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So why use it at all? Why use any social media aside from linkedin and a facebook/whatsapp account for messaging? There seems to be a broad agreement in the rat-diaspora that social media is a plague that wrecks attention spans, leads to skyrocketing teenage mental health issues and erodes any kind of political discourse, yet people still seem to use it.
Just read books and build community in meatspace instead of using Twitter/Bluesky. Whatever benefit you derive probably isn't worth the exposure to memes and toxic ragebait.
I find a healthy bunch of Substacks scratches the same itch as social media while being less corrosive to the mind and soul.
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I use Twitter basically for Cremieux content exclusively.
I only know Cremieux as a private label fashion brand at Dillards … what is yours?
He likes data, and is good at stats. Here's his substack: https://www.cremieux.xyz
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Conversely, I've never understood people who ragequit Facebook completely and then try to demand others to use some niche service to contact them. Just stop reading the feed (install a browser extension if you have to) but keep the messenger.
Facebook messenger? That sounds like some niche service that you want me to get to contact you. Don't you have, like, SMS on your phone?
The advantage of Facebook messenger is that it allows you to send private messages to people you either don't know or don't know well enough to have their phone number, enhanced by the fact that the large user base makes it pretty easy to find people. This was at least the case ten years ago when practically everyone of a certain age was on Facebook and used it regularly, and when you'd get a friend request from practically everyone you met. Now it seems like most people, especially younger people, either don't have profiles or don't look at them. I seldom look at mine, and it seems like most of my friends who used to post frequently have slowed down over the past several years. So these days it doesn't work as well as it used to because there's less likelihood that you'll even be able to find someone on Facebook, and even if you can there's a decent chance they won't see the message.
SMS is horrible for group messaging. You can't take yourself out of a group, and you can't edit the recipients without starting a whole new message. You also can't type longer messages efficiently since you don't have a real keyboard. It's fine for certain things but ongoing group texts about nothing in particular should really be on another app. I was able to switch a couple of mine over to Discord and it's been a 100% improvement. I'd like to get my ski group on there but that's going to be a tough sell.
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Known better as just the messages tab om facebook. Which a lot of people my age use. Also works seamlessly on laptop & tablets unlike sms or whatsapp.
But really the #1 killer feature of FB messages is that they’re tied to your name, not to your arbitrary phone number. Want to send someone a message? Just send one. No need to try to hunt their phone number.
It does require a separate app install on mobile though, right?
You can use it via the mobile website, too.
I can't. I use the mobile website for Facebook itself but I had to install the Messenger app to send messages.
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I have come to despise the proliferation of messaging apps with slightly different functionality, and each one tries to justify itself somewhat differently but end of the day the features anyone cares about are identical.
"Meta" missed a huge chance to live up to their name and build up interoperability with every major messaging app so that Facebook users could end up having a single account on one app that allows them to chat with everyone on every other app through one interface.
I think its more that they erred horribly by trying to make Messenger standalone instead of keeping Facebook messages effortless and having messages by a draw to keep young people on facebook.
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This is basically the long form of my somewhat pithy/sarcastic comment. Sorry, but we just live in a world where messaging apps have already proliferated. They will all have their defenders that prefer this thing or that thing (see the other responses to my comment). Probably the only thing that grinds my gears more than the people who are just defending this feature or that aspect of whatever messaging service is when they do like the comment I responded to and say that it's mostly about everyone else being there. If that's the criteria, we already have that; it's called SMS. Everybody has that. But of course, it's not really about everyone being there; it's about this feature or that feature. Names, numbers, privacy, temporary names, group functionality, extra gizmos, etc. Once you realize that it AlwaysHasBeenMeme about a cluster of features, only one of which is "lots of people have it", then there just isn't any natural "default" that everyone "should" just use.
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