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I read "it's dying" by people on Discord and Reddit all the time, but the numbers prove otherwise. It's been going up this entire time and sitting over 3 billion MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS!
I feel like the bubble around people on other platforms saying "who uses Facebook anymore lol" is kind of wild given the numbers. Keep in mind these are active users not just abandoned accounts.
And nobody is saying they're bots?
I think the era where people use Facebook exclusively to keep up with Aunt Shandelle or Cousin Pablo or your mother-in-law Sharon are over
There really isn't a replacement for local stuff.
Nextdoor exists but it's not really any better since it's still a proprietary walled garden.
It's weird how much the media still cover twitter, given how increasingly niche it's become.
Also seems quite high. I did a google and apparently it's half the number and closer to 300 million.
I wonder how many of those active users are people who only use messenger because their friends use messenger. Or people who have auto login turned on and click a link from search results.
Monthly active users is a fairly deceptive metric for a social media platform because ANY activity can count you as an active user and Facebook has massive reach.
Messenger is accounted as a different thing on the graph. Which to me is surprising that anyone would choose that pile of crap to talk to anyone.
Because it isn’t just people posting what they ate at Texas Roadhouse yesterday.
Is still use Facebook quite a bit. I have multiple hobby, local interest, and work-related groups I participate in regularly.
Local businesses post open hours there when Google has it wrong.
Local events are easier to find and participate in.
I probably make 1-2 posts on my own timeline a year. Facebook has transformed (at least for me, and I heavily curate what I see) from a “connect and stay in touch with friends” or “post everything you do” place to being somewhat more like Reddit.
I also recommend (on desktop/Firefox) Facebook Container and Social Media Fixer Plugins. Best damn thing that I ever added to FB was Social media fixer. Just add the filter “recommended for you” and so much garbage is immediately removed from Facebook.
Also, people that say “Facebook is dead” only means that maybe they and a couple of their friends don’t use it - or at least don’t admit it. Not that their anecdotal usage has any bearing on the actual state of the company.
I finally deleted mine the other day. No goodbyes, no fanfare, just dumped it like the garbage it is. No regrets.
Most folks never bother to delete their accounts, and it’s now one of the older social networks. It was also popular at one time among GenX, who got their Boomer parents to sign up so they could keep contact with their grandkids remotely.
There are far fewer Boomers on TikTok, and many GenX’rs have simply given up on trying to remain in contact with anyone they actually know.
I'm pretty happy Telegram is there though. It's the step in the right direction when we talk about "better internet". Also never realized it's that big as it has yet to break through in my country.
Yeah - I do find it odd when people say Facebook is dying, because it really isn't. Unless Zuckerberg pulls a Musk anytime soon, it isn't going anywhere - unlike Xitter, Facebook is an advertising juggernaught that makes more than enough money to keep itself afloat.
And that's not even mentioning Facebook groups, news pages, business pages, the market place, etc.. they've got fingers in many different pies, and it shows.
And even more, while it may not be popular amongst tech savvy folks, it is still insanely popular amongst regular folks. I for one can vouch that a significant proportion of my non-techy friends use either it or Instagram as their primary social media.
Hell, that's why messenger is up there too - everyone has Facebook, so everyone has messenger, making it extremely convenient to message people you know. It's certainly why I use it a lot, it's where my friends are.
Meta dominates social media even now - just look at your list. Of the top seven, over half of them are Meta.
Because that is where the regular people are and I for one won't be bothered to try convince them otherwise because I know it is futile. I'll just check in every now and then to keep in touch with them and that's why I'm still there.
Facebook marketplace primarily for anyone I know that still uses it. Also people having messenger as their sms app and not knowing the difference or using their Facebook account to sign into every other website and games. Don't forget every Instagram and WhatsApp user is pressured to link their accounts too. Meta makes parasites seem friendly and helpful 🙃
Messenger no longer integrates SMS. It was dropped some time last year or even earlier.
Your grandma and all your aunts and uncles and cousins are there, so there's a certain amount of checking for weddings and funerals.
The new restaurant on the corner has the menu on their Facebook page before there's a Google maps link to it.
Concert venues put their calendar, lineup, and set times on it
School districts and local communities post their snow days, park events, theater schedule, library events, stuff like that and it's easier to see that all in one place instead of going to each of their websites.
I don't use it, but I would assume because if the people you know are on it, leaving it means that you can't talk to them.
Social media is an example of a type of system that benefits from network effect; the value rises as something like the square of the number of users. That is, there's value in using the system because other people use it.
Systems that benefit from network effect are going to be pretty hard to shift people off of.
