Séamas O'Reilly: There's nothing for me on Facebook now - except for all the Memories

I had a nice night out, some pleasing gifts, and my son made me a card that was so adorable I hesitate to even describe it here in case you’re voluminously sick. (It declared I was “the best dady [sic] in the world”, because what he lacks in spelling, he more than makes up for in taste.)

But none of that stuck with me as much as the bip-bip I got from that neglected little app on my phone, signalling that the past was reaching out to me. 

By past, I mean Facebook itself, which I no longer use on a regular basis. 

Neither, it seems, do any of my friends, since the notification I received was for the scant three birthday messages waiting for me to peruse; one from a colleague in a job I quit nine years ago, another a schoolfriend’s auntie, and the last from a funk and soul night in Dublin that I followed — but never got round to actually attending — 16 years ago. 

I hope against hope that the latter was generated automatically, because the alternative is too depressing to consider.

My friends and I are clearly no longer within the target market of Facebook, which this month retained its long-held status as the world’s most populated social media platform. 

Not just that, its 3.03bn active users positively dwarf the competition. Its Meta cousin, Instagram, holds steady at 2bn, while TikTok’s count of 1.2bn, though an incredible showing for an app that only launched in 2016, shows the great challenger is still some way short of its elders. (The platform formerly known as Twitter, meanwhile, languishes at less than half TikTok’s number.)

Even with its age advantage, I was shocked that Zuckerberg’s leviathan was still so far in the lead. And then I was shocked that I was so shocked. 

I was, after all, an active user myself for a decade, and as recently as Brexit and Trump’s election, where I took to its blue-hued website to volubly bloviate as both crises unfolded.

More importantly, it was my chief resource for memes and links and general chatter among friends for nearly 10 years before that. 

Glancing through it now, I find a wasteland of dead accounts and odd promotions, strange viral image macros made by American radio stations, and short-form videos by men’s rights activists and women selling crystal jewellery.

There’s nothing for me there, except of course the “memories” function, which tells you what you were doing on Facebook this day for the last several years. 

Scrolling through these engenders a weird sense of vertigo, and I find myself doing it every once in a while. 

Six years ago today, I asked around for players in a five-a-side game. 

Eight — and also seven — years ago I was bleating on about Nigel Farage. 

Nine years ago, I was sharing the opening page from Steve Bruce’s first preposterous crime novel. 

Glancing through these posts, each humming with asides and replies and side conversations (the Steve Bruce post alone has 40 comments) what seems strangest of all is how distant this world now seems.

Further down the rabbit hole I go, my ‘Memories’ tab showing me in a flurry of Novembers, Benjamin Buttoning my way backward through time, retroactively losing weight and dress sense, until I grow the shoulder-length hair I cut when moving to London, and thence back to my college days, with its taut skin and day-glo jumpers.

I reach the deepest archaeological layers of my profile, buffering at it like Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar, teasing his way through a black hole’s temporal strings. 

It is 2007 and people are writing ‘face book’ as two separate words. Comments are not connected to each other, so I can only view orphaned fragments of exchanges that I’ve written or received. 

We are all writing those weirdly phrased status updates like “is feeling excited”, or sharing in-jokes that must have made sense at the time but are now as inscrutable as the Voynich manuscript.

I have no memory of any of the things I am reading myself saying, nor do I recall a worrying amount of the people with whom I speak. 

There are photos of nights out which predate the smartphone era by several years, conjuring a dimly remembered, and alarming, recollection that we all used to take photos on digital cameras, plug them into our laptops, and upload them one by one in the manner of dribbling psychopaths.

There is no small amount of cringe in looking back through the founding moments of the many-tentacled monster which would subsequently take over the planet, but so too is there a note of melancholy. 

There was an “everything all at once” appeal to its earliest iterations, part blog, part photo album, part discussion forum, that’s lacking in its presumptive replacements, each of which emphasises one major use — chat, images, video, text — at the expense of all others.

I still make jokes and read news via Twitter (although for how much longer that will be usable remains to be seen) and, increasingly, the charming and less populated BlueSky. 

I chat and share personal photos on WhatsApp. As an old man, I use TikTok the way I use YouTube; as a place where I watch things but never say anything myself, since an active, content-providing TikTok presence seems limited to those younger than my generation, or else people who want their online interactions to lead with their face and voice.

As for Facebook, I use it to remember the founding embers of this whole explosion of online life, for about as long as I can stand the constant fake podcast videos and strange rants from older, angry people that I do not know.

That, and to get birthday messages from my favourite funk and soul night in Dublin. 

Which reminds me, I really should pop along sometime.