First-gen social media users have nowhere to go

https://www.wired.com/story/first-gen-social-media-users-have-nowhere-to-go/

by fariszr • 2 years ago

74 92 2 years ago

est• 2 years ago

I feel abandoned after Google Reader shutdown. I never got engaged with daily long text reading again.

rtpg• 2 years ago

As always I will point out that The Old Reader is basically a carbon copy of Google Reader. It works, plenty of blogs have RSS feeds still (I just add more or less every interesting blog I see linked here in there), so you can get back if you want to.

It's not exactly the same, but it sure feels close!

walteweiss• 2 years ago

Thank you for the recommendation.

As the opposite, more minimalistic approach, I started to create different thematic feeds in newsfeed (a terminal reader), and I quite like the result. I check different sources, but it demotivates me to spend too much time with it.

emayljames• 2 years ago

Nothing matches the content that filled Google Reader though. It was buzzing, very much like HN.

maxglute• 2 years ago

RSS readers dime a dozen, nothing feels close to Google Reader + Google+ (circles lol), having friends on your contact list who were RSS users automatically linked to your reading social circle.

pupppet• 2 years ago

I never fail to upvote anyone who mentions this. I will never let Google live this down, in whatever small, spiteful way I can.

aquafox• 2 years ago

Maybe not a perfect replacement, but have you tried Feedly? https://feedly.com/

dewey• 2 years ago

I see this all the time and while at the time I thought the same there's so many good alternatives these days, even better than back then. All the interesting and small websites I want to follow still have RSS feeds so I feel like we can move on.

The two I use for many years already are:

- https://miniflux.app (OS, Minimal, web interface and can be used with all clients that support Fever or Google Reader API)

- https://reederapp.com (iOS, Mac)

latency-guy2• 2 years ago

In other news, social media apps continue to hit new highest MAU counts for all generations every year.

Disaffected social media addicts are way too loud of a minority. The world goes on.

LesZedCB• 2 years ago

there are dozens of us!

NoPicklez2• 2 years ago

I think being any age demographic that grew up before these apps came to rise you can remind yourself that you don't need to have them. I do remember a time when Facebook was purely about your closest friends and family, not articles, not random videos from across the world, not influencers, but people that were actually close to you.

I didn't need to send a text message any longer, I could send an instant message or a post to a group of friends and family. Social media really hasn't got much better for my quality of life than that. It's now filled with crap, random videos, random influencers, eat this, don't eat that, you're not motivated because of x, read this/read that.

Having said that, for me it's more about attention span, these social media apps have grabbed way too much of my attention and continue to find ways to keep me opening my phone.

I can clearly see that these apps are trying to keep me looking at content and that's it, they aren't really adding value to my life, they're trying to make it my life.

wahnfrieden• 2 years ago

I was using IRC and a few forums at that time. Those have been largely drained.

prmoustache7• 2 years ago

Funnily enough, I closed all my social medias account except the activitypub one and I am still loging in almost every day to 2 old school web forums. Activity may be lower than during the heydays but in term of quality and positivity it is much better. The moderators are doing a good job to keep everything civil, which is only really possible at a small scale.

operatingthetan• 2 years ago

I still follow some forums and the tone of the conversations there are generally much less combative and friendly than reddit, so if you can find some in your interests it can be great.

nicbou2• 2 years ago

Whatsapp is the closest replacement for me. It's private, personal and simple.

hbbio• 2 years ago

Private? Meta must collect tons of data!

ensocode2• 2 years ago

Thought the same. What most first-gen social media users in my bubble want is a messenger (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Matrix whatever) with the possibility to form groups/topics... ideally this should be open protocol and there should be clients for all systems and of course everybody would have to use the same protocol and not a zoo of different apps :-D

Nursie2• 2 years ago

I do remember a time when Facebook was purely about your closest friends and family

I used to be a staunch defender of FB on that basis - while everyone else was complaining of having hundreds and thousands of not-really-real friends and not finding any value, I was finding it useful to keep up with my actual friends in small ways. Friends who are all over the world and who may not see each other for quite some time. In those situations you often lose track of each other's day to day lives and the friendship slowly feels more remote and fades.

But they killed that. Step 1 was to take away all options that would allow me to see a chronological feed of what my friends are up to in favour of their algorithm. Step 2 was to insert more third party stuff whether I wanted it or not. No, I don't want to see short videos of the girl with the cleavage or the guy with the car or whatever it is that dog is up to. Please stop trying to make me.

