]

We just need to fix the existing laws so they can't be used to stifle interoperability.

As it stands there's nothing technically preventing anyone from reverse-engineering the Facebook client API and making a third-party client. There's going to be a game of cat and mouse (just like with ad blockers) but it is doable.

The problem here is legal. Facebook recently (and wrongly) DMCA'd a GitHub repo of a PHP client for the Instagram API. That was blatant abuse of the DMCA regardless of everything else as all of the code was custom, not infringing on Facebook's copyright. However, even if the DMCA wasn't an issue there's always the risk of a lawsuit like with LinkedIn scraping (that thankfully seems to be going in the scraper's favor) or that App Stores are in bed with the big guys and will not allow a third-party client on the store to begin with.

[gentleman11]

I’ve been off Facebook about a year and have spent far, far more time talking to and hanging out with friends than before. Even after Covid, we just switched to virtual hangouts, chat, and online games. Facebook does not help you keep in touch

[lostmsu]

Problem is: how many of your friends now are up to date on what's happening to you? Probably just a handful vs maybe 20+ before.

Also, more hanging out with friends probably means you tell the same story again and again, over and over.

[landryraccoon]

Are you arguing that an in-person interaction is somehow actually less real and less meaningful than looking at someone's curated social media feed?

[lostmsu]

I am suggesting to consider that possibility, yes. I noticed the opposite is taken as truth without review.

[landryraccoon]

Well yes, it seems obvious to me that an in person interaction is more authentic. But I'm open to being proven wrong. Why would you argue that a social media feed would be more genuine?

[lostmsu]

I am not sure what do you mean by "authentic". As for the genuine: people have more time to think what to say when making a post on social network, than in a real-time conversation.

[landryraccoon]

P.S. Why should I be obsessed that people know every detail of my life? I kind of would prefer that they don't know every detail of my life. That strikes me as pretty narcissistic to be blunt. I would strongly prefer to not base my self worth on what people perceive of my online persona.

[glup]

> If there is such a thing as "OpenBook" and it still allows me to communicate, comment, view and react to FB-content, I'd ditch FB in an instant.

Same here. I love the idea of federated social media, but it seems hard to get e.g., my parents to use it. Is there something that could be done to make it more accessible?

[warent]

I'm curious to know how much value it adds to our lives to stay in touch with long distance friends over facebook. Didn't we survive for years on old fashioned texts, phone calls, or even emails? If they are really that important, wouldn't we just be doing those things? This might be an unpopular opinion and sound cynical, but really consider that if we dont want to use those forms of communication over Facebook, maybe those friends are better left as happy memories?

[tvanantwerp]

I used the think I needed Facebook to keep in touch with friends. That is, until I pulled 3 months' worth of my data and categorized it. I realized I wasn't using it to keep in touch with friends at all, and was just mindlessly sharing low-engagement crap I found online. So I stopped using it, became happier, and I actually make an effort to keep in touch with friends through text, email, etc., now.

[divbzero]

Text, email, snail mail, phone, video chat, and (post-COVID) in-person gatherings are all other ways to stay in touch with family and friends. In many cases, the quality of interactions through these alternatives exceeds anything that “social” media can provide.

[beamatronic]

It sounds like your social graph should be portable, so you can take it to a neutral 3rd party.

[gazzini]

I’m interested in decoupling personal data from the application layer. Solid[0] is one such experiment.

It seems doomed though... and even if it does “work”, I imagine the nightmare scenario where, in order to use FB, you have to give them FULL ACCESS to aaaaaaalll of your data (email, contacts, messages, etc...).

There are also technical concerns around caching / rate-limiting, UX concerns around the complexity, and operational concerns around business models that don’t involve a Dragon’s cave full of data.

But, I hope something like this works. Or maybe just better tools for personal blogs again?

[0] https://solid.mit.edu

[FabHK]

That would be a dream. Switch providers, keep your phone number ^W^W username and social graph.

[dirtydroog]

Your phone has a phonebook.

[mr_spothawk]

deleting your social network on their platform helps encourage them to fail.

[joelbluminator]

And who moderates OpenBook? What's gonna keep the new social networks feeding off Facebook from becoming another attention grabbing surveillance product?