The best time to delete Facebook was many years ago. The second best time is now.
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Unfortunately, many of the old forums for various non-IT-related hobbies have disappeared and moved over to facebook groups and there is no alternative as such. Discord is great for anything related to software or hardware with computers, there are some fantastic communities, but if you are into cars or mountain biking or watches or fellwalking/hiking etc......you really don't have any alternative to facebook. I'm trying to never just passively browse the main feed because it very quickly turns into pure trash, but there are communities there that are worth participating there and which don't really have any other online space.
Yes the death of forums is one of the huge hidden costs and another great reason to hate fb.
Now info you search for online about cars comes from forums that haven’t had a post in the last year, yet in 2009 someone asked a great question about part compatibility.
We need a pirate effort to exfiltrate this data back into the public domain.
Limiting the spread of the information is a feature, not a bug. You don’t want others to take your 2009 forum post out of context and ridicule you in front of a million angry YouTube viewers.
On a forum, "you" is an anonymous username, so ridicule is meaningless. It doesn't follow you into the real world.
Facebook is used to coordinate real world events. Think weekend hikes, dog shows, garage sales, you name it. If you have to hide your real world identity to post on a forum, then it will not be able to replace Facebook.
Unfortunately we're facing a cultural issue here as well - people moved on from Facebook to Discord or private WhatsApp groups, and young would-be pirates see it as normal and good.
> Discord is great for anything related to software or hardware with computers
No, even that is terrible compared to forums – it doesn't get indexed by search engines!
Discord is fine as a active chat medium. It is absolutely awful as an information store. Even beyond the "can't be indexed by search engines" (which is catastrophically bad all by itself), it's just horrible for dealing with any information that isn't part of an active combination _right now_.
Which, unfortunately, is the point.
This is a larger cultural issue. The general population finally got used to being on the Internet, and the Internet adapted to serve its needs and modes of thinking - which are predominantly social. Objective reality, information and access to it is of secondary importance (if even that) - what matters is socializing with friends and having experiences.
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, WhatsApp and Discord are the true social media - they work much like real-life interactions. So to join a topical group, or even know it exists, you literally have to know the right people. Don't have friends who are into something? Don't have friends? Tough luck. It's high school again, but the Internet is owned by jocks now.
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Edited to add:
The shift from e-mail and mailing lists to bulletin boards to link sites with threaded discussions (like HN, or Reddit), to Facebook and finally to Discord and WhatsApp, tells the story of objective reality and information becoming less important to the Internet as more people are on it.
To put it bluntly: the old tools forced the more social people to engage in exchange of actual information. Electronic mail, posts, comments were all forms promoting information hygiene. Even the shitposts were publications which could be referred back to in the future. It all felt like writing something, so people cared, even if only a little bit. Now, the new tools are catering to what the more social/extrovert population really wants: endless chit chat. Talking, talking, talking, talking. Everything ephemeral, access managed by interpersonal relations, navigating it requires engaging in the social games.
Objectivity? Verifiability? Accuracy? Truth? They don't matter much, because outside of crisis situations, they don't matter to most people. That the Internet was briefly oriented around information and knowledge, was a temporary aberration, mostly thanks to it being built by nerds for nerds. But now the whole of society is here, and the Internet finally became social.
I disagree about the goodness of discord (and facebook) compared to old style forums or (better yet) mailing lists with archives.
Searching the forum archives is much worse with facebook, slack or discord than it ever was with even the jankiest phpbb forum or mailman list. Hell, before they grew it up, Yahoo! groups were better from that perspective. And a big part of what made forums for either tech or non-tech hobbies so nice was the ability to search and reference prior discussions.
I was actually hopeful that "login with facebook" and "login with discord" would bring those more search-friendly alternatives back a little bit, but so far I haven't seen it.
On forums you can search by username, by topic alone, inside of a subforum, or by text inside of a thread. That level of search granularity is by design so you aren't querying the entire database unnecessarily.
As a result it's far better than "omnisearch" options on social media that only sometimes surfaces what you were looking for.
Yes, this makes me sad how so many hobby groups are trapped within FB. It’s usually hobbies with an older demographic.
We can always find words to justify being a follower instead of a leader. We shouldn't. Being in the space that the Eternal September has chosen to congregate to have access to the most hikers isn't a hard necessity.
>>We can always find words to justify being a follower instead of a leader
I'm not sure what you mean by that in this context. Just like I have to be part of my local "nerdy" store to play MtG every Friday, I kinda have to be part of local MTB groups to know when they are riding. I could like you say, be a leader and organise my own rides I suppose? Is that what you mean? If so, then I'm sure you can see limitations to this approach.
It's worth it to miss out on that information to delete your account. I don't have one and I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything
I don't know how you can confidently say so - I would have missed out on so many bike rides and car meets and so many things I learnt by being in the right communities by not being on Facebook, because they just aren't posted anywhere else.