To hell with Facebook

[bugo]

Facebook is terrible. My account was recently restricted. I don't know what I said that got me in trouble, because they didn't tell me. I can make posts in groups, but I can't comment on them. I cannot like certain posts and comments. It seems to be completely random. I don't know what I said that got me banned, but I assume it was political. I'm close to abandoning Fashboot for good. Why hasn't anybody filed a class action lawsuit against Meta over "Facebook jail"? Facebook acts as a public utility and it should be regulated by the government as such.

[LilianaUwU]

I'm surprised that anyone still uses Facebook regularly in 2026. I've long since moved on to other platforms. (And yet here I am on an old school forum.)

[vdeane]

I'm surprised that anyone still uses Facebook regularly in 2026. I've long since moved on to other platforms. (And yet here I am on an old school forum.)

I feel like there's a disproportionate amount of people who still use Facebook within the roadgeek hobby.  Pretty much everyone I know of who's still on it and not a roadgeek is at least two decades older than I am.

[LilianaUwU]

I'm surprised that anyone still uses Facebook regularly in 2026. I've long since moved on to other platforms. (And yet here I am on an old school forum.)

I feel like there's a disproportionate amount of people who still use Facebook within the roadgeek hobby.  Pretty much everyone I know of who's still on it and not a roadgeek is at least two decades older than I am.

And with that said, most of my time on Facebook is reading roadgeek groups.

[Max Rockatansky]

Maybe someone got upset about the reminders about not posting AI into the groups you admin?   

[Molandfreak]

Facebook is getting bombarded with spambots and AI content farms which naturally get recommended first. The recent feature where you get a separate feed showing just your friends' posts was implemented way too late to make any difference to its public perception. It might be too big to fail as hard as MySpace did, but I don't know anyone who uses it on a regular basis who is not using it for a side feature such as marketplace or dating.

[Rothman]

I'm surprised that anyone still uses Facebook regularly in 2026. I've long since moved on to other platforms. (And yet here I am on an old school forum.)

Other platforms worry me.  Wonder if they have a large audience or...is The Dead Internet Theory correct?

[bandit957]

All of the AI poo-poo really does need to stop.

[Roadgeekteen]

Facebook is like 80% ai slop now. It's worse than Instagram or tiktok.

[kalvado]

I'm surprised that anyone still uses Facebook regularly in 2026. I've long since moved on to other platforms. (And yet here I am on an old school forum.)

Other platforms worry me.  Wonder if they have a large audience or...is The Dead Internet Theory correct?

Looks like a lot of conspiracy theories of the past are going to be true

[bing101]

How about this one some people leave Facebook for Discord. If people want to leave Facebook and other meta owned venues its this one that's getting the attention. 

[ZLoth]

Shrug... I rejoined Facebook just to keep up with some close friends. But, it's practically a ghost town. And, I'm constantly closing out ads for mobile games.

[Rothman]

I've found Discord to be a poor substitute, despite belonging to about a dozen servers.  Discord doesn't lend itself to multiple simultaneous discussions as well as the forum structures on here and elsewhere, despite Discord's channels structure.

Hard for me not to blame Facebook Groups for obliterating established Internet communities.  I'll never understand why my friends on an old bulletin board were so excited for Facebook Groups.  That community never recovered and just dissolved soon after their adoption.

En%&*(tification in social media has had no bounds and we've allowed very little competition/entrance into the market by design.

[Max Rockatansky]

Discord wasn't for me.  For a while we had a large road Facebook Messenger group that worked well.  I'm to understand people were worried about Messenger logging things they said and switched to Discord.  That angle struck me as undue paranoia. 

FWIW, our page regularly makes some money off of what we post on Facebook.  It usually isn't much but on occasion something gets a viral reaction and it yields a decent chunk of pocket cash.  Speaking for myself, it isn't bad to get engagement money for things I was doing already. 

[english si]

Facebook started going downhill when they opened it up to the general public. It wasn't the breaking up of the homogeneous society of students and recent grads that killed it, but the quest to milk as much money from it as possible and a lack of concern about user feedback.

It wasn't long before the feed stopped being a feed, and being a highlights package.

Then came Farmville...

It's coming up for 10 years since I last went on it to go on it (I sometimes accidentally end up there after clicking a link - read what I want to and then scarper). I don't miss it - or at least no more than I did when I was still semi-active - remembering how good it was in 2006.

[Molandfreak]

Say what you will about farmville, at least it was easy enough to block notifications from the one game your boomer friends used. If you block one AI content farm, two more appear in your feed.

