old people like their bigotry and conspiracy theory echo-chamber. it's the only place they can spew that garbage after their kids cut contact with them.

Bots are prob also included in these stats

I don't feel like looking it up, but I've heard statistics like the Breaking Bad finale had half the viewers of the average episode of CSI Miami. The general lesson is don't underestimate the average person's appetite for garbage.

The aversion to change in humans

How do they define monthly active users? If I never post anything, but log in every couple weeks to see what my friends are up to and maybe like a few posts, am I counted?

It's the one place some of my family can figure out how to use where they can make a transphobic joke about Mother's Day for men in dresses is April 1st and get enough positive interactions that they think they've actually re-posted something relatable and clever. So it does have that going for it.

honestly to me it feels cozy now relative to how shitty other platforms have gotten. i guess it was always leading the way at being shitty, so it doesn't feel like as stark a change (reddit, twitter)

It is absolutely atrocious to use and constantly tries to ram Algorithmic crap down your through. The thing is, most normies are there and for every person who is Internet savvy enough to see the benefit of Mastodon and Lemmy (and Pixelfed, etc) there are a dozen normies who don’t and can’t be bothered finding out.

I would not say that Facebook is popular, but I will say that it is common. It is literally the Lowest Common Denominator for port of social interaction on the Internet.

How the fuck did some one misspell 'Lemmy' as 'Facebook'

because people use. At the end of the day FB and other social media sites are about talking to and connecting to other people. Since lots of people us FB it makes it an easy way to connect. In other words, it is popular because it is big and it is big becasue it is popular.

Given that that's a third of the world population, I think they may be misreporting their users. Meta has been caught boosting numbers artificially before (when they released Threads they gave everyone who had an Instagram account a free Threads account, and then bragged about how fast their social network was growing).

There are 7.9 billion people in the world. Only 5.4 billion have any level of internet access. This includes people living in China where Facebook is banned. 3 billion is such a high percentage of all possible facebook users that I have to assume the numbers aren't all that accurate. Maybe "active" just means they haven't deactivated their account? Or maybe they consider bots to be people?

I own Meta shares have not used FB for 15 years or more. The shares have done well for me.

FB is excellent at leveraging peoples ignorance and haziness.

Boomers