[curiousllama]

There has actually been a friends-only feed on FB for years. Timelines -> Friends filters everything down.

The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore. The "flywheel" is broken.

Social Media hasn't died - it just moved to group chats. Everything I care about gets posted there.

Honestly, I would love a running Feed of my group chats. Scan my inbox, predict what's most engaging, and give me a way to respond directly.

[dataflow]

> There has actually been a friends-only feed on FB for years. Timelines -> Friends filters everything down. The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore.

Is that really the only problem? How many taps/clicks do you need to get there? Can you make it the default? And how obvious is it that it actually exists?

[kridsdale3]

I used to be TL of the Facebook News Feed.

People in UX research told us constantly they wanted the feed to be about friends, and chronological.

Several times we ran A/B tests with many millions of people to try exactly this. Every time all the usage metrics tanked. Not just virality and doomscroll metrics, but how many likes, messages, comments, re-shares, and app-opens. We never even measured ad-related things on that team.

So people say they want this, like they say they want McDonalds to offer salads. Nobody orders salads at McDonalds.

[yason]

My facebook bookmark takes me to https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr

I still see other content, even there, but it's still somehow manageable. I run out of updates very quickly though whereas I'd like to just start seeing older posts from friends that I've seen already.

[voxic11]

It takes 2 clicks and you can just bookmark it. https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr

[notlisted]

I've bookmarked the friends feed and the groups feed ( https://www.facebook.com/?filter=groups&sk=h_chr ) which saves me a LOT of aggravation.

[1980phipsi]

They actually made it even easier to find recently on mobile. Right there at the bottom.

[arch_deluxe]

You might be interested in FreeFollow.org [full disclosure, I'm one of the engineers working on it].

It combines the economic model of web hosting (users pay to host spaces, reading is free, and writing in someone else's space is also free), the simple UI of social media (you have a profile and write posts), and the E2EE security model of 1Password (we actually implemented their published security model). It's also a non-profit so there's no pressure from owners to exploit users.

It's aimed primarily at parents of young kids who are annoyed at constantly sharing via text groups, but non-parents are also surprisingly into it.

[tmpz22]

Independent social media run in a cost-effective way and actually helping their community is the future. I really hope non-American devs learn this because most American devs are too busy trying to get rich.

[ianopolous]

You have some similar ideas to the encrypted social network in the Peergos protocol. We'd love to chat and see if there is scope for collaboration.

[ryan-duve]

When I click "Join the waitlist" on Firefox I see an empty beige box on an otherwise blank page.

[busymom0]

Since it's E2EE, do you have a limit on the number of members in a group/friends?

[wwweston]

> There has actually been a friends-only feed on FB for years. Timelines -> Friends filters everything down.

I remember when this was called "Lists", and I carefully gathered acquaintances into lists. When I wanted to check in with particular list, I clicked on the list.

Then the lists sidebar disappeared (but you could still get the functionality if you knew the URL / argument structure).

Then the functionality disappeared.

I'm sure some product/UX staff did career making things on a metric somewhere.

> The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore. The "flywheel" is broken.

Why post when there's no guarantee who/anyone will see it amongst a firehose of bait-y and often angry stuff?

This is part of the anti-flywheel which draws towards doomscroll.

> group chats

Group chats have the baseline virtue of knowing who your audience is.

They're missing other virtues, but that's probably another conversation.

[laweijfmvo]

I think they recently made a big deal about this even? The fact that they would “promote” something that likely reduces time spent scrolling and viewing of ads means that no one is going to use it as an alternative to doom scrolling. They know they got you hooked on the good stuff and are just pretending to not be the bad guys

[macleginn]

It's called Feeds in the version of the interface I see in the browser.

[the_clarence]

If that friends tab is not the default tab its not going to work. Period.

[josu]

I'm looking for it on the mobile app and I can't find it.

[GuB-42]

Discord too. Most of my friends are on Discord, we have group chats and private servers. Many communities use Discord as their primary online hub too.

It is concerning. Discord has been slowly enshittifying for the last couple of years: ads (ex: "quests"), app bugs, etc... There is no export option and even public servers are not accessible to search engines and archives.