I make new friends on Facebook all the time. Usually through one or two specific people. They have a specific worldview and friends who share that worldview, or they are writers who are friends with fellow writers. I want more writer friends and more friends like my existing cool friends, so I add their friends too. This has resulted in a weird thing where I’m friends with a lot of deeply religious progressives who also write. Kind of a niche market. (weird because I’m an atheist.)
This is different than the fake scammer requests, which I delete. You can tell because they usually have no info except some generic photos and no mutual friends.
I’ve long term been into meteorite collecting. Thousands of years worth of meteorites were lying reasonably intact and obvious in the bone-dry northern Sahara desert until somebody finally noticed. Finding meteorites became a major source of income for a number of natives to the region. So I have a couple of dozen Facebook friends in Morocco and Algeria. I’m probably on some government watch list.
I dropped my FB account last summer and only miss some aspects but am overall happy to have done so.
If I knew the person at all, I’d accept their friend request but it always annoyed me when there was no post-acceptance interaction - these folks clearly either wanted to tally another “friend” or just see recent pics.
If I came across someone I knew and was curious about I just sent them a message saying “hi, it would be good to catch up” and if they responded, maybe we’d become “friends” but maybe the short back and forth was enough to satisfy each other’s curiosity and we could move on.
One of the things I miss was looking through the “people you may know” and seeing what made the algorithm suggest them. Usually it was just that I knew two of their friends (eg, my cousin and her husband, neighbors to the suggested person so not really a match) but sometimes it would be a completely random pairing - someone I went to college with, and a former co-worker were somehow connected to the suggestee and so I should be too. It was interesting in a “small world“ sense.
Anyway one other rule I had was no FB friendship with current co-workers. Too much chance someone sees something they shouldn’t. I had a woman who worked for me posting about staying in town an extra night after a convention, and my boss, her FB friend, asking me who was paying for the extra expenses.
You can send a message to someone who is not your friend. But it works weird. On my mobile devices, I will get a notification that someone not on my friends list is trying to send a message, and that tips me off. On desktop, I have no such notification and have to dig in my messages to whatever their equivalent is of a spam folder to find it. I check every month or so in this folder to see if I missed anything.
Not long ago Facebook suggested I become friends with a guy who punched me in the face in high school and who has spent a large percentage of his adult life in and out of prison, the longest stretch for breaking into a house and sexually assalting a woman in her 80s.
Sometimes it suggests someone who is only connected via a friend of a friend (and one with whom I have never had any interactions). Sometimes it shows me people without indicating any mutual friends. Once it showed me my doctor, who I have never been in touch with via Facebook. I think it may be because some of my friends have the same doctor. A few times I think it showed me people who had just looked me up on Facebook.
Yeah, my therapist popped up as a People You May Know and I was like, “WTF?” Then I realized we have a mutual friend - she is Facebook friends with a former coworker. So it was sheer coincidence.
For me that’s usually a cousin - I don’t recognize them, but they have a familiar last name and they’re friends with 20 of my other 2nd & 3rd & 4th cousins, so I assume it’s another cousin and accept. We could be getting set up for a scam - but oh well.
Recently, though, I got an obvious scammer and tried to report it. Somehow facebook’s brilliant algorithms couldn’t tell that someone with a fake company, no history, obvious stock photo, and no followers (but several dozen new “friends”) was not real. So, I’m not going to bother reporting anymore.
I sometimes get friend requests from relatives or other who I know I’m already friends with. I actually responded to the first one, under the name of a second cousin who I haven’t seen for many years. He had stolen my cousin’s profile photo so I initially thought that maybe he had re-registered for some reason. However, his birthdate was off by 20 years. I twigged when he asked me if I had heard of this great new investment opportunity. I reported him and informed my cousin of the imposter. His profile was immediately removed.
I used to get friend requests from cute young women who thought I was cute (I am not), but sadly have not seen any of those for some time.
I had one where we had two mutual friends in common but the mutual friends didn’t know each other and weren’t themselves friends. And the other person lived in a different country. It was weird to be a part of a “Facebook square” where each person knows two different people in the group but not the third.
Facebook does, too. They just don’t make it easy or obvious. You can assign your “friends” to groups, and posts can be published just to some groups or to other groups. I put everyone in a group based on how i know them (hobby a, hobby b, local, college, etc.) And i also assign everyone to either the group i post to, or not.
So i can afford to be a Facebook slut, because i post almost nothing to most of my “friends”. My posts are only visible to people i actually know and trust with that sort of information.
I like food photos.
But i hate politics on Facebook. If someone posts more than a couple of political posts i unfollow them. That’s gentler than unfriending. They can still message me, and see my posts. But i don’t see their posts unless i go looking for them.
(I prefer to argue politics on places like this, where you can choose to enter P&E or avoid it, depending on your mood.)
If it’s some fancy gourmet meal at a nice restaurant, or an unusual recipe you’ve made yourself, OK, but not something run-of-the-mill.
My family and some friends post a lot of anti-Trump stuff, so I can’t avoid it. I actually enjoy many of the posts and post some myself. (Right after the 2016 election one friend was doing it so much that I almost blocked her for a time.)
The problem is that some of them have some pro-Trump friends who pop in to those threads basically to troll. (I’ve unfollowed most of my direct friends who were making pro-Trump posts.) I used to ignore them but since Biden won I’ve been countering their nonsense and enjoying.
We have no mutual friends.
The phone number on facebook was not the phone number that my therapist had.
I never used facebook on my phone - never downloaded the app, never logged into the website - so it doesn’t have access to my contact list, and even if it were my therapist wasn’t in my contact list.
I do, however, have Instagram on my phone - it doesn’t have access to my contact list, but it does to my location, which leads me to believe that it’s tracking and data is being shared between the companies.
Needless to say, I did not friend my therapist on facebook.
If you are trying to stalk someone’s account you never send a friend request directly to them. You find someone in their friend’s list and send it to them. By default facebook allows friends of friends to view your page. I have locked down my account so only friends can see anything.
To whom? Someone you never met before who for all you know is a bot?
Even people who may be friends of friends from high school or wherever, I might ignore.
Really it begs the question of what is Facebook for? For me it’s really more a method of keeping in contact with people I’m actually friends with. But it also kind of gets to a point where I’m like why do I want to keep in contact with some minor acquaintance from 20 years ago who lives across the country who I’m unlikely to see ever again? But again, it kind of depends.
I was concerned that perhaps this is somebody I know, even if it’s not closely. And I was concerned about Facebook etiquette. As I said, I’m not a big user of the site and I don’t know the customs. I wanted to make sure that ignoring a friend request isn’t seen as an implied insult. As the cliche goes, I try not to give offense unintentionally.
This thread has assured me that this is not the case and I can feel free to ignore friend requests.
If I send someone a friend request and they don’t add me, I assume they overlooked my request or forgot who I am. (Or they don’t add people they don’t personally know.) There’s no reason to take it personally, so delete as many requests as you would like.
If it’s a hot girl, it’s spam. I don’t know what they intend to do to benefit from it, but I just delete.
If we have friends in common, I’ll try to figure out what the relationship is. I’ll accept some friends of friends, but usually I only accept people I know currently or old classmates.
