I read “it’s dying” by people on Discord and Reddit all the time, but the numbers prove otherwise. It’s been going up this entire time and sitting over 3 billion MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS!
I feel like the bubble around people on other platforms saying “who uses Facebook anymore lol” is kind of wild given the numbers. Keep in mind these are active users not just abandoned accounts.
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I live in a rural community. Facebook has more or less replaced the web here.
Businesses post their hours, specials, and information on Facebook. Some of them don’t have websites. The rec centre has a hard time keeping their website up to date, but the Facebook group is always accurate. Newspapers have closed down, so a Facebook group keeps people apprised of what’s going on (it seems to be pretty accurate, since everyone in town is part of it, people involved in events chime in). Kids and adults sports groups advertise and tell their members what’s going on via Facebook groups.
It’s a shitty medium, since the Facebook algorithm mixes trash advertisements with town-specific events, but it seems to suffice for the town’s needs.
I suspect it isn’t just my town. The network effect is strong, so I suspect there are niche communities where Facebook is verging on ubiquitous.
Yeah I found out the same when I moved back to Iceland. Buying a used car? Renting an apartment? Staying up to date on the parents groups in school, kids sports, any events by any business or group? Contacting any person?
Being forced to hand over all my personal information just to do any of the above really doesn’t sit well with me 😑
This. In the west among the younger generations, sure, Facebook is outdated/dead. Among other generations, and across much of the world, it is still almost as essential as email.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Zero
A criticism also stated that Facebook is practicing digital colonialism because it is not introducing open internet but building a "little web that turns the user into a mostly passive consumer of mostly western corporate content”.
An article by Christopher Mims in Quartz in September 2012 stated that Facebook Zero played a very important role in Facebook’s expansion in Africa over the 18 months following the release of Facebook Zero, noting that data charges could be a significant component of mobile usage cost and the waiving of these charges reduced a significant disincentive for people in Africa to use Facebook.
To me as a kid with a rudimentary phone and little pocket money, this was also how I got onto and used to access Facebook.
digital colonialism
Lmao
What else would you call it? It’s them trying to be the face of the internet, the only internet these people know.
Something less dramatic and hilarious probably. Maybe manipulative business tactics.
Yup niche communities is spot on. I’m into disc golf but most of the community news and local club updates still primarily occur on FB. This is also an extension of suburban and rural community popularity.
A lot of users are also from poorer countries that lack the means to create their own web infrastructure. Using Facebook to run your business account is easier, cheaper, and more reliable than most alternatives there. Phone carriers and ISP often also have “free”-data for certain social media platforms. You get 1GB+1GB for Facebook/IG/YT/Some Game. So you are stuck in this loop where everything reinforces itself to use Facebook.
This. Also, FB invested heavily in many of those countries in order to drive up its growth back in the mid 2010s, exactly to ensure that, once the internet finally became widely available for those people, “everything” would be on FB.
I suspect the majority of those users are from SEA countries.
- It’s established
- It is a general purpose platform: it has personal posting, business listings, messaging, groups, communities, photos, news, clip format video, live streaming, p2p sales, business sales, event coordination and advertising, payment processing and cash sharing, games…
Most other platforms do one or several of those things much better than FB, but FB is good enough for lots of people. It’s a one stop shop, and it does a fair job at cross pollinating the various aspects of its platform. It has enough stuff to keep to keep users engaged even if their interest wanes from one or more particular platform components.
I literally have to use Facebook to know what’s happening in my small community. It’s the most convenient place to learn about what’s going on and I hate it
Same here,.so I choose not to use FB.
I feel like this is the best answer so far.
Many overseas countries have Facebook preloaded on a lot of their phones. They also have data caps but Facebook is exempt from counting towards their data cap.
My phone came with Twitter and Facebook preinstalled. I installed LineageOS.
Because people have those family members who insist on doing everything on Facebook Messenger, and that Signal or even fucking Whatsapp is too fiddly for them. So everyone ends up with the lowest common piece of shit network, and it counts them as active users whether they actually use it or not and just happens to be checking for messages in the background.
That is exactly it for me. I use Messenger to talk to friends and family in Thailand and they refuse to use Signal or Telegram. A few do use Line but 90% will only use FB and Messenger.
Yea but like… why are they allowed to refuse services and you aren’t? Like, I refuse to use whstsapp out of principle (I live in a country where it’s the de facto standard but fuck
facebookmeta). Some people I communicate with refuse to use telegram or signal out of convenience. Why should I be the one to budge and give up my principles? I‘m even providing options…
I finally deleted mine the other day. No goodbyes, no fanfare, just dumped it like the garbage it is. No regrets.
It was years ago, but I used to work for a US based ISP. I’m a Canadian and the place I was working at had a contract to suppliment their support team.
My team did enhanced support, beyond what the ISP would deal with. Basically it was remote geek squad type service for people’s computers.
