It feels incredibly sad to just let those relationships die because you're focusing your energies on the people that are currently around you.
Also, to be honest, I felt the way you did before I deleted a twitter account with about 2k following and 10k followers. I felt like it was dominating my attention, and that made me mad. In a fit of pique I deleted it and it's almost funny how quickly I realized I didn't know any of them, and the passive consumption of their social media database entries was scratching some kind of itch but the same one I get from e.g. binging Star Trek series.
Very strange all around.
but I wouldn't call "passively keeping in touch" with
thousands of people "relationships." It's something,
but I'm not sure what, it seems like we may not have a
good word for "casual strangers,"
The healthiness of it can vary widely. It's a very individual thing.
The relevant questions to ask one's self would include: overall, is this bringing me happiness? Are my "casual relationships" on FB causing me anxiety -- either directly, or because of more subtle FOMO, etc? Are they taking time away from other things that would make my life better, such as more meaningful relationships?
There is a happy path there. I genuinely like seeing that so-and-so from high school just had a baby, or whatever. "We sat through so many classes together," I think. "She was always cool to me. Good for her, she seems happy. Cute baby!" I might never really be close to her again, but I do like seeing that she's doing well.
I seem to be in the minority though. Maybe FB is like cocaine. Seems like some people manage to use it occasionally without damaging their bodies or lives. But the vast majority of people are worse off for it.
This particular thread reminded me of another recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603650 - an app to help you form deeper relationships. Do you need it? Do we need it? Do these things really help?
It's funny - maybe the perfect compromise is exactly what you described. You sometimes want mostly mindless FB updates from people you "know" and otherwise converse with your core friends and family through in-person interactions and other more engaging medium.
My neighbors are nice! We make small talk. That's fine. I like it.
Maybe the unspoken thing here is that it can be a human thing to feel you're a part of a community. A safety net of sorts. If I have to leave town on short notice for an emergency, who's going to feed my cats? I could find that person via my FB network. One of them would or would know somebody that could. One of them could ping me for the same thing. That kind of thing.
This particular thread reminded me of another recent
thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603650
- an app to help you form deeper relationships. Do you
need it? Do we need it? Do these things really help?
I feel like real relationships arise from shared experiences. Doing things together. Playing sports, writing code, gaming together, whatever.
I don't think an app about sharing your life can really accomplish that.
Those relationships you don't want to let go of? They're largely worthless.
An interesting person from 15 years ago doesn't usually stop being an interesting person just because I haven't talked to them regularly.
All those connections are paid for in the most expensive currency that is.
I want Facebook for this purpose but it feels like it’s really not a blog. At all.
LJ was cool because you had quite a diverse group using it. Artists, musicians, teenagers, etc.
This was before MySpace siphoned away the youth crowd, fifteen years ago or whenever it was. I wouldn't see them ever coming back to blogging. In fact I don't really see anybody returning to blogging.
(No disrespect meant to blogs. Blogs are awesome. That was a really good era for the internet.)
https://dreamwidth.org is a community fork of LJ that has a large and active userbase, is open source, and invests a lot into mentoring users › contributors › maintainers. Dreamwidth is a Google Summer of Code participant, for example.
You didn't have normies and family and stuff on there; felt like you could actually express yourself.
Tumblr was its spiritual successor, I guess, in ways. But it wasn't the same. People actually wrote things on LJ. Maybe it was mostly crap, but it was often thoughtful and personal if you had the right friends. It felt like nothing was ever created on Tumblr; it was just endless pithy comments and jokes about things created elsewhere.
The things that made it different than Facebook were (1) that they didn't screw around with your feed (it was your friends' posts, sorted by date), (2) that discoverability and networking was user intentional and exploratory (pull, rather than suggested / push), & (3) access controls were simple, understandable, and obeyed user intent.
But later, after a Russian group acquired LJ:
https://jugad.livejournal.com/174406.html (2nd post on the subject, there was a previous one on the same blog, IIRC).
Interestingly, some years later, I mentioned the same point, on my next blog or on Twitter, and then suddenly my old blog became accessible again (it was not, for a while, after the above-linked incident).
What could fb do to enable this kind of experience for those that want it? Not that they would, but I’d really like to have a vision of what they should do.
A friend of mine from high school happened to be in my city for a weekend. He posted on Facebook asking if he knew anyone there. We went out and had drinks and caught up.
I had a bunch of super close friends at a crappy job back when I was in college. We all went our separate ways but occasionally Facebook reminds one of us of some funny photo from the old days. It's triggered a few large group chats that have been pretty fun.
Every once in awhile I'll think about an old friend from school or a job or wherever and it's nice to just see what they're doing without having to go through starting a whole conversation. (Although I often will since Facebook is a good way to reach out to people.)