Step 3 seems to have been to just flood everything with bullshit.

How would you like to follow this? This local group is suggested for you! This group that is not local too! How about one for nostalgia of a band you've never liked? How about 1500 variations on star wars meme groups? OK, maybe now one friend post. Now how about a cat thing? Or something about conservation? Here's a fan group for an old movie!

The number of IRL friend posts is now much smaller because people have moved off the platform as it becomes less useful. And it's harder to find the content they do generate because they're buried in shit.

By trying to increase my levels of engagement with the platform, FB, you've utterly poisoned it. I presume it works for some portion of users as they must be reporting favourable engagement metrics. But I'm pretty close to just giving up and its network effect feels to me like it's just in a death spiral.

154573452342• 2 years ago

By trying to increase my levels of engagement with the platform, FB, you've utterly poisoned it. I presume it works for some portion of users

I'm pretty sure 100% of their growth is coming from the developing world where they basically _are_ the internet.

pjerem• 2 years ago

I agree. In fact it’s pretty wild to think that Facebook used to be somehow … sane.

Before engagement algorithms, influencers and news outlets everywhere … it was just what your friends did today. It was mostly stupid and sentimental but that’s what humans are anyway.

I’m sad the world now looks like a worse place.

jader2012• 2 years ago

The world outside of social media and the internet is not necessarily worse. I think it’s just these things that have brought out the worst in people and the world.

Sure, in some ways it brought people together. But I think the net result is worse and has divided people and the world, and monetized relationships.

I wish we would collectively realize this, and just abandon these apps, and go back to real life connections.

But it’s too late for that, I’m afraid. The world is already addicted.

randomdata2• 2 years ago

It was mostly stupid and sentimental

Which is why it didn't last. When there was a novelty to it, people tried posting things to see what happens. Being something new, they didn't know what to expect. But soon the novelty wore off and the stupid and sentimental revealed itself as being cringy.

As such, the people made it clear that if they were going to continue to produce, they wanted tighter and tighter control over who can see it. They wanted private chats and closed groups, not a global newsfeed for all to see. Which, indeed, Facebook delivered on, but that also destroyed the "what I did today" content for the casual observer.

So, that left Facebook to draw on professional (or wannabe professional, at least) content creators to fill the void. And here we are today.

I’m sad the world now looks like a worse place.

There does seem to be a missing gap in news about regular people. Before Facebook you could read the newspaper to find out what your friends "did today". Seriously, look at newspapers from the last century. There are pages upon pages of stories like "Mr. and Mrs. John Smith invited Miss Jones from Nantucket to stay at their home this past week. A good time was had by all."

But maybe lacking that isn't actually worse. Perhaps there is something to be said about staying close enough to your friends that you already know what they "did today" without having to read an account in the news?

andsoitis2• 2 years ago

Break free!

NoPicklez2• 2 years ago

I want to break free!

nox101• 2 years ago

My facebook is still that somehow. In desktop I use FBPurity. On mobile, ... I think I don't use it much but checking it right now, it's not toooo bad? When I do I say "not interested/don't show" though it's gotten worse in the last 2 months. Loops, which I have zero interest in, showed up 8 posts in and ever 6 posts is trying to get me to add more friends but the rest was all actual people/friends/groups I was following

I wish there was a social media all my friends were on that didn't try to show me anything. All I'd want is chronologic posts by friends and family. Also, no "so-and-so was tagged ...", no "so-and-so commented on" unless it's my post or a post I commented on, no "you're all caught up so here's a bunch of other stuff", No "shorts/loops", No more than 1 ad every 5 non-ads. I'd use it way more if that's all it was.

I recently finally quit Instagram because it was all noise, no signal.

pndy• 2 years ago

It's now filled with (...)

All of this and more wasn't here when social media become a thing - we all had fun talking to each other and sharing funny, stupid and interesting stuff. Of course there were weird and dangerous people or communities around but they were keeping themselves at bay.

Personally, I believe that once social media become a collective virtual conscience it since then didn't do anything good for the whole society. On contrary - it seems it become a tool for various agendas, people who are trying to dismantle the known society and introduce some weird substitute propelled by ads and influencers. And they are giving us a false sense of happiness, engagement, commitment to causes - just as they artificially smile to us from these gaping youtube thumbnails.

fariszr2• 2 years ago

I never use Twitter to keep up with anybody who I know in real life, Its always where I go to get the latest news, the latest updates about anything I am interested in and musk doesn't seem to really care about that.

