I don't know what 2010 era Facebook is, but I'm talking about small SMS, iMessage, Signal, or WhatsApp groups among people who know each other outside the platform. These groups are no more than maybe 10 people each, so you don't fall into the problem of context collapse [1]. You can have offshoot subgroups, and groups can also be ad-hoc for a particular event. The personal small-scale nature means they're governed entirely by shared social norms, not algorithms or formal moderation.
If you want actual meaningful social interactions online, it needs to be small-scale and completely useless for advertisers. Group chats are that.
Yeah the whole idea of public mass social media has basically failed thus far.
Maybe someone will create some enlightened LLM based algorithm that solves the engagement optimization problem but what we have now has proven to be pretty disastrous through many iterations.
Small scale group chats/discord servers are the clear solution right now. Which is sad in some ways because the question then becomes how do you find your way into a good group chat.
But it’s the only way for the sane to not be overwhelmed by the engagement farming, political nonsense, and what Noah Smith calls the “shouting class” of people that have nothing else to do in life but dominate these platforms by stirring up drama all day every day.
Yeah that's not really what I'm interested in. Chat is a very different thing.