It was actually quite good back then. Now it's unusable and I left it long ago.
¹) Yes, yes, Facebook/Meta hassome access and security issues might exist etc., but way different from public-by-default Facebook
There's still, you know, real life. I recommend it.
It would be quite a challenge to re-create what FB circa 2006-2010 or so was like. Before influencers and engagement farming. Before it became "social media" and was just a "social utility"
The problem is that even if you re-built that product, it would quickly get overrun by engagement optimizers. If the product is open, they'll rush in.
Group chat apps somewhat fill this product void, but not completely. There was something magical about a social network being somewhat open & organic that group chats can't capture
We need the Craigslist of friends and family social networks. A company that is just aggressively disinterested in bloat or hyper engagement.
Something where "re-sharing" doesn't exist and links are deemphasized in the UX, so it's more focused on your content (hopefully you talking about your own life, thoughts, etc.). Especially text content, with photos/videos present, but a bit deemphasized.
Absolutely no business or "influencer" pages, of course.
This doesn't make sense to me: the Facebook from back then didn't support "engagement optimizers" as it didn't have a pervasive programmatic newsfeed trying to show you posts from random people you might like: it showed you posts from your friends, and if none of your friends were "influencers" you simply couldn't see any influencer content even if every other user on the site who wasn't your friend was an influencer.
It would seem that we'd need multiple group chats to make it work reasonably. Is that what you do?
If we wanted it done with only one group chat it would seem it would have to include the union of all the friend groups of people who are in the chat, which would result in there being for most people in the chat a bunch of people they don't know also in the chat.
We'd probably then want some kind of filtering. I'd probably only want to see posts that are from my friends, and maybe posts that my friends have reacted or replied to.
...and then we are essentially back to a Facebook-like or Twitter-like thing except maybe with better filtering.
Group chats are intimate by design and don’t seem like a good fit for “broadcast” style updates like “I bought a house”, “moved to CA”, etc. That’s the value in the Facebook feed of old. Something like that also helps you stay connected with more distant friends/acquaintances, people you might not talk to daily but you would still be happy to see how they are doing in life.
Where's the problem here? Too many options and too much control? Nothing's stopping you from blasting every group chat you're in other than that you'll annoy the people in chats that don't want to hear about your problems. Maybe just send to your family and close friends.
> now some people get the same update twice - are they supposed to react in both?
This is a non-problem. Do people have to react to everything you say every place where you've said it? Is it difficult to decide how to deal with getting news over the phone and having that person announce the same news at the book club meeting? How will you know where to answer?
You could say “if you don’t think people care, only tell your close family and friends”. But broadcast announcements can cause more spontaneous reactions from people, and I often find myself reconnecting, even if only in a short conversation, with people I don’t generally talk to otherwise. It’s a better way for staying connected with old friends, who you might not have reason to talk to frequently (e.g. via group chat), but would happily spend a day catching up with if you were in the same city.
My intimate friends are almost all in group chats. Many of them are not technical at all.
People would announce things like that to each group individually, and often chose to not mention it in some groups because they're not intimate enough. We used to just be okay hearing and discussing the same announcement multiple times ("some of you already know this, but..."), most likely with different parts of the story told in different settings and triggering different conversation because the groups are different.
For the more distant acquaintances, people wrote Christmas cards (or equivalent) for the occasional updates. These can still be handled very nicely with an email list, and really don't call for the kind of instant-update sharing that Facebook et al encourage.
Is it less efficient to write and read the same updates multiple times? Sure. But is efficiency really what we should be striving for in human relations?
The value that Facebook brought is now people can _choose_ to respond to you, and you can also silently see what others are up to without needing to explicitly catch up. It’s kind of like bumping into someone you know in public, and the resulting interaction (e.g. comment or DM from seeing the update post) feels much more organic as well.
WhatsApp, at least, makes it easy to post the same update to multiple groups.
It's imperfect, but it works well enough
So you just don't do any of those things you mentioned, people rarely broadcast using group chats. You are trading quantity and breadth for quality and depth by choosing just a small group of people to keep in contact with meaningfully.
Social media does really help people stay connected no doubt, but it breeds shallow connection habits, and I wager it makes less meaningful connections out of people who could have been very close had they not been given that feeling of connection through shallow means. Like eating a fast food burger instead of a nutritious meal, you are satisfied so you don't seek more, but you robbed yourself of a better opportunity.
now we just have baby boomers pretending to be told something by someone that doesn't care about them, making conversation with you as if they were part of a social circle they’re telling you about
yes
> It would seem that we'd need multiple group chats to make it work reasonably. Is that what you do?
It's not that complicated. If you really need to you create multiple groups. Generall it's not necessary. Groups are usually topic-related, not just based on friendship. Most of my friends come from various interests, so I just participate in the right topic groups and I see them there.
The volume is also not a problem. I quickscroll through it once a day or so and if I miss something important I'll get reminded by someone.
The thing is that social media have really screwed themselves up by screwing with our feeds, adding suggested crap and removing stuff we want to see.
I, too, am sick of all the existing social media companies trying their damnest to cater to the entertainment use case no one ever asked for.
No ads between posts, no "you might like" between posts, no "smart feeds" that ruin the order of posts. Works pretty well overall.
But then there’s the right section of Snapchat — “Discover” and “Spotlight”. We DON’T GO to the right half of Snapchat, because it’s just complete and utter garbage.