It's lonely out here

 

Facebook is old.
Facebook is outdated.
Facebook is a wasteland.
Facebook has been ruined.
Facebook is dying.
Facebook is a privacy nightmare.

All of those are true. But there’s something else that’s also true.

It was the place where people I called friends made their home. Friends I’ve known for more than a decade. Friends who grew with me, from the days when we were still active in the local writing scene, from the days we started drawing squiggly lines, from the days when everyone finally settled into their own niches, all the way to the moment we collectively despaired over GenAI… before eventually pulling ourselves back up.

Current Facebook is genuinely bad. But it is also a place where you still genuinely have friends. Not followers. Not subscribers. Not other kinds of parasocial connections. Not some hierarchical system where you’re expected to be the center. A place where when I saw someone post, my first thought was, "Oh, that’s what my friends are into, huh."

After being kicked off Facebook multiple times by their bullshit bots, I tried to move on. I thought, well... By the end of 2022 (the start of the rise of AI) the place had already been turned upside down anyway. Might as well escape and get some peace of mind.

A few months went by. I was just doing what I do. Drawing, writing, talking to people on Discord, and occasionally making videos for my barely-alive YT channel (not counting real-life stuff). But something felt missing from my daily routine.

For a very long time, I read a lot of manga and light novels. I played quite a few games and watched plenty of anime. So, like a normal person, I love talking about the things I like, what piques my curiosity, and what bothers me about those topics.

With the lost of the account, I also kinda lost people I'm used to talk with too. 

The first thing I did after losing my Facebook account was reactivating my old Twitter. And considering how Twitter works, of course it was full of strangers I knew nothing about, debating topics I couldn’t care less about.

Some friends from Facebook were there too, but they mostly used Twitter as a secondary platform. A place where you consume contents, not create. It wasn’t a place for them to socialize.

I thought, well, that’s just how it works when you join a new circle.

But NO!

The more I interacted with it, the more it demanded interaction. The more time I invested, the more Twitter shoved posts at me posts designed to pull me deeper into the abyss. Arguing about pointless stuff with strangers on the internet.

And it worked. For a while. Until I realized something.

Man, I hadn’t made a single connection. At all. Just like I treated those users as strangers, they treated me the same way. This wasn’t socializing. Not to mention with how one wrong post could get you dogpiled by the internet. You have to wear a thick mask there at all times.

This is not a palce where you get a genuine friends. 

Instead of social media, it felt like a field of landmines.

After that, I quieted down. I barely posted anything until recently.

By posting anything, you’re granting X the right to shove all your content into their slop machine. And that broke me.

I briefly entertained the idea of making a Bluesky account, but there were too many horror stories. Many of my friends discouraged me too, so that idea fell through.

Instagram. I have an account there. But it focuses almost entirely on images and videos, with barely any space for text. It’s not a great place either. I have a few acquaintances there, but they mostly use it as a dumping ground for their creations. Again, It’s not a place to make friends. After all, scrolling past things is the platform’s main interaction model.

Threads? Same situation as Instagram. Another Meta-adjacent place built on a follower/following system.

I checked Tumblr too, looking at my old account. And yeah it was just another microblogging site with a Twitter-like structure.

The internet is bigger than ever, yet since the AI bubble started inflating, I feel like my place in it has slowly eroded. Algorithms turn the places I frequent into ghost towns, while making social media feel hostile to your very existence.

Facebook is now truly awful. But now I understand why I stayed there for more than a decade, even after everything went downhill.

It was the people. It really was that simple.

Even the shittiest game feels alright when you’re playing with friends.

I don’t miss Facebook.
I don’t miss its gaslighting “recommended” posts.
I don’t miss its shitty moderation bots.

Of course there's still many friends that i can talk with in Discord. But there's also tens to hundred of people that I'm forced to leave behind when I lost acess to zuck's land.

That was a lot of words, but the main point is.

I just… miss my friends.