I understand that the title of this post is surprising. Facebook has a very negative legacy, and that legacy is well deserved. However, I was surprised to find that, if I use Facebook in a controlled way, it’s the best social media site for my internet usage goals. I’ve spent many years having problems with social media use, especially Reddit, but even Instagram and Twitter at times. Because the content is endless and designed to provoke emotion, I spend much longer than I want to and feel worse when I leave. So I started thinking about what I actually want out of social media. I realized that when I use social media productively, it’s usually to either find events to attend offline, or to connect with my local community in some way. While being connected with global communities of users (at least, users who speak the same language as you) can be great, especially for niche hobbies, doing things in person is extremely important to me and having such a spread out network makes that basically impossible.This is where Facebook comes into the picture.
It might just be the sheer number of users that allows for local connections, but even small towns have multiple discussion groups, and my local government even uses it as one of their main forms of communication. On Facebook, I am in a group that is designed for talking about my city, a group for trading items between each other in my city, and a group for lgbt discussion for the large city near me. Not only that, but I can easily browse events happening in person in my city and cities near me, many of which are only posted on Facebook. Of course, it would be possible to use Facebook in a different way that doesn’t align with my goals, but as long as I’m careful it’s been very helpful to me. I’ve been able to attend events that I never would have known about otherwise, and I’ve also gained access to smaller chat groups where people discuss and do things locally. Even if I do just post or comment on Facebook, I am at least involved in issues in my community or trying to help people in my community, which I think is important to help me feel connected.
Precautions
I definitely do not want to imply that Facebook doesn’t have problems or that everyone should be using it. Facebook is the social network with the most money and power to put towards being addictive, and it absolutely has used its platform to do terrible things in the pursuit of profit in the past. I am lucky in that I find Facebook too complicated to fully appeal to me, but I still make sure to take precautions.First, I always use a browser that prevents tracking (Firefox) to access Facebook, and I don’t download Facebook or Instagram on my phone. Facebook makes most of its money through closely tracking its users' internet activity and serving targeted advertising, and I prefer to opt out of invasive tracking wherever possible.
Within Facebook itself, I only follow people I know in real life or join communities that are local, to prevent myself from being sucked into general internet activities. The one exception to this is a group for a rare disease I have that I can’t find much information on otherwise.
I also have a Firefox extension called Social Fixer which helps me get rid of the parts of Facebook I don’t have an interest in. I block all suggested and sponsored posts, and I also use keywords to block political posts from showing up. I particularly like Social Fixer because it shows me the title of what it’s hidden and I can click to see it if I think it’s actually important. Another great feature of Social Fixer is that it stops the feed from being endless. The feed is broken into pages, each of which have a certain number of posts, and you then have to click see more at the bottom if you want to load more posts. This helps provide natural stopping points for browsing.
Finally, I use StayFree to set a 10 minute per day time limit and OneSec to make me stop and think before accessing facebook. With all of these customizations, I feel like I am able to use facebook in a way that prevents me from being addicted – I actually often feel annoyed when I need to access facebook for something.
I definitely don’t think it’s for everyone, but if you are in your 20s and have never really used Facebook, it might be worth a look to see if it would be useful for you, especially if you are moving away from other social medias.
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