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.

And? You and I are online, right now, communicating across an unknown amount of distance, while you tell me having online friends means you need Facebook to keep in touch.

There are plenty of ways to communicate with people who aren't in your town. I have friends on the other side of the country, and a couple over in the EU, and I can communicate with them just fine and never touch Facebook. If you don't want to leave Facebook, just say it instead of hiding behind trivialities to excuse you staying there. I have plenty of friends who choose to give a pound of flesh to Facebook for one reason or another, but at least they admit they want to be there.

I mean it's simple as if you are talking about them, then it's their context that matters if it is normal for them or not. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

If they were talking about you it wouldn't be normal even if they considered it normal since they were talking about you and your context.

It's just how normalcy works...

"it's normal for them so it's normal" to "it's normal for them but not to you"

I'm not sure how you've understood it like this. It's normal for them has been the thing the whole time. You said it's not normal but it is normal for them though, you can't decide normalcy for their context

Same as I can't say it's not normal for people in Peru to eat guinea pigs. But it is normal for them, it's just not normal where I live. Do you see now?

But you've never explained why that is. You just... kinda like it that way. Their normal takes precedence (it didn't for a bit, but I called you out on it and now it does again) only because you say so. No definition you put forward included whose normal goes first when two normals happen at once.

To be clear, normal doesn't work like that, it's not what I meant and you fully understand this. But if we play by your definition, nothing in your definition decides which normal is the more normal. I say my normal goes because I'm the speaker and my set of expectations define normalcy in my speech. You have provided no argument against this.