U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions, Edison Research says

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that I really like Facebook and think that overall it's a good platform with some flaws.

Right now I'm messaging 2 different groups and about 5 different people, while organising an event that's happening in a few weeks, and organising supplies and camping for a festival on the weekend. After this festival in the weekend, I can post the photos I took on Facebook, where everyone can tag each other in the photos, so they can be easily found.

For me it's an integrated social and event management platform. It works incredibly well for this purpose. If I need to find a generator for an event, I can ask in a group chat, or even put up a timeline post asking for one, and it will probably manifest. I had a friend who's laptop died and he needed a temporary replacement, so he put up a post and later that afternoon was in front of a new laptop.

There are some really shitty features that I hate about Facebook though, to the point that they induce anxiety. For messenger, being able to see when people were last active and when messages have been seen really makes my anxiety build up. I know that people aren't ignoring me and just take time to reply, because I do exactly the same myself, but it still plays in the back of my mind.

The second really shitty feature is that the people you interact with more are the people you keep seeing on your newsfeed or at the top of your messenger. I had a bit of conflict with a friend a while back, so we were giving each other some space to cool down. I kept seeing all her posts at the top of my newsfeed, and she kept appearing on the top of my contacts list for messenger, Facebook would even give me notifications that "Alice and 89 others have responded to events near you tomorrow". It actually did my fucking head in to the point where it was causing significant problems with my mental wellbeing.

I understand exactly why Facebook does this, to increase activity and engagement. But fuck it pisses me off.

The positive features you mention are related to network effects or essentially to Facebook's "first mover advantage". As I see it, you should consider Facebook as merely the incumbent in this "connecting" role, i.e. don't give the Facebook organization any credit for the market position they find themselves in. The software must be adequate enough but that's a separate issue from FB's immense asset, its subscribers.

just for organisational purposes I feel whatsapp or wechat groups do a lot of what you're describing (except for the ease of photo tagging), and it leaves out all the stressful and annoying newsfeedy things you get on facebook. Which I think is pretty crucial, because that's all the social and data and ad driven stuff that facebook essentially runs on.

In general there seems to be, especially among younger people, a tendency back towards smaller communities, fewer strangers, less agitation and so on. Youtube, Patreon and Twitch creators seem to be particularly successful.

> It actually did my fucking head in to the point where it was causing significant problems with my mental wellbeing.

You could have turned off seeing updates from her. That would not solve all the things you mentioned but it should in almost all cases suffice.

Friends giving each other space is maybe a thing but not being able to handle seeing her name pop up at all is a very extreme state of affairs about which I would suggest consulting with someone.

I think it's unfair to expect a feature that caters to that. You cannot just full ignore somebody in real life either, e.g. friends mentioning her name.

Facebook does in fact allow you to block a person or unfriend them. If you and your friend are in agreement about giving each other space, those two options should be enough from a reasonable feature expectation standpoint.

If you are friends with someone and interact a lot it's obvious and generally a good thing that Facebook highlights them. Facebook cannot know on its own that you are currently "not actually" friends with someone.

The idea of Facebook was and remains great. This is a story of hubris, plain and simple.

You can actually "take a break" from a friend in newsreel. It mutes them for like 30 days. Don't know if it translates to messenger though

As I've said before repetedly, in order to use facebook effectively, you need to do everything you can to avoid the algorithm.

What I mean by that is that you don't want facebook deciding what you see. Instead, you want to control your feed as much as possible. I've found that to be true to some extent for every social media platform.

With facebook, the best way to do this seems to be to create a "friend list" of all of the people whose posts you want to see, and then bookmark it so you can use it as your main portal to facebook. When viewing the list, you'll see the posts and shares of everyone in that group (in chronological order) and nothing else. Nothing about who liked what or who commented on what.

Now, go to the list, scroll through everyone's posts until you see something you remember from last time you were on, and that's it. You're done with facebook unless you want to post something.

Similarly, my portal to youtube is the subscription feed. If I want to see recommendations, I'll go looking for them. On reddit I tend to browse r/all with a pretty extensive block list. Whatever I can do to stop algorithms from deciding what I see.