Okay, so it's not normal.

It's me speaking, I say it's not normal here, so it's not normal. By your definition.

Of course if we dispense with the pendantry we would argue that the point of saying it's not normal is to highlight how it's inconsistent with the approach of society towards the rest of itself, so a society where women change their name to take their husband's is not normal because it's inconsistent with the rest of the mores regarding the interactions between men and women.

But that'd require not nitpicking a thing to pick a pedantic fight online that is a waste of time, so... not in the scope of this conversation, I suppose.

You don't think it's normal but for them it is. Simple as

No, wait, why can you phrase it that way but not "it's not normal but they think it is".

Why is one of those statements not equivalent to the other?

Saying you have to stay on Facebook to keep up with people says you aren't able or willing to put in the energy required to keep up with people yourself.

There are hundreds of communication platforms, and a most of them aren't run by assholes trying to ruin society for their own personal gain.

People used to write letters to stay in touch. Literally basic email could fill that niche.

Because for them over in wherever it is normal. If they lived where you live it wouldn't be normal.

Okay, but what says their perspective takes precedence? You're saying it's normal for them. Cool. I'm saying it's not normal for us.

Why is their normal a higher priority than our not normal? Either "normal" is a meaningless concept or you need a better justification than that.

Normality is defined by what happens around them. For them it is normal, for an outsider it might not be. If they would be talking about you then the roles and normality would be reversed

Normality isn't meaningless it's just dependent on the surroundings

I know they're not exactly the same from the few glimpses of Fandom history I've seen of LiveJournal, but you seriously didn't like anything about Pleroma, Frendica, Hubzilla, Diaspora, AND Wafrn? The first 4 are all essentially Facebook clones, although they can be seen as macro-blogging sites too. Wafrn is literally Tumblr, just decentralized.

I would highly recommend giving those a chance rather than clinging to FB, as these friends could totally manage it.

Here's the Fediverse.party site to check them all out (Wafrn link here).

Just write an email

Just call them

Yeah no thanks

I'll just scan for their name in the papers.

I don't understand why you think normality is defined by the object of the sentence rather than the subject.

I mean, if you take your definition of normal, surely the person speaking determines what's normal, right? That's not a good thing, because your working definition of normalcy is bad and nonsensical and only determined by your desire to antagonize somebody online on a nitpick, so you probably don't like it much yourself beyond that. But if we take it, then I get to say what's normal when I speak because normal is "the state of being usual, typical, or expected" and I'm the one having the expectations here.

The surroundings are my surroundings because it is my post.

It's Angela, isn't it?

Since when do random low quality social media posts qualify as "meme"?-_-

I'm not sure why you're struggling with this so much. Of course it makes sense to consider what is normal for the people we are talking about.

If you would've wanted to make your first sentence really clear you could've said "it's normal for them but not for me" or something.

That's a 2 way street. I will say from experience that not using social media like Facebook dramatically dwindled who will reciprocate by text or email.

Fine by me for my life, but I saw the difference as they all used it more and more and I did not.

I'm not struggling, I'm telling you how it is based on your own parameters. You could have argued that normalcy is relative, but you didn't you got stuck on the dictionary definition and decided that the set of expectations that apply are the expectations of the group and not my expectations.

I'm saying either you have a logical reason for that set of priorities or your argument doesn't follow. There was not problem with clarity on that sentence, the ambiguity was introduced by your caveat.

To be clear, this is irrelevant and a waste of time. We established that up top. We both understand what I was saying and why your response is what it is.

But I've explained to you many times how it is relative. It's just that they live in place where it is normal and you don't. So you don't feel what they're doing is normal but for them it is

No, you've said many times that it being relative means the bar for normalcy that takes precedence is theirs and not mine. Which doesn't follow from your premise. And whenever I tell you that you just repeat the wonky premise.

Alright, that's harsh, you just quietly backed away some by moving from "it's normal for them so it's normal" to "it's normal for them but not to you", which is not the same thing you were saying before. I guess I'll take the small compromises in a conversation we both knew was a waste of time from the first post.

Same, but I also recognized that the people who wouldn't message me back were not people that I wanted to spend extra effort on communication with when they couldn't bother to respond to a text.

The people that matter make the effort, but many of us are concerned with the quantity of friends instead of the quality of the friendships. I have fewer people to talk today than I did on Facebook, but at least I actually want to talk to them instead of just going through the motions.

They don't live near me. They're all online friends.