I've been railroaded into using Facebook 2 or 3 times by friends, family and even my SO, and my experience each and every time was a soulless one like yours. It was just a non-stop stream of people and their friends reposting shallow things they found on the Internet, inspirational quotes, and political garbage. And if people did comment, they were just brief quips - probably just enough effort to try to manipulate others to like+comment back on their own content.
Email and phone's all I need. If people can't put in the effort to remember or catch up with me, even if it's just every few months, then they're not my friend.
There are a lot of people on this thread complaining about the privacy implications of Facebook and how Mark Zuckerberg is evil. While I don't disagree with those sentiments, it's not really why I avoid Facebook. I still use a lot of things that have similar problems like Google or Reddit.
One of the most sinister things about Facebook to me is that it creates the illusion that you are close with friends or relatives when you're really mostly watching a superficial view of peoples' lives in a passive, voyeuristic way. Comments and likes make you feel connected, but they are not meaningful interaction.
When I first deleted my account and stopped using Facebook, I felt initially a lot lonelier. But was I? After more time went by, I became convinced it was all too superficial.
Interestingly, who I spent time with shifted toward other people who were either not on Facebook at all or were very unengaged with it personally (for example, one friend only uses it to promote his business).
My only partial regret with any of this is that the pandemic really scrambled this. Almost all of my friends were purely people I saw in person, with no online component to our friendship. That all got paused in 2020, and has been very hard to get back to the same level since.
> I've been railroaded into using Facebook 2 or 3 times by friends, family and even my SO
Just out of curiosity, as long as you don't mind: what was the reason (or which feature, actually) they asked you to use Facebook in those cases? I haven't needed it in 5 or 6 years and nobody I know really uses it (or nobody admits), but that might be due to my location (Germany), so I'm a bit curious what's it still good for!
The first time I used it, it was family members wanting to connect with me, and the old "everyone uses it!" argument (the same one applied to MySpace back in the day). So I made an account, commented on stuff, posted pics of my cat, but ended up deleting my account after a few months because nobody was really "connecting" with each other, plus I found friends-of-friends' posts boring.
Second time was from some new friends I had made, who argued that exchanging phone numbers and emails were old-fashioned and awkward when meeting new people, and that it was essential to have Facebook since it's easier to just say "you can just look for me on Facebook; you'll know it's me since I have XYZ in my profile pic". I saw some validity to the argument, since recently I had met and got along with a couple cute girls on a train ride, but regretted not exchanging contact details with the two of them because asking for numbers/emails felt like a slight overreach. Though if I had a FB account at the time, I thought it'd have made sense if I could've just been able to casually say something like "look up John Smith on FB if you wanna hang out sometime. See ya!".
Third time was my then-SO. She posted on Facebook a LOT, and had many hundreds of followers. She begged me to make an account for months, so I could bask in all the content she posted.
Anyway, your experience with people not using Facebook sounds on-par. Facebook is increasingly considered a "boomer" technology, especially by the younger generations. Many younger folk these days tend to keep in touch via small Discord groups, or whatever dopamine-drip privacy-nightmare app of the week is.
Interestingly I also met some cute girls and a friendly guy in a train recently and they tried to exchange Instagram handles with me. I just asked for WhatsApp and we created a little group (but then again, Germany).
I guess a SO being there would actually make me use it. I did have a Twitch account for a while because of someone I dated....... (Curiously I haven't admitted this even to my therapist, lol). On the other hand, it's Facebook so I'd probably troll them and ask for printouts of the posts.
About the boomer thing, interestingly I never really had close family using it. But everyone under 25 I know denies having it like it's some kinda plague. The ones over 25 claim they forgot their password.
I've been railroaded into using Facebook 2 or 3 times by friends, family and even my SO, and my experience each and every time was a soulless one like yours. It was just a non-stop stream of people and their friends reposting shallow things they found on the Internet, inspirational quotes, and political garbage. And if people did comment, they were just brief quips - probably just enough effort to try to manipulate others to like+comment back on their own content.
Email and phone's all I need. If people can't put in the effort to remember or catch up with me, even if it's just every few months, then they're not my friend.