I totally get what you’re saying and for what it’s worth I don’t feel judged by your statements. For platforms where I didn’t have that sort of personal connection with “real life” people I am more willing to swap. Here I am on Lemmy, after all lol.

There’s just no way I can convince the friends I have on Facebook that I still keep up with there to jump ship with me to join a different platform. Sure, I might convince some, and I might even be the seed of doubt that convinces another person to leave months or years later but by then I’d be gone and they couldn’t find me if they even remembered me. Because once you’re gone you’re just gone. There are a handful of people I know that I think deleted their accounts or otherwise just don’t have a presence on social media at all. I have no way to contact them. If they don’t want to be contacted that’s fine, I’m not saying people have some obligation to be found lol. But the idea of old friends reaching out to me is an appealing feeling and also being able to watch them from a distance and be seen from a distance is an appealing one. Facebook has a level of critical mass (at least in my friend group and I guess age group) that other social media platforms don’t have. I think for folks a little younger than me Instagram has that.

And what if I stay? I know I’m getting data mined. Do I like it? No. But I’m not really getting mined so hard that it’s really a bad thing. Leaving would be more of an idealogical thing to do than a practical one. Short of some massive boycott it wouldn’t change anything.

In short, the negatives of my specific usage of Facebook is extremely minor and the benefits are too much for me to give up.