Families often avoid conflict by not talking about politics and religion at the dinner table. Facebook is like being at the dinner table 24x7, except that it's designed so that you forget your entire family is there. It's also designed to make you angry and get you to talk about politics and religion. In other words, Facebook is designed to provoke conflict in families, which has torn many families apart that might otherwise still be able to tolerate one another.

@freakazoid This is a good point. This is what real name policies and 1 account/identity per person does.

@ajroach42 They do have "lists" but they are a PITA to use so most people don't.

@freakazoid & it's easy to make a mistake with their lists and not notice until you've caused a kerfuffle.

@ajroach42 Yeah if you wanted to do it right you'd show the faces of the people on the list very prominently around the composer.

@freakazoid Or let people legitimately create multiple accounts, with distinct profile pictures and account names.

Tumblr did an okay job of supporting multiple blogs from one account, in a way that was harder to accidentally screw up, but even then I preferred logging in to separate accounts.

@ajroach42 @freakazoid This is why I liked the simple and stupid Twitter & Mastodon model: just make it easy to use different accounts and save yourself the over engineering.

@kensanata @ajroach42 Yep. Facebook claim the real names policy is designed to make conversation more civil, but since it benefits them in so many other ways and also causes harm of it own I'm not inclined to take their word for it.