Social networks and communications platforms have value because there are people using them. I'm sure you know this, it's called the network effect.
Facebook's services are places where people in my demographic have accumulated social networks that sometimes forms connections in actual socializing.
When we throw parties with my best friends for a wider social circles, friends and acquaintances included, we still use Facebook events, to coordinate them, as an example.
Similarly, although I use Signal to talk to my closest friends, Facebook Messenger is still a functional way to get hold of people when you don't have their phone number or e-mail. Where I'm from, people my age didn't really collect phone numbers, since Facebook's convenient for that.
Transferring the connection between myself and these acquaintances may be cumbersome or awkward, and mind you, I'm the kind of person who insists on moving conversations to Signal after a certain point.
As a case in point, it took years to make Signal something that I actually use for real social connections outside my closest circle of people who humor my nerdy demands. And only succeeded thanks to
1) me having moved some group chats to Whatsapp for encryption the minute Whatsapp released a desktop app in May 2016. This moved the social graph to my phone book, which made it easy to switch to Signal over time. The initial move to Whatsapp worked because people already used it.
2) the larger network effect of Signal taking off, largely over the last year.
So, with all of this hassle in mind, I'm not going to tell people who, bluntly put, are at risk of being lonely, to drop useful social tools.
Thank you, I appreciate you going into some detail. It's frustrating to hear because it sounds like FB has now attached itself to a basic human need and can therefore never be removed -- but if you or those you refer to derive more benefit from that then the costs FB brings us then it's just another externality / tragedy of the commons.
I would not wish lonliness on anyone, though I hope in your example, FB is used to facilitate better social interaction, rather than subsume it entirely.
I really like the perspective you bring to this, especially this part:
> So, with all of this hassle in mind, I'm not going to tell people who, bluntly put, are at risk of being lonely, to drop useful social tools.
I think I'm playing a lot with the metaphor of Facebook or other internet properties as cities or countries—as locations where people exist and root. Similar to you, I have struggled to get people to leave the FB "city" or the iMessage "city" to follow me to the Signal "city." They may occasionally visit me on Signal but prefer to reside in iMessage or another place.
And then I feel bad asking them to move to Signal "city," as there aren't too many residents at the moment and not many whom they may know. So to take them to a sparsely populated foreign land where they don't really speak the language/dialect (different UI) can make me feel worried that it may disconnect them from the few connections they have back "home."
Anyways, thank you for sharing about your experience and inspiring me to explore this metaphor more deeply.
Facebook's services are places where people in my demographic have accumulated social networks that sometimes forms connections in actual socializing.
When we throw parties with my best friends for a wider social circles, friends and acquaintances included, we still use Facebook events, to coordinate them, as an example.
Similarly, although I use Signal to talk to my closest friends, Facebook Messenger is still a functional way to get hold of people when you don't have their phone number or e-mail. Where I'm from, people my age didn't really collect phone numbers, since Facebook's convenient for that.
Transferring the connection between myself and these acquaintances may be cumbersome or awkward, and mind you, I'm the kind of person who insists on moving conversations to Signal after a certain point.
As a case in point, it took years to make Signal something that I actually use for real social connections outside my closest circle of people who humor my nerdy demands. And only succeeded thanks to 1) me having moved some group chats to Whatsapp for encryption the minute Whatsapp released a desktop app in May 2016. This moved the social graph to my phone book, which made it easy to switch to Signal over time. The initial move to Whatsapp worked because people already used it. 2) the larger network effect of Signal taking off, largely over the last year.
So, with all of this hassle in mind, I'm not going to tell people who, bluntly put, are at risk of being lonely, to drop useful social tools.