•  Zworf   ( @Zworf@beehaw.org ) 
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        2 months ago

        Wow I’m surprised so many people still use facebook. In my circles I hardly ever hear from it. People my age (40s) are worried about privacy, the younger generations all prefer insta (30s), tiktok (20s) and other stuff.

        I really used to like facebook when it showed me updates of what my friends were doing on the timeline.

        But then they moved to this algorithmic “feed” crap which hid some of my friends’ updates and inserted random other crap. Then I hated it and the privacy invasion wasn’t worth it anymore. If they’d only allowed me to keep the old timeline I probably would still be using it. It just felt like such a drag going through all the bullshit every day trying to find news from my friends.

          • Yes indeed. I stuck with instagram a lot longer because it didn’t do this, but now in an attempt to copycat TikTok they’ve done the same with the home screen that keeps switching back to “For you” instead of “Following”. 🤦‍♂️

          • Trust me, fb ads are way worse than it used to be. Mine is flooded with celebrities advertising scams in the ads, in my region.

            “Hi, I’m [some celebrity name]. When I was young, I didn’t have money, but investing on stocks changed my life! …”

            These scammers use ChatGPT to generate millions of these and fb is now chaos because admins can’t do anything, I tried reporting and tuning ad preferences, but there’s no solution because they are literally flooding the platform. These even aren’t copy pastes because the AI generates a huuuge variety of them. The fact that the ad posts mimics actual posts (by fb’s deliberate design) doesn’t help.

            And I hate celebrities, so seeing their face already makes my day a bad one.

        • Wow I’m surprised so many people still use facebook.

          30 seconds in a month counts as an active user, so it’s not really surprising. A lot of small business, event and community information is still tied up in the Facebook ecosystem, forcing people to keep their accounts around for those occasional logins. We’re not talking about 3 billion people using it for hours a day.

        • In my circles I hardly ever hear from it.

          Same, but then again, I probably am acquainted with like 500-1000 people, which leaves about 7.8 billion people in the world who I’m not at all acquainted with. I’m starting to think that my circles aren’t representative of all circles.

    • The white supremacists are running a campaign to help their elderly (quite a large user base) get digitally literate. You get a free noodling glove and a Substack keychain if you install X and take a 15 minute creative writing course.

  • Ok new plan: convince Elon to buy Meta, or at least Threads, or at least get a position on their board.

    But seriously, I don’t understand people jumping from one proprietary walled garden to the next. My hope is that it’s a natural selection thing, and each time a platform gets cancelled, a small percentage of the user base will hop to the fediverse, until eventually it’s the preferred destination.

  • 🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

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    But as boosts from these early efforts wore off, Threads’ downloads would drop, returning once again to become neck-and-neck with X installs, particularly on iOS, according to data from Appfigures.

    Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Threads had 130 million monthly active users (MAUs) as of the company’s fourth quarter.

    Instagram head Adam Mosseri says the Threads app is doing “remarkably well” in Japan, for instance — a market where Twitter had strong traction.

    As TechCrunch reported last month, X appears to have a Verified bot problem, where a number of blue-checked, paid accounts accidentally revealed their source by replying to X posts with some variation of “I’m sorry, I cannot provide the requested feedback as it goes against OpenAI’s content policy”  — a boilerplate response for the AI.

    As for the decentralized X alternatives, like Mastodon’s official mobile app and the newly public Bluesky, they barely register in the face of this competition, appearing as largely flat lines on the download chart.

    To be fair, Mastodon has a wide third-party app ecosystem, but in total, its network is hovering around 1 million monthly active users at this time, per its own first-party data.


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