In the past, I fairly consistently made frequent check-ins as posts to Facebook for places I visited. However, it seems Facebook is increasingly deprecating this functionality. You can still check-in quite easily, but old check-in posts are breaking. The issue seems to be getting worse over time.
Facebook was very reliable at one point. You could look back through your timeline to see what you did, where you did it, and when you did it. There was even UI that made it easy to choose a time period to peruse. This was useful for so many reasons, not the least of which is planning for further activities in places you already visited, or providing information to others who planned to visit those places. Let's also no forget the value of being able to stroll down memory lane.
Here's an example of one such broken check-in. It's a post in 2012 that simply says "Surprisingly good and unusual". The information about where this check-in took place, including the town and other general information has been completely removed.
The posting is useless, other than to verify I did something with Allie on that day. Fortunately, I also maintain a blog (this blog). For this particular event, I was able to go back to the day in question and see that Allie and I
visited Salem, MA. I'm not sure which place in Salem is represented by this check-in, however.
I am also finding posts on Facebook where uploaded photos no longer display. No amount of troubleshooting has restored those photos. This seems to be particularly problematic for Life Events, where posts which contain one more more photos no longer show those photos. (These are my own photos that I uploaded to Facebook myself, so it's not an issue of someone else controlling privacy settings or removing their account from Facebook.) When you edit the post to see what's going on, Facebook seems aware that photos were included in the post because Facebook shows a loading window, but yet that loading window never resolves. When you reupload the photos to the post, you will find that you cannot summit the changed post. Facebook just errors-out on you when you try.
Additionally, even more recently, when I've checked-in at movie theaters for specific movies I'm about to watch, those posts are losing information about the movie. This is happening for posts that are only a few weeks old, if that.
As of this minute, Facebook is not currently adding post to the Life Events page for any posts dated in 2023.
Given all these issues, and Facebook's track record of similar buggy behavior for other deprecated tools in the past, it seems prudent to no longer rely on Facebook as a record of my past. This means I have to fall back on my blog. It's a bit more work to create blog posts than Facebook posts, but at this point, it seems worth the extra trouble.
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