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Comment by libso | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is flexible enough to provide this. You can post updates visible only to a group of people. Problem with Facebook is how people use it. Users tend to have > 500 friends on an average including ones to whom you have never spoken or never want to speak. This would make your timeline pretty irrelevant and uninteresting to you. Why would I care if a colleague in your first job (10 yr ago) went on a trip with his childhood friends.

Take a scrub to your Facebook friends list and you can get a more powerful TinyLetter.

Practically speaking you'd never un-friend people unless they personally bother you. This is why I hardly check my Facebook timeline. All I use is Messenger which is pretty useful to keep in touch with people you want to.

So, the real anti Facebook is Facebook itself with a fresh start.

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While I agree "the problem with Facebook is how people use it", that's kind of the point. People are so used to posting tons of minutia on it (and Facebook's ad model is incentivized to keep you aimlessly scrolling down the news feed for as long as possible), that it makes it difficult to just focus on important updates from people you care about. I find it so difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff in facebook, which is a problem I do not have in email (especially with GMail's tabbed interface that auto categorizes my mail).

> You can post updates visible only to a group of people

You can in theory, however in practice I've found it to be very cumbersome. I spent some time in 2011 trying to sort my Facebook 'friends' into groups - people I know from work, from tech meetups, and so on. It was too much work and the groups were too coarse. Facebook's graph search was promising, and I'd love to occasionally share a link (say) my policy-wonk friends will like, but there was no way to pair up graph search and status updates, e.g. share a link with "my friends who like technology policy". And of course, graph search is gone now.

I think Facebook's thinking is that you should just post an update and they'll figure out who'll be most interested in it. But the problem with that is there's no way to know who exactly is reading your status updates.

> So, the real anti Facebook is Facebook itself with a fresh start.

I did actually start a new Facebook account for a lot of these reasons, because it was difficult to scrub the old account and it felt rude to unfriend people, but there were a lot of people I didn't feel very connected to or interested in, or that they probably were interested in me.

I still don't like how they subtly influence who I am thinking of / in contact with / whatever. The algorithm is creepy.

I didn't know that Facebook can send status updates via email to people who are not on Facebook.

It can't, but that's an incredibly niche feature.

You know you "unsubscribe" from people while remaining friends with them? (or have different circles of people as another poster noted).

Facebook actually makes it easy to avoid uninteresting posts with a small amount of effort.

Actually, I find that Facebook does a pretty darn good job of showing me content from the friends I actually care about (<100 people) out of my 1000+ "friends" on the platform.

In case you want to give it hints, it has nice features like "close friends" (which will pin their posts to the top of your timeline) and unfollowing (for those people you don't want to unfriend but also don't want to see in your timeline).

>Practically speaking you'd never un-friend people unless they personally bother you.

I've started unfriending people the moment they start posting baby photos. My friends list is shrinking fast!

The only people who don't get unfriended are the people I actually like or the people who never post.

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