Limiting Customization
On the way to school my son asked me what Facebook was for originally. He is a Freshman and they just don't use social media the way we do. His understanding of MySpace was you had a website to add pictures to and customize and everything but he knew you couldn't do that on FB. You never could, it was always just a directory of profiles and friend groups.
I explained that when I was in high school we didn't have social media outside of AOL chat rooms and Geocities/Anglefire. Both of those outlets let you just make up an email, make up an account and post mostly anonymously. Your screen name was random stuff and a series of numbers, X's, etc. Your geocities was a collection of your favorite stuff and online persona.
Later on in college MySpace gave you a profile that you could also customize and change. You had the ability to play with the CSS and add sparkly gifs to your hearts content.
But by the time I was about to graduate college, Facebook came out and it didn't let you do that stuff. When I joined you had to use a .edu email address. Your profile was actually you. Your picture was actually you. Everyones page looked the same otherwise, and it still does, that same blue and white design for years.
So what was it for? Well, because in the beginning it was so restricted you basically used it to update your personal status, post life updates, and keep in touch with other IRL friends. Not long after they sent an update to everyone to change their email to a regular one since most of us had graduated school by then and were going to lose access to the .edu address.
Suddenly it wasn't for close peer groups it was now a public directory of actual people. We stopped updating every little personal detail. (Well, most of us did.) Once our parents and grandparents joined we stopped posting photo dumps from the party we went to the weekend before. Our co-workers, bosses, aunts, uncles, etc were joining and things had to change as far as personal activity disclosure.
So why do I still use it? Mostly to keep up with friends from school or people I don't see IRL. My kids school uses it for updates. My town has a local group page to share things like events, garage sales, lost dogs, and traffic stuff. It's now more of a town hall than personal updates.
About ten years ago you could use it to advertise for free. If you had a business you could post an update and all your followers would get an update to check it out. Now thats hidden, the feed is random and you miss things.
Now it's just the most popular updates from three days ago. It's how local restaurants let you know what their hours and menu are because they can't afford to/know how to update a regular website. It's just available data that you have to search for to find. The results could be from last week, an hour ago, or seven years ago.
That seems to be the way most platforms are these days. No customization, no fun usernames, no custom background music. The content you post to it is your expression and not the way you decorated your profile page.
Even my oldest who is in college doesn't use stuff like Facebook. His friends just group chat on their phones. If they do have something like instagram or tiktok they don't add everyone they've ever met on it. It's interesting.