Most people who want to leave Facebook aren't looking for a new place to argue with strangers. They want the thing Facebook used to do: tell them what their friends and family are up to. The feed stopped doing that years ago, and the rest of the product got stranger every year.
So the question isn't "what's the best social network," it's "what's the best place for a few dozen people who know each other." Here's how the options stack up for that specific job.
What you're actually replacing
Be clear about the job before shopping. For most people it's some mix of:
- Seeing what friends and family post, without a ranking system deciding for you.
- Having a page people can look at to know who you are.
- Birthdays, events, the occasional group.
- Messaging the people in that circle.
- Not being the product.
Facebook does the middle three adequately and fails the first and last. Most alternatives nail one or two and skip the rest.
The options, honestly
Bluesky and Mastodon. Both have chronological feeds you control and neither runs ads. Both are public broadcast networks: you post to the world, people follow you, there's no friendship, no private-by-default. Good replacements for Twitter. Not built for a family circle.
Discord. Excellent for a group that talks a lot. No profile pages in a meaningful sense, no feed, no public identity, and everything is a chat scrolling by. Great for your gaming friends, awkward for your aunt.
WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage groups. Where many families actually ended up. Fine for messages, no pages, no posts, no photos you can look back on, and a group chat with thirty people is chaos.
Instagram. Owned by the same company, same ad model, same ranked feed, and it's for broadcasting photos, not keeping up.
POINT. Built for exactly this job. Friendship is two-way, posts are friends-only by default, the feed is friends and groups newest first, every member has a real page, groups and events exist, messages are between friends, and it isn't funded by ads. The honest downside is the same as every alternative: your friends aren't on it yet.
The real hurdle is the people
Every Facebook alternative article skips the hard part. The network with your friends on it beats the better network with nobody on it. That's why Facebook has survived a decade of everyone hating it.
A few things that actually work, from watching people move:
Move as a pod. One person switching alone is a ghost town. Five or six who agree to post there for a month is a network. Pick the group that already texts each other and go together.
Make the first week count. Post real things. A photo of dinner, the dog, the kid's game. The feed needs content before it's a reason to open the app.
Use the invite link. Everyone on POINT has one. Anyone who joins through it is friends with you from the first second, so there's no "find me and send a request" dance.
Give the page a reason to exist. A Space with a photo, a banner, a song and a few interests is something people will look at. An empty profile isn't.
What POINT won't do
A few things, in case they're deal-breakers.
There's no marketplace. There's no news feed from publishers. There are no reels of strangers. Businesses exist but only reach people who follow them, which means your feed can't be colonized by pages you never asked for. If any of that is what you want from Facebook, POINT is the wrong tool.
If what you want is the part Facebook stopped being, your people, in order, on a page that's yours, with nobody selling you to anyone, that's the entire design.
It's free, the Android app is available now, and the iPhone app is in the works.