I have a weird relationship with Facebook. Some years ago I created an account under the name of Tobold and used it to play various games on Facebook. I had over 500 “friends”, because I just invited anybody I met in those games, as the games were designed to work better with more friends. That ended badly when Facebook correctly realized that “Tobold” is not the name that is written on my passport and decided to kick me out due to their “real names only” policy.

I still do have a Facebook account with my real name, but that one I only use for a handful of real world friends. I don’t like using my real name on the internet, using a pseudonym is my first layer of privacy protection. So I’m really not visiting Facebook all that often. I somehow got into my head that Facebook was for exchanging funny cat pictures, and not really of interest to me.

What I hadn’t realized was that Facebook has so many users, it can sustain user groups with really, really niche subjects. So lately I joined two groups: One exclusively for dungeon masters running the Out of the Abyss campaign, and one for people 3D printing tabletop miniatures. In spite of these groups both being obviously *very* specialized, they each have over a thousand members. I feel like I am connected to a large percentage of the people who share an exotic niche interest with me.

I’m still refusing to add friends to my real name account, but that’s just me.