Facebook Down, but Sadly Not Out

An Abused User Speaks Out

It was a moment of chaos and calm when Facebook went down yesterday, a moment of time I declared the Great Social Media Collapse of 2021. Facebook cited an “outage” as the reason they were down, but I think as we hear more from their whistleblower, this won’t be the last so-called outage as Facebook employees scramble to erase anything incriminating. I took a lot of time to think yesterday while my schedule was compromised by not having to try and appease the gods of social media. I was sad to see the quiet time end.

It wasn’t all quiet. I was on Twitter — a platform I am loathe to use — quite a bit. I and others danced on Facebook’s premature grave. I knew even then that any reports of its demise were exaggerated. I still lived it up like an employee whose abusive boss called in sick for the week.

As a writer and an editor, it was amazing to actually stop for six hours and think about how much of my daily schedule over the last few years has revolved around using Facebook and other platforms in a perpetual cycle of futility as the logarithms continued to hide my work and the work behind the journal I edit, Oddball Magazine.

Years of posting, and my efforts are all but invisible, viewable to only a handful of friends, and most times that’s only when I tag them. I get more interaction from the occasional troll who takes advantage of my public posts. That’s another thing: Any post limited to “friends only” may as well be set to private.

For months, my girlfriend has been telling me about the time sensitive posts on Facebook I’ve tagged her in only showing up in her feed three days after the fact.

How many times have I posted about an event well before the fact only to get “likes” days after the event is gone and poorly attended?

I freely admit I have become overly dependent on Facebook, as have most of the world. Facebook remains the best way to keep abreast of what’s going on outside our workplaces and contact the most amount of people as quickly as possible.

But what do we do with this instant communication? I host a reading series that has been condemned to Zoom calls for the duration of the pandemic. I update and post to over a dozen pages several…