Postby Kathryn-in-Canada » Tue Nov 28, 2023 10:53 am
As my 15 min timer goes on my wrist....
I was popping in to make a post about my social media ta-dah and then saw LadyM's post. It makes me feel a lot better because I see her as what I aspire to be, and her 'human' times are a reminder to be gentle with myself as well.
Dh commented this morning (while in bad) that he's spending too much time on social Media (almost exclusively FB, the other forums he's on are work related) and he has deadlines that he's having trouble meeting because the wasted time.
I have the same feeling these days.
As well because the Residents' Facebook group is active, I have to open up Facebook a few times a day to make sure things aren't going off the rails. Then I end up scrolling through 'my' feed and getting distracted (it isn't 'my' feed, it is things that FB put in front of my eyes to make me stay on the site longer and it is working.)
So my ta-dah is this morning I went through and bookmarked each FB page I am friends with and the group I follow. Thankfully I don't have many friends, under 50, because I had learned that one's FB friends should only be people you know in real life and see occasionally, or might see occasionally. They are all family or close friends, people I actually would like to get a 'catch-up' phone call from, not someone that, if I saw them on call display, I'd hesitate to pick up!
Skippable:
So here's how I'll be Facebooking from now on. (These are Chrome instructions but I think they work similarly in most browsers.)
1. I created a Facebook Links folder in my Bookmarks.
2. I went to my FB profile and selected Friends, then All Friends. All their names show up in the left frame of the window.
3. I clicked on the person's Facebook name and that brings up their FB page. In my browser's internet address window, I clicked on the star (save bookmark) and it brought up a window asking what name and where in my bookmarks I want to save the link.
4. I enter the person's name. Facebook is the default entry in Chrome and it is important to a name in because otherwise, when you look at the bookmarks they all look like they have the same name since the unique parts are beyond what Chrome shows in the folder unless I open up the folder to full screen. The first one you save, you'll have to select the bookmark folder but after that it assumes the following bookmarks will go in the same place.
5. For ease of use, in bookmark manager I sorted that folder alphabetically. I could have sorted it manually, grouping family members and friends.
6. I created a 'groups' subfolder in the Facebook Links folder and went to each of the groups I follow and saved links directly to the groups in that folder.
I've put my Facebook Links bookmark folder on my bookmarks bar for ease of opening things up.
Now I have two choices when I want to check FB.
Choice 1: right-click on the folder and click on Open All. It will open up, in my case, 49 tabs, one each for my friends. This takes a couple of minutes to load up. Once loaded, I go to tab one, see their new posts at the top of their feed, read, and then close the tab. I do this all the way along and in a matter of minutes I can read the latest posts from everyone without having to scroll past, or worse, stopping to read/watch reels, ads and 'selected for you' content.
The algorithm on my news feed shows me ~ 2 of my friends/group posts for every 15 items in my news feed. This method cuts out all that distracting content specifically fed to me by AI (which is tracking not only my cookies from all of my browsing, but also how long I take to scroll past an item, because that means it may have caught my interest.)
Choice 2: If I'm only interested in how a few people are doing, I can just click on the Facebook Links folder and scroll down to each person I want to see.
Potential Choice 3: I might created multiple Links folders, each with subgroups. For instance, there are about 10 people I'd like to look at daily, so put them all in the same bookmark folder and then when I open up that folder, I'll only be open up those 10 tabs, not 49.
When I open these tabs, my notifications (which I have set to only see in FB, they don't come to me on my phone), are indicated so I can also jump to those to see what new activity I need to keep an eye on.
And, of course, I can just open the Residents' Association group page directly and quickly scan for new posts. Unfortunately, the algorithm doesn't feed me the latest posts, it shows me only "most relevant". You'd think as moderator, I could tell it to always show me all posts, because, if it feels a post isn't relevant, I could end up missing something really important. Like this morning, when someone who had asked for a 'charitable' person to help him photograph and post for sale a vast jewelry collection on Facebook, accused members of scaring away volunteers, just because we had pointed out this was a huge job and not something that you can expect others to do for you for free. And when I called him out, saying his post was unacceptable, he shot back at me that "you're certainly not an opinion reference judge." In fact, I am because it is MY group and he is now on posting restrictions and his offending posts have been deleted!
That was my other ta-dah of the day, dealing with him. (He is a continual problem posting something polite or nice and then an attacking post hours later in an unprovoked mood swing.)