I joined Facebook years ago not long after it took off from its college roots. I also quit it years ago when my feed became full of junk.
The one thing I miss is contact with my friends, family, and ex-cowokers. Most of them weren’t technically inclined so that was the only platform they were on. Some of them did move to Instagram, which I did as well until Facebook bought it.
I then tried wt.social shortly after it started up. It seemed like a great alternative, but its growth is very slow, It has 450,000 users according to wikipedia. Now there’s a version 2, Trust Cafe. The same article also mentioned that they’re looking into connecting to ActivityPub.
What do you use in place of Facebook to stay in contact with friends and family? Mainly, I just use text messaging apps. I use Lemmy and Mastodon for news and information.
I had a Facebook for about a month or so back when it first started getting widely adopted. I got one too many unwanted friend requests and deleted it.
The true benefits are so few and it brings out the worst in people, I don’t really need to see that. I also find the weird, impersonal dynamic of voyeurism and exhibitionism to be off putting, that’s not how social relationships should work. None of it feels like actually connecting with those people. I get connection by hanging out with people, text, voice, games, email etc.
If someone is important to me and I to them, we’ll always find a way to stay in touch. I have a friend with whom one of our main means of casual communication is trying to one-up eachother with terrible postcards that we find in shops and the like. That feels more personal to me than a FB post.
So I’d say, rather than finding a FB replacement, find personal ways to sustainably communicate with the people who actually matter to you.