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I read "it's dying" by people on Discord and Reddit all the time, but the numbers prove otherwise. It's been going up this entire time and sitting over 3 billion MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS!
I feel like the bubble around people on other platforms saying "who uses Facebook anymore lol" is kind of wild given the numbers. Keep in mind these are active users not just abandoned accounts.
I don't use it, but I would assume because if the people you know are on it, leaving it means that you can't talk to them.
Social media is an example of a type of system that benefits from network effect; the value rises as something like the square of the number of users. That is, there's value in using the system because other people use it.
Systems that benefit from network effect are going to be pretty hard to shift people off of.
In practice, it's probably not really the square of users -- most people don't interact with or even have the realistic possibility of interacting with billions of people. But they do interact with "pools" -- not an official term, just something I'm making up here -- of people that might be a subset of that. Some might be friends and associates, the sort of thing that hovers around Dunbar's number, maybe 150. There might be a broader pool of people with similar interests that one might interact fleetingly with, a broader pool that speaks the same language, etc. And once a lot of people in such a "pool" are in a given system, it increases the value to an individual a lot, because those are the people that the system lets them speak to and lets them hear. If you leave for a competing system, you give up connectivity to all the people in that pool.
That creates a collective switching barrier, and a potent one. The point of social media is to communicate; if nobody else uses it, it has essentially zero value.
There's also an individual switching barrier created by UI familiarity -- that discourages anyone from using a given system, isn't really specific to social media, but it explains why anyone would tend to want to avoid switching away from a system that they are familiar with, all else held equal.
In the case of social networks like Reddit, a moderator might have built up personal reputation and a userbase for their particular group. I don't know how Facebook group moderation works, but let's say that it works the same way as on Reddit. If you switch to a Facebook alternative, you lose the status, plus the network effect from that particular group. That's another individual switching barrier.
In the case of social networks like Reddit, which use pseudonyms, you accrue reputation associated with a pseudonym. I know a handful of pseudonyms on the Threadiverse that are knowledgeable or trustworthy. That gets zeroed out when you switch a network; people lose both the status and the knowledge of the reputations of others, don't know who to trust. There are ways to deal with that particular one, like having a bot that everyone trusts that tells a new Fediverse account to send a particular random comment, waits for a Reddit account to send a message and then endorses a particular user on the Threadiverse as also being a user on Reddit. But...if you look at the Fediverse today, it doesn't have a mechanism for that. And if people running social media like Facebook or Reddit discovered some kind of process like that, they'd probably have an interest in shutting it down, doing what they could to disrupt that transfer mechanism. That's another individual switching barrier.
The combination of all of these switching barriers makes it pretty tough for someone to leave, and it's one reason why social networks have value -- because you're getting your hands on information about and access to a large userbase that will have a hard time switching away.
I don't actually know if there is some kind of alternative that aims to do the same thing that Facebook does. Reddit isn't it, and Twitter isn't it, though they do do some vaguely-related things. But, okay, let's say that something like that exists.
It's really hard to get a person to switch, because if they do so in isolation, they smash into the switching barrier associated with network effect.
And because you have to have everyone do this at the same time, you have a collective action problem. You propose that everyone switch from Facebook to -- for example -- Fedibook on the Fediverse. If everyone switched concurrently, nobody would hit the barrier to switching from network effect. But...it's hard to convince everyone to do so. Maybe some people are sick or busy that day and don't want to put the time in at the same time. Some people aren't going to want to do it -- they aren't going to want to put in the time to learn a new system and build new workflows around it, maybe learn new client software. It's like switching from Windows to Linux -- someone may have put many years into learning Windows, and that's experience that in part goes away if they switch to Linux; for them, that's a large individual switching barrier. Some percentage of people feel, based on a quick assessment, that the individual switching barriers above dominate, make a switch from Facebook not worthwhile even if they are willing to participate in a mass concurrent switch. Maybe some people think that Fedibook is technically-superior to Facebook and would have used it if each had 0 users and were put side-by-side, but don't want to deal with trying to coordinate a concurrent switch. And because you can't get a simultaneous collective switch going due to those reasons, every individual user thinking about switching is going to face the big collective switching barrier -- being cut off from lots and lots of other people.
