* My group of friends and acquaintances who play badminton coordinate on Facebook; we do not work at the same place or have each other's phone numbers. People use the number of "Going" people to figure out whether there are still slots to play or not.
* The local university feminist organization is organized 100% through Facebook. We send one email a month or so to our mailing list, but if you want to participate (help out, for instance), you do this through the closed Facebook group.
It may be easy to leave Facebook and stay in contact with your closest friends; it's hard to replace larger social groups like those above.
> It may be easy to leave Facebook and stay in contact with your closest friends
Often it is not, because Facebook has so successfully inveigled itself into and through people's social interactions that a lot of folks just don't think about keeping in touch any other way.
If that were going to work, it would have done by now. Diaspora was the closest, and Diaspora is the kind of joke you tell as a joke because it's better than crying.
We should be trying to make it possible for people to have the very real benefits Facebook offers, without having to suffer the miseries both subtle and gross which Facebook has no reason not to inflict. I don't have a good answer yet as to how we go about doing that. But as it becomes more clear that Facebook is a problem, it becomes also more likely that someone will invent the thing which will not only kill it, but make it impossible for anything of its like to come along again.
So even if I don't have a solution, talking about the problem is still worthwhile.
I mentioned something similar in one of the other threads on the same subject, but here it goes:
Right now, using facebook isn't like choosing an email account or cellular provider.
It is more like one of the old telecoms. And unfortunately, if you move to one of the 'others', it isn't compatable with facebook. It is truly more akin to a phone company that won't connect to other companies.
Which means that switching definitely has its costs if friends, family, etc are already on the network. This is a huge advantage in Facebook's favor, and part of what makes entry into the social media realm somewhat difficult. Folks have attempted, but none have taken hold well enough to be worth the time.
Not a hopeless situation, just has challenges. I'm not sure what the answer is to solve the stuff outside of passing some sort of regulations, either protecting speech to a point and/or demanding cross-communication so choice seems reasonable.
I'm a member of plenty of discussion groups that run on a VBulletin board or something where you can register and start posting. Why doesn't the local university feminist organization do that, why do I have to give give up my private info to Zuckerberg et al just to be part of it?
Maybe I'm weird but my larger social groups are usually focused on specific things and I'm happy to interact with them in a forum designed specifically for that purpose, not owned by a huge information-sucking company.
In fact, I find the requirement to be a member of Facebook as a condition of productively working with that feminist org to be really exclusionary.
Just seems like a gigantic waste of time to me... ;-)