On Using Facebook Again

On Using Facebook Again

Byrichard

Recently I reverted to Facebook due to the death of Twitter, but also because of the political bias I see on Mastodon instances. That political bias has encouraged me to take a break from that social network until the conflict is over.


Critical Mass


Yesterday I saw that two people on Facebook discussed leaving Facebook just at the time when I am returning. I am returning for two reasons. The first is that with three billion people you’re more likely to find people who think like you do. It’s also about being local. I can spend thousands of hours on Mastodon, looking for conversations, and people, only to learn that they live thousands of kilometres away, and that they don’t want to meet in person anyway. It’s not that I want to meet in person, but that I like for the option to exist.


Groups, Pages and Threading


Another reason to use Facebook is that groups already exist. We don’t need to follow primitive hashtags and other sub-standard technologies. We can join a group, or like a page, and we see the discussion threads that are associated with that page or group.


Europeans As Customers


Since the beginning of this month Europeans have become customers of Facebook, if they choose to be. If we want to we can pay 9CHF99 per month. Part of me things that this is disgusting and absurd. Why would we pay to be part of a network that plays with our sense of misery and unhappiness. The reason is that if, and when Facebook misbehaves, if Europeans are paying, then Europeans can destroy their accounts, or withhold payments.


One of the things YoUTube, Facebook, Spotify et all should realise is that if we pay not to see ads, and then stop paying, those ads that we barely tolerated before becoming paying customers will become intolerable if we stop paying. That’s when Facebook will lose the most users.


How Does It Compare to Mastodon


For a Mastodon instance you would pay from 5 euros per month for Linode for masto.host and up to 120 CHF per months for a Swiss option. Some Mastodon Instances cost around 25 Euros per month, from several providers. This means that if you’re one user Facebook is cheaper, and there are 2.6 billion active users per month. Mastodon and the Fediverse are much smaller, for now.


Point of Friction


I disagree with Facebook’s policy that we should pay for Facebook, Instagram and potentially threads as three separate accounts with an additional fee for each account. If and when we need to pay a supplement for Instagram I will deselect that account, or maybe even delete it, rather than pay more. Instagram went from being one of my favourite apps before Facebook bought it, to a worthless pile of waste when Facebook destroyed the sense of community that had once been so pleasant.


Threads


From what I heard and saw Threads sounds awful, with very little control by users. It seems like a text based Instagram, and Instagram in its current form is worthless. Instagram is not worth an extra six CHF per month.


Paradoxically it is not the ads that bother me the most, but the influencer garbage. I don’t want to see the idealised lives of influencers. I want to see the real lives of the friends I follow on Instagram. It’s because of Influencer noise that I dumped Instagram.


And Finally


My return to Facebook is due to one key reason. Twitter is no longer a community I want to be part of and although the Fediverse is filled with ideals, I am not ready to spend hundreds of days, weeks or months rebuilding a community on a platform where I am trolled and personally attacked for my views or opinions. I have already erased several accounts on instances.


If Glocals was still alive I would use that site to find people to do things with and if Meetup proposed free outdoor events I would join those. In the end Facebook offers a local community with topics I am interested in. As absurd as it feels to return to Facebook, it is the least worse option, for now.

Mastodon has Eight Million Accounts Today
| |

Mastodon has Eight Million Accounts Today

Byrichard

Mastodon has reached eight million accounts today. That’s close to the population of Switzerland and two million less than London. Mastodon is growing because it was ready to scale up at the right time. As Musk and Twitter shift towards the Right, and as Musk perpetuates conspiracy theories, on a daily basis, so he prepares the idea conditions for other social networks and opportunities to thrive.


As Twitter loses users, and engagement so other social networks are more likely to thrive. Every day I check on Twitter, and every day I am repulsed by what he is sharing. Every day I feel that I should abandon Twitter. I don’t, for now, for a simple reason. On twitter there are conversations to be had twenty four hours a day, whereas on Mastodon, you have to wait for people to show up. That wait is a good reason to do other things, like return to Twitter.


What I am waiting for, impatiently is for enough people to leave Twitter for Mastodon, for Mastodon to be entertaining at all times, without long moments of silence. I am not convinced that Mastodon will be the ideal Twitter replacement. For now it is a curiousity that has the ability to scale up as required, within the current requirements.


Mastodon is to “microblogging” what WordPress is to blogging. It’s a way to create an instance of a service which you can either use in solitude, and yet access what others are discussing, or a way of having a small personal community. We’re used to syndicated blogs. The fediverse is almost the same, but goes by the name “federated”. In both cases it’s spread across servers, more flexible, more adaptive to demand, and easier to sustain. Wordpress and other content management systems could be written to take advantage of this distributed networks of communities.


That’s it for today.

| | | |

Social media, loneliness and isolation.

Byrichard

“The pathology of social media is all about loneliness”

Social media professionals take the weekend off. Twitter users use hashtags so that their content can be found without being followed. Everything is turned towards discoverability rather than commitment and conversation.

Social media practitioners know that people aren’t listening attentively so they repeat and repeat in the hope of a click or two. Hashtags are just a way of pretending that a conversation has had an audience. It doesn’t measure the number of comments and responses. It doesn’t measure how long threads lasted before they stopped.

There was a time when people like me would read every tweet from people we followed and we would converse daily. It created a lot of friendships and led to a lot of face to face meetings.

In today’s social media landscape I do see loneliness rather than socialising. I see on twitter that people are actively posting only once or twice a day. On Facebook I have seen such a serious decline in participation that there is little reason to stick around. My generation were active in social media for a short amount of time and now they have retreated to “normal” life.