Mastodon is way too niche to have the variety and the relevancy of X and Facebook is just way too cowardly to build a platform that's actually relevant to real life and not just wasting time while selling as many ads as possible.

I think the best way to be up-to-date with people is ironically to use messenger app stories, they are almost always encrypted and will show up to all of your contacts without any algorithms in between.

rustcleaner2• 2 years ago

There is still one good class of apps to socialize over: distributed/mesh peer-to-peer messaging to replace your surveiled lines of communication. Four excellent examples in order of favoritism for me:

1) Briar. What can I say? Briar is well built and hardly hiccups. It's annoying that the desktop client is in forced upgrade beta still, no single-profile on multi-device, and there will likely never be an iOS version (iOS' fault), but aside from that for Android users it is bar none number 1. Where it lacks voice/video, it has groups, forums, blogs, and is modular with its transports (Tor, LAN, Bluetooth, Sneaker Net). It will absolutely work in a zero internet situation; for emergencies at minimum android-owning families really ought to install it and add each other. It will work with no internet!

2) Session. Session started as a fork/clone of Signal which did not require an associated phone number to use. It has since evolved to use Oxen (Lokinet, an onion network like Tor/I2P) for messaging. Session has multi-device profiles. Unlike Briar, Session has voice and video (and it is stable most of the time, over mullvad vpn). Voice and video rely on a clearnet Oxen introduction server still (this will eventually change) and the two participants stream p2p; if anonymity is desired then a trustworthy obfuscator is a must for voice/video. Session can be used metadata free if voice/video are avoided for the time being and Slow Mode is selected (no push notification services used). Session is my second because it is more feature rich for normies, works on iphone (that abomination*), and is quite stable.

3) Tox. Tox makes the list as #3 for being around a while and having a lot of client choices. Tox seems a little less stable, but that's more the fault of the various clients being buggy sometimes. It has voice and group voice (I think). Tox is not anonymous, so an obfuscator will be needed if anonymity is desired.

4) Jami. Jami is a GNU project application (formerly Ring) which I think could substitute for Zoom potentially. It can be a bit buggy sometimes dropping calls or video not working right sometimes [though I haven't used it enough to say it's not PEBKAC here at this point]. I make mention of this because it underwent heavy improvement during COVID to try to offer some competition to the dismal (proprietary, China) video conference landscape. It too can do multi-device profiles.

All of the above are short listed because they are easy to install, really quick to generate a locally stored and used set of identity tokens, and then trade strings with friends to link with them. Honorable mention because it's not a messenger but it is in the same vein as the rest spiritually: SyncThing. Ditch the cloud, sync headache-free! (MS should have used this to replicate their windows domain controller file stores IMO, no joke!)

We are soon entering the age of The Basilisk... except The Basilisk will be leashed, tethered to men who dictate upon whom The Basilisk gazes. Stop being an NPC when it comes to your data and privacy habits, and start acting like a strategic player... always practice all of the Safe SECs!

(* Disclosure: I daily drive Qubes OS and GrapheneOS.)

refulgentis• 2 years ago

Are these for socialization? They sound like one to one communication with preestablished contacts

prmoustache7• 2 years ago

Yes you won't meet anyone on these.

OTOH I haven't met anyone through FB, twitter or instagram either.

rustcleaner2• 2 years ago

Session has Communities. Also if there is a network effect then the group functions of these programs can facilitate larger social group communications (Communities with Session, forums/blogs/groups with Briar). OK fine casting a net as wide as $GLOBE isn't really a thing in these, but then again the over-pseudosocialization may be the thing to avoid (there is no intimacy in having only a sea of distant acquaintances).

h0p3• 2 years ago

In my experience, Tox qua qTox and Toxic has been the most stable of the options you've listed. Retroshare is another fine (though perhaps fiddly) example, and it has the longest standing communities of any of these (I see about ~2.3k people right now), with plenty of non-voice/vidya features; it also works with i2p, not just tor.

crotchfire2• 2 years ago

Tox is by far the most stable in my experience.

It's the only one that is truly decentralized -- no DNS, no WebPKI, no Tor "authorities". Its DHT is rock solid, second only to bittorrent's. And Tox's NAT-holepunching capabilities are amazing, due to the way they're integrated with the DHT.

Tox was being used for a lot of the stuff that people think Tailscale invented -- five years ago.

