Facebook

Everyone you ever met, still in one place

The social graph is the product here, and no rival has anything close to it. That is why the app stays on phones owned by people who complain about it constantly: the school friend who moved abroad, the selling group for your town, the five a side club that arranges fixtures here because everybody is already signed in. Meta’s problem is that the graph and the feed have drifted apart, and the feed is the part you meet first.

Groups, events and Marketplace

Those three still earn the space. Groups work unusually well for narrow interests, holding discussion, files and members somewhere findable, and for a lot of hobbies the active community simply exists here and nowhere else. Events remain the default way local things get arranged, with invitations people actually answer and attendance lists that mean something. Marketplace became the main secondhand trading floor across much of the world, which is why a sofa shifts faster here than on any dedicated listings site. Messenger split off into its own app and moving between the two is still smooth.

None of that is fashionable and all of it runs on reach rather than design. Putting an event or a secondhand cooker in front of a whole town is something newer platforms cannot do, because the people are not there to see it.

The feed forgot what it was for

Open the app and the first several items are likely to be suggested posts and video from strangers, with the friends you deliberately followed sitting further down or missing entirely. You can push back, switching to the view that shows only people you follow, but the app does not hold onto that choice as firmly as you would like, so the same fight repeats. The result is that staying in touch, the entire original promise, is now something you do on purpose rather than something that happens while you scroll. That drift explains more of the criticism than anything else in the app.

It is also one of the heavier things running on a phone, busy in the background and hard on the battery, and the notification settings arrive turned up to maximum until somebody goes and prunes them.

Use it as a tool, not a window

Come here for groups, events and Marketplace and it is properly useful, still the best thing available for all three, and the reason a lot of local life would be harder without it. Come expecting news about friends and you will spend the session steering around recommendations that have nothing to do with anyone you know. A trip through the notification settings improves the experience more than any feature toggle manages. The parts that still work deserve a high mark. The promise the whole thing was built on is coasting on the fact that everybody is already here.