So, moving the Facebook group back to here is a long time coming. I was just lazy, moving houses, dealing with pandemics and such.
Why now? I think you’re only as strong as your convictions. I despise everything Facebook has done to civil society, and so, never felt entirely comfortable giving it more than it deserves. That included my little part of the R.E.M. universe.
I’m glad you revived it. It was MY social media back in the day.
Murmurs was social media before “social media” was even a term.
What FB and Twitter etc have now, we didn’t have back then. They do suck, and their algorithms and creation of echo chambers etc sucks and is seriously affecting our world.
But there’s also more information than what we had access to.
Memes to make points or take the edge off. Those didn’t exist back then.
We accomplished so much on Murmurs with just our words and each of us contributing our knowledge. Maybe the fact that we had to work harder and put more effort into the connectedness made it more valuable.
I think part of it was these isolated communities (which are coming back, especially because of video games) WERE more work, and demanded more because they weren’t driven by outrage-for-profit.
Vaguely related fun fact - I co-admin a science comms group on FB and one fine day the single most nightmarish user Murmurs ever had (him of the Final Fantasy avatar) applied for membership there. I mentioned his behaviour here in the admin chat and he was unanimously rejected and blocked. Tell yiz, being a mod here has given me life skills!
How did I not know about the facebook group until now? 
Facebook sucks in many ways. It has helped me reconnect with some people for which I am eternally grateful but in general it’s smiling dystopian hellscape.
Yeah, its that balance. It connected me with high school friends, but ruined relationships between some family members.
95% of my time on Facebook is spent on the R.E.M. Facebook groups, and most of that time was spent on R.E.M. Fans United. While I’m really tired of watching family members, friends, and strangers use Facebook to argue about politics, Facebook is a tool like any other: it has its uses, it has connected me to other R.E.M. fans around the world who have generously shared their knowledge of the band with me, and no one is forced to waste their day on Facebook arguing about vaccines or whatever. Having said that, I’m glad this forum has relaunched and that I will now have one less reason to log on to Facebook.
I was just tired of seeing the same old questions on the FB group every few days, such as:
Welcome back, Murmurs.com!
Or even worse, the bad quality JPG’s stolen from some Google Image Search.
FB became more of a negative than a positive to me. I stopped posting there ages ago, only visiting to read a forum for my small town, updates on a local cat celebrity or keep up to date on who has died in my extended family.
I left FB for a good while because it was a cesspit of depression and fighting and yuck. I only recently came back and in the process decided to find groups and focus on them and found the FB group and now I am here. For me the upside of FB as an expat is being in touch with my fam and friends on the other side of the Atlantic. But I prefer to spend time in the groups I am in and try to avoid my FB feed.
No more fake T-shirts offers of the 40th anniversary will be nice.
Or constantly having to block users.
Moderating anything on Fbook is a nightmare but the REM and Athens groups I work on were just a maddening loop of “look at this photo” “why did you block my post that had no text” “whaddya mean I cant call someone that name?!”. Jeez
Part of my decision making was how terrible the group moderation tools have become, and how bad the spam is.
I have not been fond of how whatever FB’s “Community Standards” are have become more restrictive. In the past several months I have had had comments or posts flagged for violating their Community Standards and have even been put in FB jail a couple times due to keywords being picked up by bots that weren’t in violation of anything. The latest instance of having a comment flagged was when I mentioned the Nuggets box set in a group for a radio station I admin. Apparently, it was interpreted to be spam when I was just mentioning it in casual conversation. Since the comment didn’t appear to go through, which I chalked up to a FB glitch, I tried again (it still didn’t appear). So, I got two notifications for violating their Community Standards with what one of their bots thought was spam.
Always refused to go near Facebook so can feel smug now but probably missed out on plenty to be fair. Never really posted anything anywhere but if anything can draw me in it’d be REM.
I think the simple answer is that Facebook sucks because it’s no longer meant for the users. The users are the product now.