DoItToMe81• 2 years ago

Tox is alive again? I thought it was abandoned when the protocol was thought to have insurmountable security problems.

crotchfire2• 2 years ago

You're confusing Tox with something else.

magic_hamster• 2 years ago

This was a disappointing read. There's no data in there. No research. Just a couple of opinions. I can relate, but what I'd really like to see is some usage data for social apps with more insight.

prmoustache7• 2 years ago

Also author do not really try to evaluate if the evolution comes from this generation suffering from enshitification of social medias they used to love or if it is just a natural part in one's life to reconsider some activities, especially when reaching the thirties and fourties.

It could also be based on the social circles those person haves. I had never been big into social medias but when I moved in another country and divorced 5 years ago I found myself with a completely reduced social circle apart from my coworkers. Most locals are very welcoming but also very superficial/hypocritical: you will meet people in a bar and most they will act like a long time friend and give you their number but past that first encounter most are either not reliable or will decline all invitations because they already have a big enough social circles and stacked agenda and don't care inviting you. So you are mostly stuck with meeting other expatriates who are more keen to build relationships and for that it is easier to enter organized events (otherwise you just meet tourist that leave the week after). Most social events where I would have the possibility to encounter people are now only announced on social medias so I ended up using facebook for a 2-3 years at fourty-something despite not liking that platform.

otterley2• 2 years ago

I think they meant third-gen, with Usenet/BBS, IRC, and LiveJournal communities all preceding them by years.

prmoustache7• 2 years ago

The term social media didn't exist at that time.

otterley2• 2 years ago

Perhaps so, but just because we didn’t call something by a name at the time doesn’t mean that’s not what it was!

angled• 2 years ago

A scary email I got a few weeks ago was a virtual gift for my 21st anniversary on LJ.

In those days, you needed an invitation!

Ekaros• 2 years ago

Yeah, it feels just wrong to call Facebook and twitter first gen. When sites like MySpace or here irc-galleria existed years before either of those two. With everything that we can consider as social media.

hiAndrewQuinn• 2 years ago

Social media is pretty cool. I met my wife, a ton of business contacts, and most of my best friends through social media, so I'm probably an outlier case in just how positive an impact it had on my life. But it was a very very strong positive indeed, and contributed greatly to my agreeing with patio11 about the internet being the caps-G caps-dub Great Work of humanity.

I don't feel particularly bad that my children likely won't have the same social media experience that I have. They'll probably have a much better one, refined by a few extra decades of free market practices figuring out better ways of getting people what they really want it out of it. It's entirely possible that in a decade or so meeting people first online, then irl will be much more common than it is today. I don't think that's a bad thing in the slightest.

javaunsafe2019• 2 years ago

I don’t believe you.

hit8run• 2 years ago

I’m a little surprised the author didn’t mention Reddit.

tayo42• 2 years ago

I feel like reddit is the biggest site that no one talks about using.

over_bridge• 2 years ago

A site with accounts that you never want linked to your real self, or your other accounts, under any circumstances. It bucks the trend of every profile linking to every other one somewhat

prmoustache7• 2 years ago

Even if it has a social aspect to it I wouldn't strictly call it a social media. It looks more like a fucked up mix between a web forum and a tool like stack overflow.

vaylian• 2 years ago

This. I draw a line between 1) sites where the author of some content is very visible and 2) sites where you need conscious effort to check out who wrote something (like reddit, HN, wikipedia). The former is social media. The latter is just web 2.0.

OldGuyInTheClub5• 2 years ago

I still long for the days of Zeroth-gen tech: Usenet, listservs, and bulletin boards. I miss the focused discussions, some of which turned into face-to-face contacts that have lasted for 25+ years. Reddit never scratched the itch. The Stack Overflow network did not either especially when my questions, carefully worded to comply with the guidelines, got the blockhammer anyway.

My best alternative so far is searching the HN archives at least for certain kinds of technical questions. Lots of firepower here despite it not being a Q&A site.

(Never used Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter)

rrr_oh_man3• 2 years ago

The Stack Overflow network did not either especially when my questions, carefully worded to comply with the guidelines, got the blockhammer anyway.

Tangent, but: I've honestly never stumbled upon a question on SO that had been closed objectively unfairly. Not in 5 or so years, anyway. Can you maybe share a story?

OldGuyInTheClub5• 2 years ago

~8+ years ago: I wanted to know if/how I could accomplish X with tool Y in the relevant group. Showed examples of what I had tried with negative or inconclusive results, listed some SO and non-SO references I consulted, and specifically said I was _not_ looking for alternate tool recommendations since that was against the guidelines.

