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.
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.