That's all I use now for REAL social media. My family is in one Signal chat, and my in-laws in a other one. All the social media I need. School groups are unfortunately on Facebook Messenger groups.

Whatsapp updates, you can see the updates of your contacts, then you can react or send them a message

Ah. Kind of "decentralized" in a sense. Thanks.

Nothing. I see them when I see them. If there’s something urgent we call each other or send an SMS. There’s no need for daily, weekly or even monthly updates. This makes meeting and talking in person always interesting because there’s so much to sync that we’ve all had time to digest beforehand.

In the beginning when I left Facebook over ten years ago it felt alienating. Then it felt too quiet. Then whenever I met people, months apart or even years for distant family, I realised it didn’t matter. We connected like it had been days since our last meeting. Eventually more and more of them have also quit social networks entirely, though most use group chats for their immediate family — parents and kids to orchestrate activities etc.

I think culture is more private again. In the early social media phase, people very nonchalantly posted all their random thoughts and drinking pics, vagueposting publicly about a breakup etc. People now feel more surveilled, and feel that the public internet is icky. HR sees all etc. It's similar to how people changed their behaviors in response to ubiquitous phone cameras.

It feels paradoxical to say that, but I think it's true both that social media is bigger than ever in terms of flurry and activity, and that normal people participate less (outside scrolling the feed passively). A few people are semi-professionalizing in it now, influencers with sponsorships, local celebrities and trendsetters etc., while normal people's normal life updates are dwindling. The Pareto split is sharper.

I think that's definitely a part of it. I also think the signal to noise ratio has simply gotten so low that it's started taking up too much energy for most people, so the value is lost. There will always be "feed junkies", I suspect, but they're a dwindling minority.

WhatsApp and Signal are considered "social media" technically, though plenty of people are still on FB telling the world about their trips and what they ate for breakfast.

I'm always surprised at how HN folks are either unable or unwilling to admit that the fediverse exists beyond Bluesky or Mastodon. I far prefer lemmy to reddit, and Friendica is essentially that the author is describing. This stuff exists already, and it's the perverse incentives of social media such as walled gardens and a critical mass of people that are what keep them alive.

Nothing :(

Most everyone is on facebook that I know of and they're not going anywhere and I'm not. I actually missed that an old coworker had died recently. Frustrating.

Facebook just mostly show me ads now. I don’t have many friends active on it anymore. I did find out a few years ago that a coworker has passed away though. It’s really useful, pity there isn’t a similar viable alternative

FB is practically dead, particularly from an innovation stand point. Theyre just pumping as much cashflow as they can out of it before its inevitable death.

> What are people using now instead of Facebook

Email, phone, text.

I have a few friends who won’t communicate outside of Meta products and I just don’t interact with them any longer.

We have a shared iCloud photo album which works pretty well, and a group chat in iMessage

Nothing mostly. Closest family have a group chat, and I have a few friends hanging out on IRC. For broadcasting, nothing, and I probably never will again.

One thing many forget when presenting new ideas for social media platforms is that we've been burnt by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Imgur and even LinkedIn to some extend. I'll never trust a social media platform again because of people like Mark Zuckerberg. There's nothing you can say or do that will convince that your new platform won't turn to shit just as fast as Facebook did.

The business model doesn't work out, because not enough people will pay and you cannot run these platforms on ad revenue and be trustworthy.