I think this is too harsh. Organising a grand 50th birthday is a lot of effort, and forgetting that one friend (who may not be a close friend but still a friend) doesn't have Facebook is easy enough.

"Easy enough" - only if your default way of thinking is "all my friends are facebook friends".

That's plain lazy thinking, it's completely giving up on your privacy-aware friends because Zuckerberg makes doing that so so easy. What a surprise.

There are many systemic wrongs that are worth fighting to change, and a single person can't possibly fight them all at the same time. You can't expect everyone to be deeply invested in the privacy cause; some people care more about, say, feminism, or veganism, or homelessness, or something else. That's okay, too.

Oh, I 100% agree.

We all choose our own battles and our own hills to die on.

And deep down, I suspect many of us (or at the very least "me") choose those battles and hills for not entirely rational or "for the greater good" reasons.

Having said that, if your battle is feminism you don't remain engaged with and support "locker room talk". If your battle is veganism you don't remain engaged with groups of butchers or hunters. One of my battles is privacy - I'm not going to support or enable surveillance capitalism, even though I know the social cost I'll incur there.

There's an unkind stereotype about vegans "Hoe do you know if someone's a vegan? Don't worry, they'll tell you..." - but that reveals an admirable trait shared by "them" collectively, if you aren't speaking out for what you believe in - you're enabling and maintaining things which you do not believe in.

This was well-articulated, and your example was good. I'm not vegan, but I dislike the vitriolic 'jokes' that many of them are subjected to -- voicing your beliefs is certainly an admirable trait to me.

It is indeed lazy thinking; but it doesn’t make it insincere or wrong, just inaccurate.

I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted. I feel the same way. I’ve been invited to multiple social events that were largely organized on Facebook since deleting my own account. I was always informed either directly or indirectly through mutual friends, usually by phone or SMS/iMessage. I’ve also been made aware of multiple events I did not attend because I do not consider myself close friends with those hosts and I’m happy to avoid that awkward ‘has not responded’ status that Facebook would mark me with.

In a world with email, SMS, and iMessage I do not fear being left out by my true friends.

>I was always informed either directly or indirectly through mutual friends, usually by phone or SMS/iMessage.

Precisely this. A type of thinking which includes Facebook being a persons only means of communication is very simplistic. While there are some unusual user cases -- such as my coworker who had to use wi-fi for Messenger -- and they pop up in certain circumstances, I do not think this is as widespread as some make it out to be. To explain my standing, it comes from my observation of hearing people say using Messenger is "easier" and they're able to stay in contact with people they may not want to on a more personal level (i.e. SMS, voice calls) or they are international.

That doesn't have to be true. I forgot to invite the guy who sits left of me at work to my 40th birthday, because he does not have Facebook. I coordinated the whole thing on Facebook because "everyone has Facebook". And it didn't cross my mind that someone didn't. I talk to him a couple of times a day about non-work related things, it just never came up for some reason.

I agree. I think many of us throw around the word 'friend' too liberally.

Thanks for making this point, as (I hope) banal it can be. This assumption that everyone uses FB needs erasure.

Funnily enough I can categorically say that's not true. He's one of my closest friends, was extremely upset that I wasn't there, and was kicking himself for months afterwards for the lazy assumption. The almost total ubiquity of Facebook leads to an assumption that everyone is on there. Hopefully that's going to change over the next few years, but there are hard lessons along the way.

Do you ever talk with him directly, via sms or whatsapp? How often? Was the party really never brought up?

We go long-ish periods without speaking. We have that kind of lifelong friendship where we just pick up wherever we left off. He lives in London, I live on the south coast, so we only really speak when I'm in London for work and I stay over at his place. That's usually relatively frequent, but I wasn't going up much at that specific time. I should also say that he's not particularly good at organising these things and usually totally ignores his birthday, so it wasn't a huge party. Still stung though!

> Facebook is for finding out about events / people who aren't close to you, but you're still interested in.

That's one use case, I don't think it's the only one though.