[lolinder]

Again, it's instructive to think how things worked before Facebook.

People would announce things like that to each group individually, and often chose to not mention it in some groups because they're not intimate enough. We used to just be okay hearing and discussing the same announcement multiple times ("some of you already know this, but..."), most likely with different parts of the story told in different settings and triggering different conversation because the groups are different.

For the more distant acquaintances, people wrote Christmas cards (or equivalent) for the occasional updates. These can still be handled very nicely with an email list, and really don't call for the kind of instant-update sharing that Facebook et al encourage.

Is it less efficient to write and read the same updates multiple times? Sure. But is efficiency really what we should be striving for in human relations?

[noisenotsignal]

I mean, sure it worked before Facebook, but having grown up using Facebook, it feels much more natural to use social media than a Christmas card, email list, or whatever! Besides, those alternatives still feel intimate - you made an effort to reach out - and now you have to consider whether the other person wants that level of intimacy, will feel obligated to respond, etc.

The value that Facebook brought is now people can _choose_ to respond to you, and you can also silently see what others are up to without needing to explicitly catch up. It’s kind of like bumping into someone you know in public, and the resulting interaction (e.g. comment or DM from seeing the update post) feels much more organic as well.