I very valid question with a very valid answer.

I’m sure Meta dislikes my use case, as I’m basically a data miner. I have a profile that I haven’t contributed to in probably 5 years or so, I don’t post or upload. I was going to delete my account around the time I moved over here to Lemmy, but I started posting to the Superbowl community as it was fizzling out already. I shared what handful of photos I had, but I soon ran out.

I started getting stuff from various sources like Flickr and eBird and the news, but I started getting really interested in wildlife rehab. As charities, Facebook is still the way to go to promote charities since it’s free, widespread, and easy and quick to use. When every penny, second, and view counts, what beats Facebook for that?

Now my feed is basically nothing but animal rescues and wildlife photographers (and increasingly AI) and I curate (steal) the good stuff and bring it to you all here without Zuckerberg getting his mitts on your data and the original source still gets all the credit.

Doing that and seeing the positive stories lead me to volunteering at my local rehab this year and it’s been lifechanging. So there is still some good that can be taken from it if one puts in the effort, but you still shouldn’t because it’s Meta and they’ve got the ick. So let me do it for you. I’ve already taken the hit and shared enough stuff, so now I’m going to siphon their stuff like they want to do to us, but I do it to promote wildlife rescue.

It’s not like any of the rescues particularly love Facebook that I’m aware of, they just want people to exist and know they need volunteers and money. Photographers want to promote their work or sell prints or their guided tours. I pass all that info along to you guys so you can find them on whatever platform you want. It’s not like I want to take any credit for it, I want you guys to support them, but if you guys won’t touch Facebook, they lose out. But I’ve dedicated hundreds of dollars and 100+ hours this year because of my sharing content, one or 2 of my subs have become volunteers, and hopefully a handful of others have kicked in something to their local rescues.

So Facebook can still provide some stuff, at the cost of privacy, but if I can extract the good and leave the bad behind for my 5000 subs, I feel that’s me doing something good.