Literally just call them. You don't even have to ask for permission. Cold call them. If they don't want to talk now, they won't answer. That's fine. Call again another time.
In the last year I have just started cold calling my friends and family. It's been great.
what would make chats awkward is if the topics never go beyond smalltalk. if every so often a message exchange is like: hi, how are you? how are the kids? i am fine, kids are doing well. how about you? likewise thanks. and the conversation keeps remaining at that level, then i start wondering, why are we even talking. there has got to be more.
Second, I love that you decided to reach out to that old friend because relationships come and go and it's never to late to pick up an old friendship.
As for your final point, if the idea is to call someone in order to replace the classic facebook passive stalking I think it's fine if the conversation never goes too deep. It's a way to show you care and sometimes it's all that matters. Maybe in doing that, when it's time to have deeper conversations, they'll remember that you called them and showed interest. And that's something they can't see if you just scroll their facebook page.
And I'm saying you generically, not talking about you specifically.
But I do get what you're saying, if every time you talk to someone you have shallow chats, after a while you might start wondering what's the point.
At some point Facebook crippled those features. Maybe for good reasons (I guess the possibility of stalking might be one). But in any case, I use Facebook much less now.
I've known people who have gone from on the phone all the time people to using skype to those in discord voice chats. Largely because of the costs of calling internationally as well, can't leave that out!
Although I will say, some of these platforms could learn a thing or two from the voicemail system!
Now it’s a lot easier to do a voice call and also do something else since you’re probably sitting in front of your computer. And you can stay there for hours chatting about literally nothing.
Phone calls, had to be a lot more intentional. Firstly because of the cost but also because it was harder to do something else while on the phone.
And I kinda miss that.
Facebook ads are egregiously bad. Overwhelmingly scammy: Drop-shippers pretending they are having a going-out-of-business sale, products priced double or triple where they are priced elsewhere. And of course, I've started seeing straight up malvertising campaigns which somehow made it through review. ("somehow" being - paid ads get little scrutiny)
If Facebook groups hadn't totally taken over a few communities I want to be a part of (car enthusiast groups, local fishing groups), I would probably never check it. Actually, less and less my friends and family post there, preferring other social networks, if any.
#DeleteFacebook
I'm not an American, I don't live in the UK, and I'm working towards gaining a second citizenship rather than removing one.
Also for example, an ad from a government of a country I don't live in about them banning a breed of dog I've never heard of. I don't own any breed of dog, definitely now whatever that was.
I've been on the lookout for one. Wish there was a cool one. I go out and volunteer for sanity.
The issue is, the big platforms are where everybody else is. To them, the internet IS facebook, insta, X, etc..
To us, it's something more.
I'm always checking out the blogs I find on here though. I should interact more with them.
2. I think it’s a matter of being proactive. I treat blog-to-blog interactions the same way I treat person-to-person interactions. If you want the connection to happen you have to be willing to act. Which is why I often send emails, share thoughts on what they wrote, maybe share a link to something they might find interesting based on what they write about. More often than not, people with public personal blogs want to interact with others.
[1]: https://havenweb.org
The obvious downside is that (like with other apps) everything is inside a closed ecosystem. But there is zero spam, only a few non-intrusive ads, and generally good UX all around.
Until they give in and introduce ads, it's just too convenient to run small groups/communities in it, instead of anything else.
Dead internet theory. AI generated stuff. Busted algorithms, and attention-soul sucking 'pull me in' psychological warfare ad induced stuff. We need to reclaim our sanity from doom scroll/infinite scrolling.
I have it in my /etc/hosts file to be blocked unless I'm at a computer that requires me to log in.
I don’t mind the Youtube algorithm, it used to be better but it’s still good enough. I don’t use Youtube with an account so I have gotten good at “training” it and getting it to show stuff I’m actually interested in. The X algorithm is not bad either, if I post art related stuff it will only show me art related stuff.
Highly disagree. I'm down to one hyperspecific account that follows hundreds of people, and my "for you" page might as well be someone else's. Literally nothing there matches the purpose of the account.
I'm also convinced that clicking "not interested" doesn't do anything because every time I click it, I can just refresh the tab and see the exact same tweet all over again.
I scream this and my love for Linux from the rooftops, hoping other people show the love for the internet and things like I do and don't put up with the exploitation. It's _OUR_ psychyes and their psychological manipulation, and our future generations they're going after.
And you can check your fingerprints with: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ that has a adtrack company that openly shows how it fingerprints you, with WebGL, canvas'ing, timestamps.
I have the random timestamp addon, random user-agents, canvas blocker, exfil data, Ublock origin. The 0.0.0.0 day 'Port Scanner' -> https://github.com/garywill/LAN-port-scan-forbidder
Yeah, they can use JS to ping stuff on our LANs to fingerprint too.
It's an internet hellscape out there.
Most people don't care. I do.
Out of curiosity, does it successfully block https://fingerprint.com/?
The garbage that they serve up on my feed is astounding. When they don’t have any info from “friends” to populate it, it looks exactly like a collection of chumbox ads
The Facebook experience when you have no connections is so horrid that I’m guessing they don’t put much thought into new users anymore. They already have everyone
On iPhone it’s in More -> Feeds. They really work to hide it.
The main caveat is it only shows a few days worth of activity. But it’s still better than the main feed.
Dunno what kind of weird experiment they were conducting last December but once I start scrolling, I was getting AI generated images of really poor quality accompanied by comments from bot profiles among normal stuff, obviously out of chronological order from my friend's list.
Not that I'm visiting that page that often - on contrary; every few months to see if those who don't have anything beside messenger want something.
One guess is if social media engagement isn't as high as desired, users are increasingly presented with alternatives to take them in different directions until they're more engaged, or at such a deficit of dopamine they will be ready to jump to the next thing, maybe like a tik tok?
Today, if a social media network made and kept it about people and not algorithms calculating the topically desired outcome of one company, maybe there would be a different usage.
People have historically learned how to tune out certain forms of media when or if they became too focused on topics not aligned to them, including advertising. Newspapers, Radio, TV..
Hyper personalization may be an option, but if the result of it is distance and not supporting authentications in real life and not digitally, the brain is wired for one for the former a lot longer than the latter. An example of this is how much more.. vivid spending time in person with someone was after not being around people as much during the pandemic.
You post the same image? And then you're happy you get more engagement from x?
I don't get your experiment... You want lots of engagement when you post boring content repeatedly?
"each night, i choose one image, and upload it to both x and insta" i guess would be less ambiguous?
It's annoying as I'm constantly clicking the X. I'm on Facebook to follow family & friends and groups I joined not other groups I didn't!
"The algorithm is poor" is not a thing anymore, algorithms are easy to get right and even easier to break on purpose for their own benefit.
No large corporation actually serves their algorithm for you any more. That's why TikTok got so popular, their algorithm actually worked for you for a long time.
Instagram is suffering the same fate, it doesn’t show my posts to my followers, really wants to show me post that have nothing to do with my interest and I’m getting a lot of likes from bots. I noticed my friends don’t post to it as much anymore so it’s feeling like a ghost town.
I have an experiment going on, I have an art account on insta and X, every night I post the same image to both and X gives a lot more views and engagement than Instagram for the same content. Also it seems like the X algorithm is smarter than FB/instagram because it shows me similar art to what I post and keeps the correct vibe. Insta/FB show me random crap I couldn’t care less about.