There’s been a lot of bad news recently about Facebook, much more than we want to recount in detail here.

We been hearing from friends, family, and colleagues that they are tired of Facebook, that they’d like to spend their time doing something more productive than scrolling through ads, and getting anxious if they’d not checked their Facebook page in the last hour.   Some of our friends are so sick of Facebook that they are deactivating their Facebook accounts, or deleting the Facebook app from their devices so they get out of habit of checking it constantly.

What we find interesting about this trend is that it makes sense in the context of recent research.  Because there’s accumulating evidence in the research literature that social media platforms like Facebook just are not good for our mental health, backing up what we are hearing from our friends and families about how unsatisfactory Facebook has become for them.

In one recently study, University of Michigan students randomly assigned to read Facebook for 10 minutes were in a worse mood at the end of the day than students assigned to post or talk to friends on Facebook (Verduyn et al 2015).  Relatedly,  in a study from UC San Diego and Yale, people who clicked on more links than the average person, or who liked twice as many posts, reported worse mental health than average (Shakya and Christakis 2017).   As we see the current state of the research literature, in general the bulk of the evidence indicates that social media platforms like Facebook don’t appear good for our mental health.

The time is right for Magnify, because it is a different type of social platform — it’s a place where you can connect with your friends and family, and to work together to get things done.  Using Magnify you can get things done in your community, and help others get important things done in their communities.  Magnify provides a new and productive way to connect, and to use those connections to get things done and help others.

And getting stuff done on social media makes people happier, which has been documented in the research literature.  According to a recent study, people who sent or received more messages, comments and Timeline posts reported improvements in social support, depression and loneliness (Burke and Kraut 2016).   So using Magnify is likely to make you free better than the older and less productive social media platform — Magnify is about helping others, and along the way staying connected with friends and family.

So try Magnify today.  It’s easy to get started, and simple to help others get stuff done.  It’s also easy to get your own projects launched, and to connect with your friends and family to help solve your project.