Facebook asks: “How are you kids?”

Facebook was cool back in my day. Groups of high school kids would scour the local mall, where we’d stop at the Apple Store, find an early MacBook Pro, and take dozens of photos with garish Photo Booth filters to post on Facebook. Sometimes other teenagers would forget to log out of their accounts, and we’d post something like “I just pooped” before we logged into our accounts.

That’s no longer the case. In 2014, the Pew Research Center estimated that 71% of American teens used Facebook; that number dropped to 32% in 2022, then rose slightly to 33% last year. Other research from Edison Research found the same trend. Although Meta is reluctant to share much demographic information about its user base, the app’s CEO, Tom Alison, said there are 40 million daily active users between the ages of 18 and 29 in the U.S. and Canada.

Facebook remained the central point of my social experiences in high school and college. If you didn’t have a Facebook account, you wouldn’t get invited to parties and you wouldn’t know when student clubs were meeting. In the 2010s, deleting Facebook would have been a disaster for my social life. Now, if I woke up one day and found that my Facebook account had been deleted, it would be a minor inconvenience.

My experience isn’t unique. So, as Meta tries to fan the flame between Facebook and youth with social anxiety, the company published a blog post today titled “Navigating Your 20s with Facebook.”

“Your twenties are a decade of change, from graduating from college, moving to a new city, starting a new job, and living on your own for the first time. It can be a hectic (and fun) decade, and Facebook is here to help,” the post reads.

Do twenty-somethings read Facebook blogs? (Does anyone but journalists read Facebook blogs?) If so, they’ll know that you can make new friends in groups like “NYC Brunch Squad” or “People We Meet in Book Club,” a virtual book club with nearly 20,000 members. (This isn’t necessarily a group for meeting other readers, but the title is likely a reference to a novel by bestselling romance novelist Emily Henry.)

The Meta blog also suggests that you can meet the love of your life on Facebook Dating in your 20s. I don’t know, but then again I’m a single 20-something who has never used Facebook Dating, so maybe they’re right.

Facebook is right about Gen Z that Facebook Marketplace is the new Craigslist. It’s trendy among young people—whether out of environmental awareness or budget constraints—to buy second-hand. It’s never the safest decision to meet a stranger online to buy their old couch, but if you can at least see that stranger’s Facebook profile, it’s easier to verify that they’re legit. They may even have mutual friends, whereas on Craigslist you’re staring a private relay email in the face with no personal information.

Facebook’s marketplace is so popular that the emerging social app Gen Z Fizz wants to undermine it. The anonymous social platform for college students recently added a marketplace to its app with that idea in mind.

“There’s a certain stigma, like if I sell something on Craigslist, I might get kidnapped,” Fizz founder Teddy Solomon told TechCrunch. “And the Facebook marketplace… Generation Z doesn’t use Facebook,” he said.

As Facebook has fallen out of fashion, our social architecture has changed. I find out about concerts in my area through Instagram posts or promotional emails from local venues. My friends send out birthday dinner invitations through Partiful, a text-message-based party planning app powered by a16z, or just post kitschy Canva graphics to their Close Friends story.

At 20, Facebook is trying to stay relevant. According to Axios, the platform hosted an event for young creators to look forward to the next 20 years of Facebook. Facebook handed out pamphlets to creators that stated, “We’re not your mom’s Facebook.” Instead, the app described itself as “a hub for everything culturally happening in the platform underground.”

That seems far-fetched. On the other hand, Abercrombie, which reigned supreme about 20 years ago, has re-entered the zeitgeist, with its stock up 900%. Even Mark Zuckerberg has done a miraculous rebranding. Maybe one day Facebook will be cool again.