I've largely achieved that as well, I think. Slightly different road traveled, perhaps. I have a larger than average extended family: a dozen aunts/uncles and a corresponding number of cousins. It's impossible to have a close relationship with all of them, but I do enjoy keeping up with how they're doing and knowing when big life events (and deaths) happen.

So, my day-to-day life has absolutely nothing to do with FB. I've got notifications off and I typically feel no desire to check it. Instead I'm focused on my much smaller number of intentional, meaningful relationships. But, from time to time I do enjoy scrolling through FB and seeing how so-and-so is doing.

Do you have an extended family you keep in touch with? Do you keep up with them through other means, or have you just sort of let them fade from your life?

I have surrounded myself with chosen family and am always meeting new people. I give generously of myself to the people in my life because it brings me joy to do so. It’s a conscious trade off that means I lose touch with some people, and I’m ok with that. Most relationships should have an expiration date anyway; far too many people just go through the motions out of a sense of obligation.

It feels incredibly sad to just let those relationships die because you're focusing your energies on the people that are currently around you.

Also, to be honest, I felt the way you did before I deleted a twitter account with about 2k following and 10k followers. I felt like it was dominating my attention, and that made me mad. In a fit of pique I deleted it and it's almost funny how quickly I realized I didn't know any of them, and the passive consumption of their social media database entries was scratching some kind of itch but the same one I get from e.g. binging Star Trek series.

Very strange all around.

    but I wouldn't call "passively keeping in touch" with 
    thousands of people "relationships." It's something, 
    but I'm not sure what, it seems like we may not have a 
    good word for "casual strangers,"

The healthiness of it can vary widely. It's a very individual thing.

The relevant questions to ask one's self would include: overall, is this bringing me happiness? Are my "casual relationships" on FB causing me anxiety -- either directly, or because of more subtle FOMO, etc? Are they taking time away from other things that would make my life better, such as more meaningful relationships?

There is a happy path there. I genuinely like seeing that so-and-so from high school just had a baby, or whatever. "We sat through so many classes together," I think. "She was always cool to me. Good for her, she seems happy. Cute baby!" I might never really be close to her again, but I do like seeing that she's doing well.

I seem to be in the minority though. Maybe FB is like cocaine. Seems like some people manage to use it occasionally without damaging their bodies or lives. But the vast majority of people are worse off for it.

This particular thread reminded me of another recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603650 - an app to help you form deeper relationships. Do you need it? Do we need it? Do these things really help?

It's funny - maybe the perfect compromise is exactly what you described. You sometimes want mostly mindless FB updates from people you "know" and otherwise converse with your core friends and family through in-person interactions and other more engaging medium.

My neighbors are nice! We make small talk. That's fine. I like it.

Maybe the unspoken thing here is that it can be a human thing to feel you're a part of a community. A safety net of sorts. If I have to leave town on short notice for an emergency, who's going to feed my cats? I could find that person via my FB network. One of them would or would know somebody that could. One of them could ping me for the same thing. That kind of thing.

    This particular thread reminded me of another recent 
    thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603650 
    - an app to help you form deeper relationships. Do you 
    need it? Do we need it? Do these things really help?

I feel like real relationships arise from shared experiences. Doing things together. Playing sports, writing code, gaming together, whatever.

I don't think an app about sharing your life can really accomplish that.

Those relationships you don't want to let go of? They're largely worthless.

An interesting person from 15 years ago doesn't usually stop being an interesting person just because I haven't talked to them regularly.

All those connections are paid for in the most expensive currency that is.

I want Facebook for this purpose but it feels like it’s really not a blog. At all.

A friend of mine from high school happened to be in my city for a weekend. He posted on Facebook asking if he knew anyone there. We went out and had drinks and caught up.

I had a bunch of super close friends at a crappy job back when I was in college. We all went our separate ways but occasionally Facebook reminds one of us of some funny photo from the old days. It's triggered a few large group chats that have been pretty fun.

Every once in awhile I'll think about an old friend from school or a job or wherever and it's nice to just see what they're doing without having to go through starting a whole conversation. (Although I often will since Facebook is a good way to reach out to people.)

You didn't have normies and family and stuff on there; felt like you could actually express yourself.

Tumblr was its spiritual successor, I guess, in ways. But it wasn't the same. People actually wrote things on LJ. Maybe it was mostly crap, but it was often thoughtful and personal if you had the right friends. It felt like nothing was ever created on Tumblr; it was just endless pithy comments and jokes about things created elsewhere.

The things that made it different than Facebook were (1) that they didn't screw around with your feed (it was your friends' posts, sorted by date), (2) that discoverability and networking was user intentional and exploratory (pull, rather than suggested / push), & (3) access controls were simple, understandable, and obeyed user intent.

What could fb do to enable this kind of experience for those that want it? Not that they would, but I’d really like to have a vision of what they should do.

https://dreamwidth.org is a community fork of LJ that has a large and active userbase, is open source, and invests a lot into mentoring users › contributors › maintainers. Dreamwidth is a Google Summer of Code participant, for example.

LJ was cool because you had quite a diverse group using it. Artists, musicians, teenagers, etc.

This was before MySpace siphoned away the youth crowd, fifteen years ago or whenever it was. I wouldn't see them ever coming back to blogging. In fact I don't really see anybody returning to blogging.

(No disrespect meant to blogs. Blogs are awesome. That was a really good era for the internet.)

"If writing them a physical letter is too much work, what kind of friendship are you really worried about maintaining?"

That sounds strawman-y, but I have a (annoying) family member who legitimately expresses this thought regularly.