I joined Facebook years ago not long after it took off from its college roots. I also quit it years ago when my feed became full of junk.

The one thing I miss is contact with my friends, family, and ex-cowokers. Most of them weren’t technically inclined so that was the only platform they were on. Some of them did move to Instagram, which I did as well until Facebook bought it.

I then tried wt.social shortly after it started up. It seemed like a great alternative, but its growth is very slow, It has 450,000 users according to wikipedia. Now there’s a version 2, Trust Cafe. The same article also mentioned that they’re looking into connecting to ActivityPub.

What do you use in place of Facebook to stay in contact with friends and family? Mainly, I just use text messaging apps. I use Lemmy and Mastodon for news and information.

  • @[email protected]
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    12 years ago

    Nothing I’ve found is a true replacement to the good, original Facebook. Even Instagram is filled with ads and random BS nowadays. I made it a point to add all the birthday information I could to my calendars, and then keep up a bit with people on Instagram, but that’s about it.

  • @[email protected]
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    92 years ago

    Nothing I’ve found is a true replacement to the good, original Facebook. Even Instagram is filled with ads and random BS nowadays. I made it a point to add all the birthday information I could to my calendars, and then keep up a bit with people on Instagram, but that’s about it.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 years ago

      I also added birthdays to the contacts on my phone. I found an Android app called Birday that reminds me when someone’s birthday is based on the dates in my contacts. Birday and the clock are the only two widgets on my homescreen. People seem to like that I reach out with a text or phone call to talk to them on their birthday over the FB “click to send happy birthday” thing (which is still better than forgetting, to be fair).

  • HousePanther
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    52 years ago

    I am ex-Facebook user since November of 2017. So far nothing but I recently learned about Friendica. I am curious about it.

  • bbbhltz
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    42 years ago

    I’ve had FB since 2004 or 2005. I never deleted it. I visit once a week. It is a wasteland for me. The only person who ever posts regularly is my brother.

    When I stopped using it regularly I switched to… Nothing. While I do have Mastodon most of my chatting takes place through Signal. I have 2 contacts on WhatsApp. I am awful at keeping in contact but people know how to find me if they need me. I send out birthday emails to close friends.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    contact with my friends, family, and ex-cowokers

    Whenever I wanted to keep in touch with someone growing up, I’d ask to exchange phone numbers. This habit meant I didn’t really need to use social media to honestly keep in touch with most people. At most the social media would hand me a quick life update (e.g. vacation picture lets me know to ask you how your vacation was) that I could use to start a conversation. I think this worked because most people my age had cell phones that they accessed the social media from.

  • @[email protected]
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    32 years ago

    Mastodon has been a fun replacement for twitter, but I don’t really use it to keep in touch with real life friends, I use it to meet new internet friends and keep up on niche topics/hobbies. I have no interest in a Facebook replacement tho. The format of Facebook is lost on me at this point and anyone who I want to keep in touch with since leaving Facebook has my phone number. As for family, I see them for holidays and it’s more than enough for me.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    My grandmas and I are pen pals. I text my parents.

    I got on facebook to meet girls at university, not to keep up with family. I slowly got off facebook when my friends from university quit posting anything useful.

    My other sort of anonymous social media stuff was on reddit and now Lemmy.

  • @[email protected]
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    22 years ago

    I got into Facebook pretty late (around 2010) and it never grabbed me. I caught up with old friends, but the window into their lives that it provided me with just made them seem annoying. I fiddled with it for a bit and then switched to Google Plus for the brief window between it coming up and Google sucking all of the joy out of it. After that, it was Twitter and then Mastodon around five years back.

    As for keeping up with friends and family, it’s mostly email, phone, and the occasional Signal group chat.

  • Gutotito
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    22 years ago

    Pretty much just this. Well, and LinkedIn, but I don’t post personal stuff over there. I moved from Facebook to Reddit about eight or nine years ago, and with Reddit circling the drain, am currently rudderless. Tried this Mastodon thing when it first got popular a few years ago and had no good experiences with it; this time around seems to be different with all the fresh blood. Just hope it keeps on keepin’ on .

  • @[email protected]
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    22 years ago

    They can come visit me if they have something to say. Or email. I’ve invited them to XMPP and fedi many times and they’ve ignored it. I interpret this as them not wanting to talk to me.