[Chris]

I don't like Facebook either, the platform has gone downhill for at least 10 years now, and has gotten substantially worse in the past 5 years, the feed is essentially a bunch of random pages vying for virality. Almost nobody my age (Millennials) has posted anything on it for years.

That said, it's becoming more valuable to find realtime road-related information that used to be on Twitter / X. Citizen-generated content has moved mostly to Facebook, at least in Europe. Current events about weather impact, disasters or crashes involving roads? Or project updates? That's now mostly on Facebook, not Twitter. Or maybe TikTok, but I don't use that.

I'd say that any platform based on algorithmic feeds is bound to end up with 'enshittification' and misleading / ragebait information, especially with AI now. Which is why I appreciate that a forum like AAroads is still around.

[Max Rockatansky]

I couple other things I've pointed out about Facebook in another recent thread:

-  Several mainstay hobby pages have a significant presence on Facebook (including AAroads).  Many of the pages don't really post much here if at all anymore.
-  Roads are a far more diverse topic on Facebook.  You'll hardly ever find anything on the forum that isn't related to numbered highways.  You can find pretty much any type of niche highway and along with groups on Facebook.  In particular, I really dig the dirt road and overlanding stuff.
-  Historic highway photos are big on Facebook and often have dedicated pages.

I get it some of you don't like Facebook as a social media platform.  All the same, some of you wonder where a lot of folks in the hobby went simply because they aren't here on the forum.  It doesn't seem like many of you looked very hard for missing people and just assumed they quit the hobby.
 

[vdeane]

Facebook is getting bombarded with spambots and AI content farms which naturally get recommended first. The recent feature where you get a separate feed showing just your friends' posts was implemented way too late to make any difference to its public perception. It might be too big to fail as hard as MySpace did, but I don't know anyone who uses it on a regular basis who is not using it for a side feature such as marketplace or dating.

Interesting, I hadn't realized that it was recent.  I remember the old Facebook (before the current design) had stuff like that, but I've been using FBPurity, so "most recent" largely accomplished the same thing once all of FBP's filtering took out the junk (especially as I do still want to see stuff from pages I've specifically followed, and I avoid following ones that would spam up my feed).

I'll never understand why my friends on an old bulletin board were so excited for Facebook Groups.  That community never recovered and just dissolved soon after their adoption.

It's ironic how much "social media" has destroyed communities both online and in real life.

[Rothman]

I couple other things I've pointed out about Facebook in another recent thread:

-  Several mainstay hobby pages have a significant presence on Facebook (including AAroads).  Many of the pages don't really post much here if at all anymore.
-  Roads are a far more diverse topic on Facebook.  You'll hardly ever find anything on the forum that isn't related to numbered highways.  You can find pretty much any type of niche highway and along with groups on Facebook.  In particular, I really dig the dirt road and overlanding stuff.
-  Historic highway photos are big on Facebook and often have dedicated pages.

I get it some of you don't like Facebook as a social media platform.  All the same, some of you wonder where a lot of folks in the hobby went simply because they aren't here on the forum.  It doesn't seem like many of you looked very hard for missing people and just assumed they quit the hobby.
 

It wasn't hard to find m.t.r or this forum.  Shouldn't be harder to find "missing people."

[Max Rockatansky]

I couple other things I've pointed out about Facebook in another recent thread:

-  Several mainstay hobby pages have a significant presence on Facebook (including AAroads).  Many of the pages don't really post much here if at all anymore.
-  Roads are a far more diverse topic on Facebook.  You'll hardly ever find anything on the forum that isn't related to numbered highways.  You can find pretty much any type of niche highway and along with groups on Facebook.  In particular, I really dig the dirt road and overlanding stuff.
-  Historic highway photos are big on Facebook and often have dedicated pages.

I get it some of you don't like Facebook as a social media platform.  All the same, some of you wonder where a lot of folks in the hobby went simply because they aren't here on the forum.  It doesn't seem like many of you looked very hard for missing people and just assumed they quit the hobby.
 

It wasn't hard to find m.t.r or this forum.  Shouldn't be harder to find "missing people."

It "shouldn't be" but seemingly is for some reason?  I know bugo started this topic because of Facebook jail.  It has since turned into the usual suspects who don't like/don't use Facebook complaining about the platform. 

