Now that Elon Musk’s takeover has hastened the demise of Twitterjilievo online gaming, many are grasping for alternatives to their beloved town square. Mastodon, Cohost and Koo have all been floated as options. But I won’t bother joining any of those. Instead, you can find me on Facebook.
This probably sounds strange. Far from its origins as a hot-or-not rating system for Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmates, Facebook conquered the world — but then devolved into a cesspool of privacy violations and misinformation. Between its failure to detect election misinformation, its inability to contain hate speech and its gleeful collection of personal data without users’ full understanding, many now see Facebook not just as a graying social media site but also as the nexus of an evil empire.
Facebook, still the world’s biggest social network with over two billion active users per month, has been in slow decline for years. A forecast by eMarketer predicts a decrease of 1.4 million users this year. By next year, fewer than 15 percent of its users will be under the age of 25. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, just announced its most significant layoff ever: more than 11,000 people. But in its decline, Facebook has become one of the most absurd, uncanny and therefore enjoyable places on the internet.
A consummate millennial, I joined Facebook in 2007 — the year I graduated high school — when it was still a place to blithely make weekend plans on one another’s public “walls” and trade perplexing romantic overtures known as “pokes.” Over the past 15 years I have watched Facebook metastasize from a place that could form the basis of Sheryl Sandberg’s credibility in “Lean In” into one where the only conceivable reason people my age log in is to revisit photos from one’s indie sleaze party era or determine which high school classmates now support Donald Trump.
While Facebook is still a thriving, active social network for the over-45 set, for my cohort a mass exodus has left it the digital equivalent of an Old Western ghost town where tumbleweeds blow across an arid landscape. Formerly the apogee of my social life — from 2012 to 2014, I wouldn’t leave my house without reviewing the “attending” portion of an event’s guest list — Facebook has reverted back to the spaciousness of the early internet, where people blogged about minutiae for an audience of 12.
In the absence of peers, a thriving ecosystem still prevails. Unlike the TikTok algorithm, which is creepily accurate, Facebook is an erratic pu-pu platter of things I never knew I wanted to see.
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