While I was working there in the mid 2000’s, there was a Facebook outage. All of Facebook’s services were unavailable. We broke records with how many calls we got that day. Almost all of them went something like this:
Client: “the internet doesn’t work!” Tech: can you open a browser and… Client (interrupting) “it says page cannot be displayed!!11” Tech: I understand, can you tell me what it says at the top in the address bar? (Insert some explaining of how to find the address bar) Client: “facebook.com” Tech: okay, I want you to click on that and erase it, then type in google.com, hit enter, and tell me what the page says. Client: " it says Google, with a (some bad description of a text entry field)" Tech: this is Google’s website, it loaded from the internet, so your internet works. Facebook is down. Client (without missing a beat): “can you fix Facebook?” Tech: No. (Call ends)
I’m certain my employer made bank that day, since clients had to pay an extra monthly charge on their internet bill to speak with us, and their support made a point of dumping calls to us whenever they could. If someone wanted to speak to another tech, sure, but you have to buy this service…
I did not like that job. I actually got a call from an inexperienced Linux user who couldn’t get DNS resolution. I tried to coach him over the phone to determine if his internet was working at all. Before I could actually give him an answer, my manager dropped by (he was monitoring the call) and told me to tell him we could not help him, that the support center only supported Windows based systems, since, out of everyone there, I was the only one with enough Linux knowledge to know what to do, and he didn’t want to give anyone the impression that we could help with Linux.
All the guy needed to do was change his resolv.conf to valid DNS servers and he would have been fine. It doesn’t work that way anymore, but it did at the time, and I knew it. I did not feel good getting off of that call. It’s like, I have the answer, this guy needs the answer, he paid to speak to me, and I really want to help him out, but I would probably lose my job if I do. I was very blunt with him. I said that I could help him, but I wasn’t allowed to. He understood, but I still felt like shit. I was too timid to realize my worth, which was part of the reason I was there to begin with… Now, I would have just made it clear that he’ll only get help on this once, and when we hung up, never expect to reach me again, and that nobody here knows what I do about this stuff, then helped him anyways. Fuck that manager. I’m so glad I don’t work there anymore.
That last paragraph made me sad… It was the most emotional comment Ive read in a while
I live in Morocco. I keep leaving Facebook for months but I end up going back there even though I don’t like it at all. The reason is that all the people I know and all local content is available only through Facebook. There are hardly any Moroccans on the Fediverse, I’ve only seen like one other person in all my years of using Mastodon. If I wanna see what’s going on in the country, the city and anything related to the region then I am obliged to be on Facebook. I suppose this is the case with most developing and non-english speaking countries.
atleast you can know whats happening in Estonia without Facebook (i think)
Aren’t there instances?
Lotta people keep Facebook for the marketplace.
Also, a lot of scammers make accounts to use for the marketplace.
The marketplace fluffs the numbers.
Old people
People don’t use Facebook, hence you find them on other platforms. They may be thinking that if they don’t use it, then nobody does.
But you also have to consider where these people live. It might be “dying” there, while Facebook is getting new users in other markets. I remember watching a video about genocide in Myanmar and the role that Facebook played. Access to Facebook was free if I recall correctly, it was the internet for most people.
It’d be interesting to see data by country.
It still boggles me that there still isn’t a good popular plarform to look for events near me like facebook. Why doesnt imstagram instagram have this? Or even WhatsApp, that would be so much more useful that the crap stories they added, who cares about that?
Well there’s meetup
Yeah but it always left so awkward. People have to sign up for it just for the events, and for that there’s plenty of services. I mean having a service where your friends already are also have a list of events. The “in going” feature on Facebook was genius for that.
I sometimes think of myself as tech literate, then I realize I have absolutely no clue how to navigate Facebook, Twitter, or Facebook, no clue how to find a specific thing I’m looking for, or to get a post noticed by people.
Yeah - I do find it odd when people say Facebook is dying, because it really isn’t. Unless Zuckerberg pulls a Musk anytime soon, it isn’t going anywhere - unlike Xitter, Facebook is an advertising juggernaught that makes more than enough money to keep itself afloat.
And that’s not even mentioning Facebook groups, news pages, business pages, the market place, etc… they’ve got fingers in many different pies, and it shows.
And even more, while it may not be popular amongst tech savvy folks, it is still insanely popular amongst regular folks. I for one can vouch that a significant proportion of my non-techy friends use either it or Instagram as their primary social media.
Hell, that’s why messenger is up there too - everyone has Facebook, so everyone has messenger, making it extremely convenient to message people you know. It’s certainly why I use it a lot, it’s where my friends are.
Meta dominates social media even now - just look at your list. Of the top seven, over half of them are Meta.
It IS dying, but for the youth. And I’d even say “for the youth that resembles mine”
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Funny, I was told my friends would miss me too. Them never reaching out after I left Facebook determined that to be a lie
It took almost six months for my best friend to notice I deleted my account. ;(
It looks to me like “social media” breaks down into a few categories: Video/image sharing (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Douyin, Kuaishou); Messaging (WhatsApp, WeChat, FB Messenger, Telegram, Snapchat, QQ); Microblogging (Twitter, Weibo); and tangled fog of pulsating yearning (Pinterest).
Then, there’s Facebook, which defies easy categorization. It does all of the above, plus more. It’s how people maintain loose connections with other people that they may not talk to every day. What is its competition? Basically, I think it remains popular because it’s the default, nothing else can replace it.
