Groups has also slowly become a killer feature of FB. There are very strong niche communities there; it’s a direct competitor to Reddit in that way. It’s pretty much the only reason I keep opening the FB app, but it is enough to keep me opening it.
As well as local area groups there are quite a few niche hobby groups on Facebook. I'm converting a van into a campervan and on Facebook there are groups specific to converting my van that have the same number of users as the whole vanlife subreddit.
The only thing I don't like is it is tied to my real name and friend circle... I see in my feed friends posts in groups I am not a member of, so I guess it does the same for me. In my recommendations was a BDSM group... Yeah not on Facebook :D
That's a byproduct of pages you've liked, people you follow and groups you've joined. Beyond that, content you've engaged with.
Take time to prune and shape your network. Unfollow people / brands you have no interest, friend/follow those you do. Maybe join a group that matches your interests or local community groups.
Kind of like clutter in your house, taking time to clean up as your interests evolve, or to some extent undo sins of the past, can make for a better experience.
The last point is that they show you more of what you engage with. So if you want to see more friends and family, actively seek them out and engage and they'll start being more prominent.
They're horrible for archived data. And in technical ones, they encourage people to post the same shit questions over and over. Meta won't encourage any effort, because effort stops people from using it, so you end up with tons of low quality, disorganized, unsearchable shit.
Facebook Groups are very popular in the country I live. (Reddit is too American-centric to have ever really caught on.)
I'm in groups on legal stuff (19,000 members), boardgames (16,000 members), family stuff likes activities for kids (9,000 members), roadtrips (5,000 members), camping (9,000 members), food (41,000 members), dog lovers (14,000 members), and a general city group (150,000 members), a group for my neighborhood (22,000 members), a musicians network (3,300 members), pens (montblanc, etc; 8,800 members)
Most those groups are just for my city (i.e. the dog lovers is just for dog lovers in my city).
On french facebook there's a whole community that's actually exactly subreddits, it's called "neurchi de [...]" ("neurchi" is "chineur" reversed, which translates to "bargain hunter"). Any niche, or not niche, topic has its neurchi group that range from low hundreds to 100,000+ for some.
I tried Marketplace a few times but always gave up because the search filter was so bad. There was no way to force it to include a particular search term, e.g. searching for "rtx 3060" would return tons of posts without "3060" or even "rtx" anywhere in the title/body. The distance search was also useless, since no matter how I tried to restrict the search to around my city, it would just randomly return posts from cities hundreds of kilometers away.
Perhaps the bad search was by design to show you as many posts as possible? Either way, it's worse than reddit search, which is saying something...
It's a terrible product on many levels but is clearly successful because it uses all the usual Meta dark UX patterns to hack attention and engagement. I (horrifyingly) find myself clicking on marketplace and just browsing all the time.
More so, as a seller... it gets far more leads than the other classifieds options around here. We've been casually selling berries and misc produce off our small farm on it, and it's kinda crazy how many people reach out for random $10 containers of red currants or fresh garlic scapes, etc.
Maybe it's specific to numbers or tech or something, but in our area fb marketplace is THE place to sell/buy used baby/kids clothes. It's mindbogglingly high traffic. Put up used but decent looking item from sought after brand and you get literally tens of requests in minutes. If you're looking to buy then good stuff is gone like in half an hour. And were not even a big city.
Marketplace is so horrible on so many fronts that it's unimaginable that it's successful, but it is. Most likely thanks to the network effect. It's a good target for disruption IMHO.
eBay is too international, Craigslist is USA only. FB marketplace is probably a local focused, but for each country. I'm just guessing here, I don't have the data to back this up.
Running threads off IG has a good shot too.