Facebook Wants Us Back. Will We Go?

Earlier this week I met a fellow who, among very many other things, is a member of a bicycling group based where I live. Given that I live in a pretty small community, I was stunned I’d never heard of the club, which has 900 active members and runs four or five organized rides a week. How’d I miss it?

Well, the fellow told me, it’s a Facebook group. You should join! For the first time in ages, I fired up Facebook with the intention of actually doing something useful. I applied to join the group, then promptly forgot about it. I lost the habit of checking into Facebook more than a decade ago, and I have all notifications from the app turned off.

Then, as if to tempt me back, Facebook announced the Friends Tab.

The Friends Tab is a new — no, actually, a very old — approach to the Facebook news feed. According to the Times, it’s a “separate news feed for users that featured posts shared exclusively by people’s friends and family.” If that sounds like the Facebook you remember from 15 years ago, well, that’s exactly the point.

Core Facebook app usage has declined steadily for the past decade, and if it weren’t for its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, the company would have likely become a Yahoo-like afterthought. Year after year, as the original Facebook sunk into an echo chamber of enshittification…