Whilst some people have hundreds of likes on their instagram images I have half a dozen to a dozen. Almost every like on Instagram is a person that I have conversed with online for years. There is a chance that I can tell you how long we’ve been chatting online, whether we’ve met in person and at what event and which networks we have shared. Twitter friends were trusted enough to become facebook friends. Facebook and twitter friends followed on instagram etc.

Facebook was a very active and social place when we were all at university and having the same social life. Twitter was a very social network when I was looking for work and meeting the London Social Media crowd, the French social media crowd and the Swiss social media individuals.

Ingress has presented me with a large group of Swiss people whom I have met many times recently as an active player of Ingress. Many of them are around my age.  We use Google hangouts to talk and plan missions and are in constant communication.

Glocals was good for finding people to explore new activities and locations with but the connection lasted only as long as the activities. There was little to no follow up socialising online. The Glocals Scuba diving group is the one I got along with best and the group with which I did the most activities. It’s a shame that this was an activity for people a decade older than me.

When I think of the social journey both online and offline I see that loneliness is not the pathology of social media. I joined Twitter because I love to try new things. Facebook was a network of university friends whom I saw every day. Seesmic was a network of people whom I developed strong friendships with that last to this day and Glocals was probably the only network I joined out of solitude and a need to do things on weekends. I like the irony that the network I joined to avoid solitude is the one that resulted in the deepest feeling of it. Eventually every social network becomes lonely but we would say the same about the city from which our friends have gone, of the bars and more.

Geneva is referred to as an airport hub. People come to the city for a year or two and then leave. As a result the refreshing of friendships is very high and it takes a certain personality to cope. Modern transportation; planes, cars, and trains create a pathology of loneliness and social media are part of the solution for as long as the social networks are frequented.

| | |

A move away from centralised “social networks” and “social media”

Byrichard

Facebook engagement has declined since farmville distracted people away from conversations and towards mindless interactions with games, the sharing of tabloid content and emotional posts. These changes have had an adverse effect on social networks and the way in which we engage with people. I have noted a shift away from individuals towards following “celebrities” and “thought leaders”. Rather than interacting with 300 people on your timeline, becoming engaged and getting to know people well we have moved to a “yelling to be noticed” model. I have many thoughts on this topic and will elaborate later.

Have you thought about how Ello, App.net and other social networks are trying to do what so many forums and discussion forums did before? They’re demonstrating how much context they are lacking. Instead of investing more time with social networks that may never gain traction I’m returning to this blog/website.

Two million members for the London Network on Facebook.

Byrichard

There are now two million people who consider themselves to be part of the London network. It is currently the biggest network Facebook has to the best of my knowledge. I know it was the largest before and there’s a good chance it has remained so.

That’s a lot of people. There are 117 events occuring just for today. There are almost a quarter of a million post on the group wall and the top three posted items are Clarkson’s story about bank pranks, Israeli girls and a crash on the m40.

Now what would encourage so many people to join this facebook network. Are they all immigrants or students, are they people who have friends in this city so they decided to become part of the network. What does it mean from a social point of view?

As i’ve mentioned there are 117 events for today, 165 for tomorrow, 161 the day after and so on. Does this mean that as a person London living in London I could get everything I want and need socially via what the London network is telling me is going on? Would I be able to fill an entire day with activities via this network? It could be interesting to try it and see what happens.

Are you part of the London network? 116 of my friends are listed as such. How about you and your friends?

Facebook Is Down

Byrichard

Social networking websites should never be down because their success comes from three factors; ease of use, accessibility, and reliability. With a good layout and good interaction, the website attracts the novice as well as the weather-beaten web surfer that’s seen it all. Accessibility is about it being easy to use on all browsers, whether mobile phones, laptops, or desktops. The third one is the key.


Facebook down


source 


One of the reasons I’ve moved away from Hotmail and yahoo is that they became slow and clogged up in spam. What this meant is you’d waste a huge amount of time waiting for pages to load and even more time deleting all the junk. That’s why I moved. Myspace is another case in point. Whilst it’s an interesting website there are several flaws such as page load time, too much freedom in layout, and more.


Facebook is currently the flagship of the social networking community worldwide because it’s simple, fast loading, and reliable. Today that has not been the case and I hope that they are not going to take too long with their upgrades. It was working fine therefore taking the website offline with no visible change in layout is just inconvenient and will see me looking for another solution… in fact, I have one. My website. This has been a constant since 1997 and has seen me through my IB, my HND, my BA, and now career building.


We’re living in a different age. Anyone can follow me on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, and one or two other websites but my flagship is my part of main-vision.com because this is where I have full control of the website. Facebook has become a very useful tool thanks to the number of people joining the website but recently they’re going through a bad period. I’m not talking about a bad period where they’re struggling to keep users or make money but rather bad in that it’s a hormonal teenager trying everything at once before gaining the stability of a mature website like Flickr after it was bought by yahoo or last.fm after CBS purchased it.


Whenever a website goes down I wonder about my future use of websites. One of the greatest things about RSS feeds is I can operate facebook remotely due to all the apps they’ve added. I add a few RSS feeds, take a few website API and it gives the impression that I’m on Facebook more than I really am.


The worst thing about social networking websites is that when they start offering a crap service you have no choice but to keep using them in order to keep in touch with what friends are doing. Last night for example I went to an event which was advertised both on Facebook and on myspace. There were not that many people but it was a practical way to keep in touch. That’s why I went to a silent disco, a silent rave, and know what others are telling us they’re doing.


I hope that this is nothing more than Facebook sneezing and that the quality of service we have grown to expect from the website resumes once more.