I have accounts on Facebook and Instagram, and have had them for a long long time. I rarely use Instagram, unlike my college-age kids, because I can’t seem to get the hang o how to find things. Facebook is nice for keeping up with good friends who now live all over. But there is the FB algorithm that decides what and who shows up in the first 10 postings and in what order, every time I open it up. I have to remember that I haven’t seen anything “pop up” from many of the plants groups I’ve joined in a long time. Then I have to click a few times to get to a listing of all the groups I’ve joined. Then when I click on one, I discover that there have been any number of postings since I last read one. And only rarely is there a long “discussion” of a topic or picture. Which leads me to my biggest complaint of Facebook and the like, and that is that it’s incredibly difficult to look at past posts, especially if they’re more than a few weeks old. (Whereas with the email list, they’re all waiting for me in my PBS folder where all email from PBS gets filtered to by my mail program. I can start reading from where I left off even if it was months ago.) [Which it never is for PBS!] I don’t even know how to do a search within a Facebook plant group, even after having been on FB since near its public beginning. The search function on the PBS wiki of old emails is amazing, and people like Mary Sue will often give a link to a search result when a topic shows up that was discusses 10 years ago in great detail. The forum is okay. But I miss not being presented with *everything* new that has been posted. However, it’s difficult to know sometimes if there are good or interesting emails lurking in a given discussion topic because the topic title isn’t a good description of what is being discussed. With the email list, I can very quickly click through the first paragraph of every email and see if it’s interesting or I can just pass on it. And the mail itself comes to me without my having to open it up in a browser when I remember to do so. However, the photo attaching is really easy and a nice thing. I can understand why some people like them so much. But I am worried about the mindset that many people who prefer Facebook or Instagram have towards what shows up. It’s kind of transitory. They look at or read something and then move on, sometimes lingering over something of more interest, or even commenting back. But it doesn’t take long until they’ve moved on to newer posts and almost never go back to an older conversation. And it’s pretty hard to go back to an older conversation anyway unless you make a concerted effort to find it. And there’s no real history. I mean you can pick a group and keep scrolling back and back, which on a phone is actually a slow process because your phone has to keep retrieving older and older posts and then display them every time you reach the bottom of what it already has loaded. And of course, there is no permanent storage of all those posts other than what Facebook decides to keep. Or if that account is deleted, everything that was posted to it disappears instantly, never to be found again by your ordinary user. It’s a little sad to me. (To the contrary, I have every email ever posted to PBS and even to IBS after I joined it. Email files are small these days compared to applications and movies and other kinds of files that litter my computer drive.) Just rambling, (and that’s another thing I find easier to do on this list than on the forum or especially on social media). I guess they each have their advantages. --Lee Poulsen San Gabriel Valley, California, USA - USDA Zone 10a Latitude 34°N, Altitude 340 ft/100 m > On Feb 15, 2023, at 10:40, oooOIOooo via pbs <pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net> wrote: > > Facebook/Meta and its subsidiary Instagram seem to require accounts to view content. I have accounts with neither. When people send me links to content they post I reach a login screen, not the content. > _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/… Unsubscribe: <mailto:pbs-unsubscribe@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net> PBS Forum https://…