It looks to me like "social media" breaks down into a few categories: Video/image sharing (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Douyin, Kuaishou); Messaging (WhatsApp, WeChat, FB Messenger, Telegram, Snapchat, QQ); Microblogging (Twitter, Weibo); and tangled fog of pulsating yearning (Pinterest).
Then, there's Facebook, which defies easy categorization. It does all of the above, plus more. It's how people maintain loose connections with other people that they may not talk to every day. What is its competition? Basically, I think it remains popular because it's the default, nothing else can replace it.
Because non technically savvy people get comfortable and it's always difficult to get them to move, so everyone who wants to change, can't because they end up alone and social media only works if you have people to be social with. Younger people will have the same problem with TikTok and the like when their friends age and they want to move. Only new generations start with a clean slate and can get all their friends to start out at the new sites.
3 billion monthly active sure sounds a little excessive. I wonder if there's some shenanigans going on, combining other facebook's services.
Where I'm from. Facebook is free of charge on data connections on some Telcos.
That's why almost all people with data connection, whether pre paid or post paid are most likely using Facebook.
Does those number include people that only use the account with other pages widgets? Like "access with your Meta account" and shit like that.
This says nothing about how much they use reach platform though. Just logging into Facebook and checking what's up over a month will count here.
People don't really delete their facebook account. Just keep it around. And at one point I'm pretty sure everyone had an account.
A while back I remember hearing "dying" was only accurate in the West, but that was a matter of years ago so it may or may not still be true.
I use Facebook. I am not in touch with very many of my relatives. The few that I am in touch with are all on Facebook. I also live a significant distance from pretty much all of my friends and that's a way I can keep in touch with them. On top of that, my brother, who is on the spectrum, prefers to communicate with me that way. In fact, I would probably never hear from him until my mother died if I didn't because he's never called or emailed me.
But... here is how I use Facebook: I only follow select friends and relatives who aren't too annoying- which means following about 10-15 people and unfollowing all the others, I tell it every time I see an ad I never want to see again, and I am only in groups that are either small and personally significant to me (like the group for my relatives) and a couple of others that I mostly just look at and don't participate in.
No arguments, no political unpleasantness, nothing that makes me angry or upset unless something bad is happening to someone I care about, and honestly it's not unpleasant. I think I've maybe blocked three people the entire time I've been on Facebook and all three did something personal to me offline that made me decide to cut off contact with them.
Sure, they're hoovering up my data, but so is everyone else.
It fulfils roles as
It's large enough that any amount of enshittification is compensated by network effect.
Because that is where the regular people are and I for one won't be bothered to try convince them otherwise because I know it is futile. I'll just check in every now and then to keep in touch with them and that's why I'm still there.
This is it. Lemmy users are completely unaware of the extent to which they are not like normal people.
A significant number of those are not from the USA.
Yeah, not surprised at all. I know many people for whom Facebook is 90% of their internet usage, and some people I know use the words 'Facebook' and 'internet' interchangeably. Personally, I deleted my account well over a decade ago.
I wonder if we could see how many new users each year (without bots), I'd wager their growth is pretty stagnant because they already have so many users that nearly every person has an account.
I use it because it has what I want.
It has my local community group who discuss ideas and plan events. It has my mother's group who only use Facebook messenger to communicate. It has my extended family who live overseas. If I left and asked them to send me pictures I would only get a few a year, this way I see pics every week.
Do I hate the idea of it? Yes. Would I like to delete my account? Yes. Is the trade-off worth it for me to stay? Also yes.
I'm in Canada, and I'm pretty locked into Facebook for a few things:
I have and sometimes even use it. Most important reasons: some interest groups stuck on FB (at best they move to Instagram), and my municipality posts their news/info there. Sure they have the official notifications but the really useful stuff is on FB (and I hate it, though I also get why)
Network effect. That's why we need to keep the fediverse alive: so futur generation aren't forced to signed into Facebook, Discord or whatever would be (or would have been) trendy.
It'll probably stay insanely popular until the boomers die off. They're not gonna switch to another one, but I don't any of the younger gens gravitating toward it.
