Anecdotally I quit Facebook in 2016 but of my friends and family that still use it, I would say most simply use it for marketplace. They may still view the updates that people still post to see what's going on but it doesn't seem to be near as about keeping in touch (I'm in the US).
For those of us in families that are spread over the globe in a dozen time zones and separated in different countries, what other methods of connection even come close to social media? Facebook (and the rest) have provided a way for us to vicariously experience glimpses into each other's lives and in many cases reconnect with people who we never would have otherwise.
I have siblings, cousins and other relatives and friends spread around the globe.
We keep in touch over Signal, WhatsApp, FaceTime, Jitsi, Messages... It's a little more work. We don't speak as often as we used to see each other's posts on Facebook but when we do get in touch it's a lot more personal and meaningful. It's not rare either. I speak to some pretty much daily, others weekly to monthly, and others perhaps more spread apart but it's always great when we do get in touch.
No vicarious experiences, no voyeurism into one another's lifes. Only pure and intentional human connection with all the imperfections that come with it. I recommend it.
I am way past that point. I used to use Slack personally but I like Slack about as much as FB, so I now primarily have reverted to my own personal blog, where I make posts with video etc and take comments, and post those posts on FB, Twitter and other social media. It's like I have gone back to what works. My closest family and friends have a login to that blog where we share posts that are private. All our YouTube videos are unlisted and embedded on the blog with settings to prevent "Watch on YouTube" etc. I have my own nix servers and maintain shared family audio/photo/video/media content. We extensively use Signal, Facetime and Skype. When you have a large extended group that wants to stay interconnected globally there is only so much you can do - different participants have their own preferences and if you want to stay connected with them you have to use their poison of choice. It is unrealistic to alienate users who only know one or two platforms and lack the technical expertise, time and yes money to invest in yet again something new.
Also, I never did understand the benefit you get from deleting your FB/Instagram account - Meta still owns your content. It never gets deleted. Isn't it better to maintain your account but lock it down to your own standards? (e.g. link external content, share content to focused groups of users, etc). You can use Messenger (which is all some people actually use). What do you gain by deleting the account? Just losing control.
EDIT: One thing I think is great with FB is the ability to export all your content. I do that at least annually and have a MySQL database into which I import it all (which gives me the coveted ability to search for a specific post either by date back in 2008 for instance, by text etc). Why would I want to lose all that?
I urge you to read Facebook's "Terms of Service" [0]. 'Facebook's terms allow them "a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook." In layman's terms' [1]
Obviously the internal procedures Meta follows regarding content is unknown. It is probably different for different countries - you mention GDPR, well very little of my content is shared in Europe, so I'm sure the rules that apply to me are completely different from rules that apply for Europeans. It is probably different for different time periods in Facebook history, and it is definitely different for different levels of universality of sharing. That is if you post something "Publicly" then it gets shared by another user, then the original post account is deleted, in all my testing the content that was shared by the other user persists. Facebook has argued that it is "public" content [2]. I personally have seen corporate posts get LIKED and commented by users who delete their accounts, but their content endures on the corporate page.
I do not envy Meta. Knowledge of the legal environment in every country for a global operation makes programming in assembly seem trivial by comparison. I had a friend who was a federal (securities) agent who told me back in the 1980's that the legal environment in the US is deliberately complicated/obfuscated to the point where if you are in compliance with one law, you are automatically in violation of another. It is up to you to pay for representation to contest constitutionality on appeal to a high enough level for acquittal.
If you are unsure about what Facebook does and it matters to you, then test it - you will find FB still has a few human users, some of whom may be interested in running tests with you. Posting content of different types, different sharing, deleting different users etc ... test it! Just delete your account. Then later try and recover the account. It is all still there.
For me, I just assume when FB says 'it may retain copies of "some material" from deleted accounts' [2], I just assume there is no privacy and that I own nothing.
> Knowledge of the legal environment in every country for a global operation makes programming in assembly seem trivial by comparison.
That may be so but they still need to comply.
I've just signed up with the same email address I had on my old account. I can't say for certain whether my data has been permanently deleted but I can't find any of it.
I'll try to get in touch with others who have had access to my old posts and comments and see if they are still there.
Edit to add:
The deletion option on Facebook states:
Delete account
This is permanent.
When you delete your Facebook account, you won't be able to retrieve the content or information that you've shared on Facebook. Your Messenger and all of your messages will also be deleted.
I wish you every good thing. I'm going down something of a rabbit hole on this and was so surprised at the Wikipedia discussion on US privacy:
'Some conservative justices do not consider privacy to be a legal right, as when discussing the 2003 case, Lawrence v. Texas (539 U.S. 558), Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia did not consider privacy to be a right, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued that there is "no general right to privacy" in the U.S. Constitution in 2007. Many Republican interest groups and activists desire for appointed justices to be like Justice Thomas and Scalia since they uphold originalism, which indirectly helps strengthen the argument against the legal protection of privacy.' [0]
My extended family shares a paid Slack instance and it works great. Some of them are on Facebook as well, mostly for marketplace and groups; I don't use FB (I am not really interested in seeing glimpses of distant relatives' lives). I think there is a real future for services targeting the middle ground between the very public nature of Facebook and the very private nature of an email.
I can understand this for sure! In my experience Facebook degraded and a lot of people that just posted pictures with small updates moved to Instagram. Again, anecdotally, I have a pocket of friends in Prague and they mostly used Instagram. But now Instagram is moving the same way with a clutter of suggested posts or 'reels' - or whatever their version is.
My chosen family (most of the people of my bio family I kept in touch with have passed on) are very much like that, but I keep in touch with them via a mixture of IRC, gchat and twitter DMs (fascinatingly the one member of my bio family I enjoy talking to who's still here uses twitter DMs to talk to me.)
The people who're local to me I catch up with in person, and regularly get "oh, yeah, you're not on facebook, I can actually tell you about this" with a huge grin and it's a big happy for me every time.
I've found that for whatever reason people's twitter feeds are "stuff I've found interesting" and I catch up with them separately from that, which I've found fine.
(note: this is an observation of what works for me, please don't consider this as in any was a criticism of your use of facebook if it's working for you, keeping in touch with people is awesome and "whatever works for that is good" applies)
Why not "closed world" apps like Whatsapp or Discord ? I personally loath them (specifically Discord) but they seem optimized for the kind of use case you want. Facebook and friends are a huge and dysfunctional towns square, but you don't need a towns square to talk to your family, you need a private shed.
One of the things I do enjoy is Google Meet videos with my grandchildren that allow for the video to be saved. I can then save that video in my own (private) blog on my own private server. I have found that recording Facetime QT video on macOS/iOS is too problematic.
Yep. One of the reasons that old-style classified ads in newspapers worked is that you had to pay to post an ad. Did people run scams in newspaper classifieds? Yes, but by and large the ads were legit. Today, legitimate online marketplace ads are drowned by the scam ads.
Some of the private groups are still pretty good, it's what the web should have been, could have been, if a better commenting system had been in place and if we had had a better aggregator.
I think it's nice. It provides some additional accountability that Craigslist doesn't provide.
I don't know what you mean by "walled-of version of the web". At least, I don't know what kind of warning you are talking about, with respect to Facebook Marketplace.
I think they mean Facebook is the new AOL where it has it's own content (Marketplace) that non-users can't access. While Craigslist is available to anyone on the web.