I had lunch in Fresno the other day with a hobby regular who isn't on here much anymore.  His take was that Facebook is just easier for people to get into nowadays as opposed to a dedicated highway forum.  I'm to understand he has had much more success increasing his audience for his page on Facebook given there is greater visibility.  I find it hard to disagree with that logic given how small the crowd tends to be here.  It is really hard to register on the forum nowadays and it isn't the exactly the most accommodating place for newcomers to the hobby.

About 90% of my own personal usage for Facebook has something to do with Gribblenation.  That remaining 10% is mostly comprised of keeping up with what my immediate family and friends are doing.  It feels like I mostly post dog photos on my personal page or get I tagged in things by my wife. The rage bait news stuff and AI things are fairly easy just ignore.     

[Molandfreak]

I couple other things I've pointed out about Facebook in another recent thread:

-  Several mainstay hobby pages have a significant presence on Facebook (including AAroads).  Many of the pages don't really post much here if at all anymore.
-  Roads are a far more diverse topic on Facebook.  You'll hardly ever find anything on the forum that isn't related to numbered highways.  You can find pretty much any type of niche highway and along with groups on Facebook.  In particular, I really dig the dirt road and overlanding stuff.
-  Historic highway photos are big on Facebook and often have dedicated pages.

I get it some of you don't like Facebook as a social media platform.  All the same, some of you wonder where a lot of folks in the hobby went simply because they aren't here on the forum.  It doesn't seem like many of you looked very hard for missing people and just assumed they quit the hobby.
 

Facebook is definitely not all bad, but you need to search for the content that would have automatically appeared in your feed ~15 years ago or opt in to receiving notifications when the roads pages post. The algorithm doesn't distinguish between content farms and pages which are run by actual humans, so if you're engaging with the AARoads and Gribblenation Facebook pages, you are also being directed to Americo Express, USA Culture, and all the other pages which exclusively post AI garbage.

[Max Rockatansky]

I couple other things I've pointed out about Facebook in another recent thread:

-  Several mainstay hobby pages have a significant presence on Facebook (including AAroads).  Many of the pages don't really post much here if at all anymore.
-  Roads are a far more diverse topic on Facebook.  You'll hardly ever find anything on the forum that isn't related to numbered highways.  You can find pretty much any type of niche highway and along with groups on Facebook.  In particular, I really dig the dirt road and overlanding stuff.
-  Historic highway photos are big on Facebook and often have dedicated pages.

I get it some of you don't like Facebook as a social media platform.  All the same, some of you wonder where a lot of folks in the hobby went simply because they aren't here on the forum.  It doesn't seem like many of you looked very hard for missing people and just assumed they quit the hobby.
 

Facebook is definitely not all bad, but you need to search for the content that would have automatically appeared in your feed ~15 years ago or opt in to receiving notifications when the roads pages post. The algorithm doesn't distinguish between content farms and pages which are run by actual humans, so if you're engaging with the AARoads and Gribblenation Facebook pages, you are also being directed to Americo Express, USA Culture, and all the other pages which exclusively post AI garbage.

Both those and others I have blocked on both my accounts.  Turns out the well wasn't bottomless with AI road pages.  Most of the major road groups ended up banning sharing from those pages along with similar AI content.  I'm just glad that I got the blocks in before they started to rip off our stuff.  It is annoying enough when a human has lifted posts from us.   

[Molandfreak]

Facebook is getting bombarded with spambots and AI content farms which naturally get recommended first. The recent feature where you get a separate feed showing just your friends' posts was implemented way too late to make any difference to its public perception. It might be too big to fail as hard as MySpace did, but I don't know anyone who uses it on a regular basis who is not using it for a side feature such as marketplace or dating.

Interesting, I hadn't realized that it was recent.  I remember the old Facebook (before the current design) had stuff like that, but I've been using FBPurity, so "most recent" largely accomplished the same thing once all of FBP's filtering took out the junk (especially as I do still want to see stuff from pages I've specifically followed, and I avoid following ones that would spam up my feed).

The tab I'm talking about was introduced about a year ago. If it were introduced around a decade ago, I bet it wouldn't have lost as much popularity with younger folks.

[bing101]

https://www.proboards.com/

Take your pick on finding alternatives outside of Meta Inc owned stuff like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads. I was told about the Fediverse platforms like Bluesky and Mastadon as alternatives to the meta owned platforms with hype and it's gets played on how Linux is supposed to be an alternative operating system to Windows, Mac and Chrome Os on the PC side.

https://fediverse.info/

https://thefedi.wiki/


https://jointhefediverse.net/learn/?lang=en-us

https://fediverse.party/