I don't know about scam ads, but I've been seeing badly targeted ones, for example a bunch for a lawyer who specialises in helping Americans who live in the UK to renounce their US citizenships.

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.

VPN active, by chance?

There isn't supposed to be, but you have reminded me that I'm noticing signs of the iCloud Private Relay running even though that's supposed to be a paid feature and I'm on a free account.

Tangential question what's a good group site these days?

There's things like https://www.meetup.com/ but honestly I haven't found any. The dead internet theory seems true. I block reddit, facebook, x, etc in /etc/hosts - Search top 100 websites by traffic and see what's really going on and who owns what..

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 know this will sound weird but I found plenty of connections thanks to my blog: by writing about things I find interesting, by encouraging people to connect via email, and by emailing people whose writing I found interesting. There’s plenty of good humanity still out there, but it requires effort and it’s hard to find.

Nice. I have a blog, but, I never expect I'll have any readers. Good to know there's good humanity out there online, I see it in the real world. Digitally it's really overshadowed by a mainstream, paywalled, everything is a service and costs money.

I'm always checking out the blogs I find on here though. I should interact more with them.

1. Can you send me your blog? If you don’t want to post it here my email is on my profile. I’m always interested in reading other people’s blogs[0]

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.

[0] https://manuelmoreale.com/i-ll-read-it

I've been working on Haven[1] as an open-source self-hostable alternative to give control back to people. I actually wrote a blog post about how the move from "see what your friends/family are doing" to "just keep scrolling" was a pretty blatant bait-and-switch[2]. I think any alternative will fail in the same ways as Facebook has unless there are different incentives. I'm hoping that by making Haven open source and decentralized there won't be a path for me to make money off of it (beyond maybe hosting fees?) if it gets broader adoption.

[1]: https://havenweb.org

[2]: https://havenweb.org/2022/11/02/facebook-lie.html

I like the look of this. A nice simple blogroll. I will certainly be trying it out.

I've been working on Weavus (https://weavus.app/, see my top-level comment in this post) as an alternative to facebook mostly for events, but you can also create private groups where you can chat, share photos and todo lists, split expenses, and more to come. It's just a mobile app for now, and definitely not facebook-grade as a product, but we find it useful already!

I’m personally setting up a private Discourse instance to facilitate old school, friendly, online interactions. But it’s probably overkill if you just need a place to digitally hang out.

Great way to test the waters. Don't underestimate the cool and see what kind of posts and habits it could pave the way for, should it lead down some rabbit holes. Lots could be said for establishing even some crude habitations and running with it.

Discourse is amazing. Some of the best (and worst) tiny communities on the internet are running it.

Around here, there is a very popular sports team management platform called Spond. While many parents call it a huge chore, it definitely beats the crap out if Facebook groups et al. I've seen people starting to use it more and more for any type of group that wants to organize events, communicate to members etc.

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.

Discord has been rapidly overtaking this role.

Until they give in and introduce ads, it's just too convenient to run small groups/communities in it, instead of anything else.

Every time I report scam advertisements Facebook responds that they do not violate their TOS. I rarely spend any time on Facebook as a result. Big waste of time. I have moved all my friends and family interactions to text messages and WhatsApp.