In practice, it's probably not really the square of users -- most people don't interact with or even have the realistic possibility of interacting with billions of people. But they do interact with "pools" -- not an official term, just something I'm making up here -- of people that might be a subset of that. Some might be friends and associates, the sort of thing that hovers around Dunbar's number, maybe 150. There might be a broader pool of people with similar interests that one might interact fleetingly with, a broader pool that speaks the same language, etc. And once a lot of people in such a "pool" are in a given system, it increases the value to an individual a lot, because those are the people that the system lets them speak to and lets them hear. If you leave for a competing system, you give up connectivity to all the people in that pool.
That creates a collective switching barrier, and a potent one. The point of social media is to communicate; if nobody else uses it, it has essentially zero value.
There's also an individual switching barrier created by UI familiarity -- that discourages anyone from using a given system, isn't really specific to social media, but it explains why anyone would tend to want to avoid switching away from a system that they are familiar with, all else held equal.
In the case of social networks like Reddit, a moderator might have built up personal reputation and a userbase for their particular group. I don't know how Facebook group moderation works, but let's say that it works the same way as on Reddit. If you switch to a Facebook alternative, you lose the status, plus the network effect from that particular group. That's another individual switching barrier.
In the case of social networks like Reddit, which use pseudonyms, you accrue reputation associated with a pseudonym. I know a handful of pseudonyms on the Threadiverse that are knowledgeable or trustworthy. That gets zeroed out when you switch a network; people lose both the status and the knowledge of the reputations of others, don't know who to trust. There are ways to deal with that particular one, like having a bot that everyone trusts that tells a new Fediverse account to send a particular random comment, waits for a Reddit account to send a message and then endorses a particular user on the Threadiverse as also being a user on Reddit. But...if you look at the Fediverse today, it doesn't have a mechanism for that. And if people running social media like Facebook or Reddit discovered some kind of process like that, they'd probably have an interest in shutting it down, doing what they could to disrupt that transfer mechanism. That's another individual switching barrier.
The combination of all of these switching barriers makes it pretty tough for someone to leave, and it's one reason why social networks have value -- because you're getting your hands on information about and access to a large userbase that will have a hard time switching away.
I don't actually know if there is some kind of alternative that aims to do the same thing that Facebook does. Reddit isn't it, and Twitter isn't it, though they do do some vaguely-related things. But, okay, let's say that something like that exists.
It's really hard to get a person to switch, because if they do so in isolation, they smash into the switching barrier associated with network effect.
And because you have to have everyone do this at the same time, you have a collective action problem. You propose that everyone switch from Facebook to -- for example -- Fedibook on the Fediverse. If everyone switched concurrently, nobody would hit the barrier to switching from network effect. But...it's hard to convince everyone to do so. Maybe some people are sick or busy that day and don't want to put the time in at the same time. Some people aren't going to want to do it -- they aren't going to want to put in the time to learn a new system and build new workflows around it, maybe learn new client software. It's like switching from Windows to Linux -- someone may have put many years into learning Windows, and that's experience that in part goes away if they switch to Linux; for them, that's a large individual switching barrier. Some percentage of people feel, based on a quick assessment, that the individual switching barriers above dominate, make a switch from Facebook not worthwhile even if they are willing to participate in a mass concurrent switch. Maybe some people think that Fedibook is technically-superior to Facebook and would have used it if each had 0 users and were put side-by-side, but don't want to deal with trying to coordinate a concurrent switch. And because you can't get a simultaneous collective switch going due to those reasons, every individual user thinking about switching is going to face the big collective switching barrier -- being cut off from lots and lots of other people.
Marketplace has a big impact. It's the best place to sell your stuff
The graph doesn't show it's going up. Ay source for that?
How do they define monthly active users? If I never post anything, but log in every couple weeks to see what my friends are up to and maybe like a few posts, am I counted?
I imagine that would count as an active user. Just any login or site visit probably counts though.
Probably messenger.
That's listed separately.
Oh right. Wow that is surprising then! Maybe FB events.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a large crossover of people who want to use Messenger but only access it through Facebook.
There are plenty of people for whom Facebook may as well be the entire Internet. Not just demographic groups but entire countries. It's definitely in decline with the demographic that uses Reddit, Lemmy, and discord -- but several billion average users don't disappear overnight
Yup, in many of the world's poorer regions Facebook has partnered up with cell phone providers to provide free access to the Facebook ecosystem and a limited number of other sites but not the general internet. This means for instance that if someone posts a newspaper article you can't even check up on the source without incurring extra costs. For millions of people Facebook therefore is the de facto Internet experience.
