I deactivated my first account 8 years ago, but got back on to re-connect with my old pals and acquaintances from back in the day. For that reason, it was fantastic.
After another year, I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There's a lot of variety in my crowd. I have the sense IRL to know that not everything is for everybody, but that doesn't matter much on Facebook unless you want to spend hours and hours hand-crafting subsets of your friends for different topics (I don't). And I have zero interest in posting selfies or status updates of what's going on in my life, so that made the platform exceedingly boring and a waste of time for me. It's a shame, because it does work really well for "connecting" with people (in the shallowest sense of the word).
The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.
There's a lot of variety in my crowd
Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren't children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world.
I remember in college, we were encouraged to seek out differing opinions. I remember a guy who once chastised me for not seeking a broad enough range of opinions. He said, "What's wrong with you? Don't you want to be challenged?" My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today.
Be who you are. If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
This is a load of gilded age nonsense. There's never been any point in history where people deliberately exposed themselves to uncomfortable truths about people they considered other as part of "growing up".
I'd really challenge you to think about when you think this was. Was it in the 80s while gay people were dying of aids while straight people ignored their plight?
The 70s when mainstream american society treated anti-war activists as terrorists?
The 50s and 60s when white people literally moved out of cities and into suburbs to get away from black people?
What you're experiencing isn't "people failing to communicate with people with diverse views," but the internet finally forcing people to coexist with social groups they could just ignore until now. You have to exist on the same site as people who have been deeply harmed by the systems that benefit you and you're scared of that anger and those people's unwillingness to accept your desire to stick your head in the sand like your parents could.
> "internet finally forcing people to coexist with social groups they could just ignore until now"
How so? The internet has made it much easier to isolate and block than ever before. That's exactly why there's so much division today.
> "you're scared of that anger and those people's unwillingness"
What are you talking about here?
In person or not, everyone has a social filter on who they interact with. Your wealth, race, gender, orientation, interests, and location all act as filters against who you'll interact with, let alone be friends with. If you go to Harvard, how much relative opportunity do you think that gives you to befriend someone who isn't a rich white person? Especially, ya know, when only white people (white men, even) could even go to Harvard.
These filters are more or less permeable by the culture and scope of your life, but if you think there's some magical moment in the past when white people by an large all had black friends or rich people all had poor friends, you're dreaming.
It's easier now to experience perspectives alien to you by a country mile. It's also easier for them to intrude into your life.
Somehow, it's the most privileged people are the most likely to call this intrusion an attack. To call people wanting to re-establish boundaries with them a violation of their 'right to free speech'. Funny that.
A few things are true about wealth distribution, it's empirically become more concentrated and also more localized to elite urban areas. When people from this urban elite start calling everyone else privileged and intolerant to the point that they don't deserve a voice.. it's not a great look.