An interesting article about the "unambiguous failure" of social media https://coryd.dev/posts/2023/we-lost-the-thread

It was interesting to me that he focuses on social networks as a support (or not) for IRL relationships; I'm usually thinking more about relationships that start on the internet. Agree that facebook sucks for actually keeping up with friends... Substack actually launched a small feature a few months ago that I've thought would make it work really nice as a facebook replacement: https://read.substack.com/p/private-substacks i.e. you can start a private newsletter and people can request to join, analogous to getting a friend request. And then you've got likes and comments and stuff built in. I've never gotten around to it though because I'm terrible at maintaining relationships ha ha...