[Symbiote]

I use it for events.

It aggregates most of the small and large music and other events in the city into a single place, and shows me when a friend is "interested" or "going" to the event.

I have forgotten how we did this before Facebook. But there are many events only advertised on Facebook! For others, I'd need to check 20+ websites every week to keep up. RSS is no longer implemented on these sites, neither are aggregators like last.fm keeping up to date. (That's probably what I used before Facebook.)

My feed is about 30% content I've asked to see or would want to see, the rest junk (AI crap, far right rage, far left rage).

Two months ago I started a subscription to see if that would reduce the amount of junk, hopefully to zero, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference. It has probably hidden ads, but I had an adblocker anyway.

For a long time I've objected under GDPR to the tracking, which I think is why I get the mixture of political junk.

[nicklaf]

> My feed is about 30% content I've asked to see or would want to see, the rest junk (AI crap, far right rage, far left rage).

Since we both seem to use Facebook in the same way, I'll just point out that you can reduce the junk to 0% by skipping your timeline, and going to Feeds: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr

That will give you a feed of pages you've followed, and doesn't have any algorithmic or suggested content. I think the only pitfall is that it only shows you recently posted content.

[0xEF]

> I have forgotten how we did this before Facebook

Radio, newspaper, word-of-mouth, local bulletin boards, email and print newsletters, advertising posters, etc. I might be dating myself, but that's how we got word out about things in urban areas, back in the day.

The way I see it, as a person who has dealt with actual substance abuse and understands an addiction when it presents itself, we have collectively become hooked on social media and give ourselves all sorts of excuses as to why it's better than the way we used to keep in touch or get the word out. Every one of those excuses is really just us giving things up that we cannot get back (such as time and privacy), things that others profit greatly from exploiting, all cloaked in a Trenchcoat of Convenience.

It is likely very easy for you to advertise your music events with a few clicks, yes? It beats walking around town, posting bills and leaving flyers on corner store countertops...in terms of footwork, anyway. But we lose that connection with the community around us in exchange for the illusion of a broader network that is filled with superficial relationships, at best.

> But there are many events only advertised on Facebook!

And there's the rub. These event organizers are giving FB permission to dominate our lives and extract/exploit whatever it wishes from us simply because they wanted to do a little less footwork.

I used to go to local shows at least two or three times a month in my younger days, prior to FB or even MySpace and Friendster, for that matter. I never felt like I was missing any because I didn't hear about them, since it was not hard to catch wind of this or that venue's upcoming bookings. Even the punk shows, which sometimes were organized the day of, knew how to spread the word. We were all connected, but on a more personal level, and I seem to remember less in-fighting within the groups versus what I saw back when I used FB. Online, it seems like people are at each others throats with much more ease, perhaps driven by the social shield of a keyboard, which told me that maybe we were not really meant to be quite that connected with each other. Part of me blames the fatigue that came with our over-exposure to each other being the keystone to exploiting us on a mass scale, be it to sway political opinion, impose oppression or just sell us a product we never needed.

Social media changed our landscape, so it's pretty much impossible to go back to "the way things were," but none of us are expecting that, I think. We need new ways to spread the word, ways that don't exploit us as profitable and disposable soft product. Email could be a start. We beat that drum of email being filled with spam for so many years that it's hard to separate our views on email from that, despite spam filters being pretty darned good now, and various methodologies of mitigating spam to your primary inbox in the first place. There's at least a dozen newsletters I subscribe to and read because it's actually pretty darned convenient, now that my inbox is not filled with spam. Things have changed on that front, so where else have they improved? Is Bluesky a better option than Twitter? Would people still pick up flyers from the counter of a local pizza joint? Can we use VOIP numbers for SMS about local events so nobody's real phone number is being put on a list somewhere?

I see the problem and am open to solutions, but those solutions need to come from the people who think they need FB in their lives, I think.