Over the past few years, I've observed that many of my friends on Facebook have dropped off or become very rarely active. It's often that there aren't even enough new posts in a day to fill the screen and I see older posts from older days.

Conversely, on Twitter I started following a variety of journalists and otherwise interesting people, and there's always a ton of stuff to read, but relatively little from people I've met in real life, and for those, they tend to post more professional and little or nothing personal.

I'm curious if others have made similar observations. Like, has the Facebook "news feed of your friends" idea just completely died off?

I see posts from older days on Facebook, not because there isn't new stuff from friends, but because the Facebook algorithm "chooses" to prioritise some older stuff (that I've often already read at least once). There is no shortage of content from friends for them to show me, but sadly the Facebook engine doesn't always want to show that to me first.

I don't see that on Twitter, but only because I don't use the official Twitter client. If I do go and use the website or official client, it does the same annoying stuff that Facebook does, only seemingly worse. The whole first page and half on Twitter's website for me is old tweets or stuff from people I don't directly follow (possibly made worse by the fact that Twitter are being cut off from the interaction details they'd get if I didn't use a third party client).

I miss the days of the Facebook chronological feed. I'm very glad I can still have a chronological Twitter feed via a third party app (TweetBot).

I do still value Facebook though, largely for the active canoeing and kayaking communities that I'm involved with there and no where else.

I've never been a big FB or Twitter user, and pretty much not at all now. I prefer old school boards such as this one, where I can decide what to read and carry on reasonable conversations.

And, of course, the kids moved on to shinier things some time ago.

-jk

It never went away: it's under "Most Recent" on the left, and you can bookmark it as "https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr".

Peter

So I've tried the "chronological" feed, but it doesn't really solve the problem, which is that a significant number of my friends have simply disengaged from the platform. Or if they post super-infrequently, like a few times a year, that doesn't get surfaced.

FWIW, I've been very aggressive at blocking all of Facebook's advertisements as well as blocking all of those no-name meme image sources and related junk that some people just blindly reshare. I want to see actual things written by my actual friends, and I'm reaching the conclusion that they're simply not writing much of anything any more.

Yup. Dan, I've noticed the same trend steadily since the Cambridge Analytica scandal and then really tanking after the last election year. Only a few friends still posting stuff I want to see.

Yesterday's 6-hour Facebook/Whatsapp/Instagram outage has been a fun one to watch. Someone at Facebook really made a huge mistake with their DNS, bad enough to bring down their internal systems, too.

Some of my favorite moments during this time (on Twitter of course):

- "People making jokes about the Facebook services going down make me sick. Anyone who was using an Oculus headset at the time is currently trapped in VR, and if they die there then they die in real life." (link)

- "oh facebook's not working? did you try unplugging it and leaving it unplugged forever?" (link)

- A bevy of Spirit Halloween images, here's one: (link)

- Plums in the icebox: (link)

- "Facebook.com is for sale!" @jack: "How much?" (link)

It was worse than their DNS, they stopped advertising their whole set of network routes. They cut the whole of Facebooks network off from the Internet (they host their own DNS servers).

And they couldn’t then fix it remotely…

The way I understand it is that they hosed up a router config so badly that it nuked the ASN, effectively removing the entire network from the internet.

You know, Facebook has enough problems, but they're not doing themselves any favors these days what with the whistleblower testifying in Washington D.C., the BGP failure, and who knows what's next.

Rob Schofield recommended FB Purity a few years back, and it's made it just about tolerable from a advertising perspective.

A few friends of mine still inflict pictures of their offspring on everyone they know. But most have realised that, for the few people who are genuinely interested (their immediate family, grandparents and the like) they can just use group messaging in cross platform systems like Whatsapp. Any actual meaningful conversations take place on that or FB Messenger.

I actually use the closed groups feature of FB more than anything else now. Typically broadcast engineering type stuff, uni and work alumni etc. It's a bit like this BBS in some respects.

The rest of the time, I troll luddites on EV related adverts and posts. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

An inexhaustible supply

I only use forums and an email list, never really got on with Facebook, Twitter etc

I’m guilty of this due to not everyone having a smartphone let alone WhatsApp. I personally don’t care as people can unfollow me if they wish. Having said that I only have real friends on my Facebook. No random work colleagues or people I hated in school! Some people just want to collect ‘friends’.