Got closed because I was asking for recommendations (!) which was against the posting guidelines that I obviously had not read.

There was another ~1-2 years before that which got a few helpful responses/discussion and one or two that were off base. It got closed for attracting low quality responses.

Suffice it to say I wasn't lazily shotgunning SO but posted only when thorough research and experimentation hadn't gotten me over the hump.

shzhdbi09gv8ioi3• 2 years ago

I miss the focused discussions

There are many such communities alive and well today, on for example Discord.

Here's one I use often, for the Bevy game engine: https://discord.gg/bevy with 3100 users online.

The issue as I see it with reddit et al is they are too open and too large.

When there are too many unknown people around, users tend to treat each other as strangers and that can turn ugly fast.

I think this is related to tribalism [1], where you can have relations and "know" a couple of hundred people, but with too many people around you no longer feel the same connection with them, they are all strangers to you.

That's just my take, but I think there's something to it. Most if not all enjoyable groups I found, even on reddit and facebook seemed to be working because there were just a few hundred to thousand people, rather than a 500k subreddit. The same held true on older forums, where usually you have a few hundred active users.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribalism

OldGuyInTheClub5• 2 years ago

I have not used Discord and was under the impression it is realtime chat like IRC. The services I mentioned were asynchronous and after AltaVista/Hotbot/Google, searchable. Happy to be corrected if that's wrong.

OldGuyInTheClub5• 2 years ago

I don't want to say that Usenet/Listservs/Bboards were perfect by any means. The ones that lasted a while did develop "in groups" that could be aloof to newcomers. Kat Nagel's insightful "The Natural Life Cycle of Mailing Lists" from the mid-to-late 90s (I think) resonates:

https://www.chipford.com/list/list_life.htm

"Every list seems to go through the same cycle:

1. Initial enthusiasm (people introduce themselves, and gush a lot about how wonderful it is to find kindred souls).

2. Evangelism (people moan about how few folks are posting to the list, and brainstorm recruitment strategies).

3. Growth (more and more people join, more and more lengthy threads develop, occasional off-topic threads pop up).

4. Community (lots of threads, some more relevant than others; lots of information and advice is exchanged; experts help other experts as well as less experienced colleagues; friendships develop; people tease each other; newcomers are welcomed with generosity and patience; everyone -- newbie and expert alike -- feels comfortable asking questions, suggesting answers, and sharing opinions).

5. Discomfort with diversity (the number of messages increases dramatically; not every thread is fascinating to every reader; people start complaining about the signal-to-noise ratio; person 1 threatens to quit if other people don't limit discussion to person 1's pet topic; person 2 agrees with person 1; person 3 tells 1 & 2 to lighten up; more bandwidth is wasted complaining about off-topic threads than is used for the threads themselves; everyone gets annoyed).

6a. Smug complacency and stagnation (the purists flame everyone who asks an 'old' question or responds with humor to a serious post; newbies are rebuffed; traffic drops to a doze-producing level of a few minor issues; all interesting discussions happen by private email and are limited to a few participants; the purists spend lots of time self-righteously congratulating each other on keeping off-topic threads off the list).

-- OR --

6b. Maturity (a few people quit in a huff; the rest of the participants stay near stage 4, with stage 5 popping up briefly every few weeks; many people wear out their second or third 'delete' key, but the list lives contentedly ever after)."

philip1209• 2 years ago

I think the next trend will be low-attention apps. People shouldn't be tied to their phones nonstop. Engagement, measured by active users, will increase if we make communications more async.

Animats• 2 years ago

Time to bring back USENET.

Really. It was a successful federated system in its day.

mo_42• 2 years ago

New social networks are exciting until the business needs to make money. The first phase of a social network is funded by investors. So the developers make it super-interesting and easy to join. Then, it reaches a stage where the investors want to see a profit. So developers need to convert an interesting and exciting social network into a money-making machine. Feeds won't be ordered by time anymore, ads lurk around in every corner, and algorithms will be tuned to push profitable content over interesting content. Before that, social media was a bargain for the user. Now, it's a bargain for the investor.

jader2012• 2 years ago

The definition of bait and switch.

andsoitis2• 2 years ago

For someone who hates X, they sure like to post on it: https://twitter.com/nonlinearnotes

rrr_oh_man3• 2 years ago

narcissism is a helluva drug

pixxel• 2 years ago

Heh yeah. People here also jump into X/Elon threads to whine and pontificate. Move on or STFU.

prmoustache7• 2 years ago

Also social media are now invaded by beggars and prostitutes (so called influencers or content creators). While I don't mind the occasional homeless or juggler asking for money and would stop to listen and donate to a good musician in the sidewalk or in a park, I would totally avoid a street where I would have to navigate around thousands of people begging for my attention and money.

LeoPanthera• 2 years ago

No mention of Threads or Mastodon until right at the end, with the throwaway line "none of them have seized mass culture".

Well sorry, you can't just completely ignore the biggest up-and-coming social networks like that. I left Twitter for the obvious reasons, and the combination of Mastodon and Threads has been a pleasant replacement for me.

krapp• 2 years ago

The fewer people descend on Mastodon, the longer it can hold back its own ruin. Assuming it hasn't already been ruined by the people like you and I escaping Twitter.

Eternal September is as absolute a law as thermodynamics. I don't even recommend Mastodon to people anymore. It's selfish, but in this day and age of algorithms, dark patterns, psyops, influencer culture and AI, all engagement must be considered toxic, although the dose makes the poison. The day Mastodon does "seize mass culture" is the day it becomes something unrecognizable and irrevocably cancerous.

fariszr2• 2 years ago

Honestly mastodon was never a replacement for Twitter and it's not even close to the variety Twitter has.On Twitter you can delve into pretty much anything and get the real time events about it whether its, sports, politics, economics or even tech and it's own niche cultures

Nothing come even close to that, mastodon is just a couple of small niches within tech and some news organizations, you won't find anything near to how Twitter works and you won't find anything even close to being relevant as it is.

I personally think most of the complaints that hacker News writes about Twitter, stem from who you follow.It really depends on who you follow, if you find the right people it's going to be your source for what's going on in anything you're interested in.

And unfortunately Elon doesn't seem to be interested in keeping that, he is just interested in milking every last dollar out of it and the result is the platform fighting against its own users.

Unfortunately he also proved something very dystopian while he's doing this:The network effect is so strong that even if you fight against your users، nothing is going to change.

This article explains it fully: https://stratechery.com/2023/threads-and-the-social-communic...

My comment on it is also relevant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36684443

jakobnissen• 2 years ago

We can go outside. It's certainly nicer there than on Twitter. If people did that it would be the happy ending for social media, really.

yungporko• 2 years ago

we don't need anywhere to go, i'm quite happy having a life outside of the internet.

ensocode2• 2 years ago

I am not able to use Instagram or Twitter for my own use cases. Either I want to gather information about some topic or I want to gather the news. But the search function is completely useless. What I dislike about the "new" social media is that it is missing the focus more and more and I am not able to make any use of it. YouTube if awesome to learn some new skills. TikTok or YT Shorts are pretty much useless for this.

Question: How do you feel about this, and how do you make use of the next-gen social media apps?

leeeeeepw• 2 years ago

I'm running an alternative social net : netwrck.com

Interested what people think but early days, hopefully will be a place with more interesting and useful AIs that can help us instead of trying to scam us like Facebook lol

mitchbob• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/2023.11.10-153614/https://www.wired.com/s...

vcg3rd• 2 years ago

I still have a deactivated FB, which I would long ago have closed except Messanger became the default family chat app, and I have over 15 years of family messages.

FB failed for me in the early years. Even though I only ever added friends I knew in the flesh,I didn't really care which coffee they picked at Starbucks or what cute thing their pets did.

When FB moved into the next phase as global forum I found that, just like with email, most of USENET, and pretty much any digital communication tool/platform, no one had the attention and/or capacity for reasoned, balanced, nuanced, irenic discussion of any length.

It's one reason why Twitter was "successful" at political/cultural/philosophical "discussion. Despite the complaints about character limit it's what people actually wanted. It's also why I couldn't use it.

For years I used to write family and friends email like I would a postal letter. I replied in-line instead of at the top (thanks MS for destroying that sane practice), but even if when printed the email would be a page, page and a half at 12 pt font, I got constant compliments about length.

I never used Instagram, quit Mastadon after it had its "Eternal September" as people fled Twitter to talk about nothing but Twitter. I never was able to find active IRC channels even in the late 90s. It felt like rooms with statues even when I asked a specific on-topic question.

Mid-90s USENET and Prodigy forums were the best social experience I ever had. Now I mostly use internal forums in the tilde/rawtext public *nix space, a little gopher and gemini.

First-gen social media users have nowhere to go

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