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Then the gravitational pull you have on your friends and family seem to be far greater than what I have.

Because besides incredibly few exceptions no one uses another Smartphone App for me, no one wants to have an explanation how IRC works, and E-Mails seem to be good for everything but writing to me.

No one will change their behaviour in any regard just for me. Maybe because I am not one trying to force something down other people's throats, that's not my style. Maybe you were one of those hardcore social media users people couldn't live without, but for the occasional twice a month conversation online and the 1 like a week, I won't be missed nearly enough.

And this is also the sentiment I have received multiple times from others who have abandoned social media at some point. So I strongly suspect your case is an exception and not the norm, and maybe you are portraying it as a little bit easier and positive than it was or is.

I was thinking something along similar lines. It's not like I brought my friends to Facebook in the first place - we all just ended up there. Even worse, so did my parents and their friends. If I had brought them to Facebook in the first place, that'd be one thing, but it is so big it has it's own pull, and honestly I don't think I can compete with that. What's more is I don't want to - if I have to hard sell someone on switching to Slack, for example, I'm now the Slack expert to them forever.

The shame of it is that the alternative is miss stuff, and who wants to do that? I would rather deal with a shitty Facebook app on my phone that I can force quit when I'm done with it than feel like a self-exiled citizen of my own community. It's defeatist, but whatever - humans are social creatures for the most part, and I don't want to separate from the herd over something stupid like an app on my phone.

as I reflect on the sentiment of this message, I am brought to tears.

these soldiers won't fight to save their own asses, much less will they risk their own necks. their friend's just wound up here.

it's not my fault.

we failed before we tried.

We tried. It didn't work.

No, this was pretty much a sheeple post. I'm following the herd of friends and family to Facebook because that group is large and my 40+ cousins, most of whom are blue collar and happy just to have place to share baby pics, are uninterested in bizarre discussions about corporate malfeasance.

This is exactly what I did, and I'm so happy I did. I'm now Facebook-free which is something I didn't think I could get (albeit I lost contact with a couple of people I rarely spoke with).

I'm using Telegram a lot lately (although it was more about other people bringing me in rather than me bringing them over) and I still wouldn't switch to WhatsApp now. The webapp requires your phone to be turned on and connected (as it acts as some sort of bridge or something?) unlike Telegram which "just works" once you give permission.

Plus I find the whole infrastructure to be much nicer for group chats (with nice things like bots that are quite useful).

> I have a solution. Why don't you get all your friends off there?

While I don't disagree with your goals, it's not just moving your friends and family off Facebook. It's also moving their friends and family off as well. And all the groups they are associated with, and the people they interact with.

One reason I have a fair number of friends is that I don't evangelize to them.

This is one reason I refuse to use Facebook's messaging app. There are plenty of ways to contact me on my phone. My friends know what they are. I don't see some Facebook messages, but that's just too bad.

How did you make your friends use telegram instead just for you? I use iMessage with my best friend and my dad because it is my preferred way of communication (it is fairly secure, easy to use, and I can reply from my watch, Mac, iPad and iPhone, unlike any competitor except email). For everybody else I have to use what's app because they cannot be bothered to install an app just to contact me once a week (or some even once a month) and email (my second preferred method of communication) is too complicated, clumsy, old, or just too uncool for everybody to use (except for checking for that registration link on Instagram).

You cannot just move a large group of people to another platform if you don't have any authority over them (e.g. their boss) unless they want to switch on their own (because their previous method is too unreliable, inconvenient or expensive).

I, for one, would be happy if I can make my teacher believe that WhatsApp is not a good idea to contact me for various things regarding my final exam. The best way to reach me is always through email.

"Hey did you check out that app I asked you?"

"Hey, the other day I wanted to text you and it's so much more comfortable if I can type from my laptop, would you please install it? It's just like WhatsApp, you won't even see the difference."

"Hey, remember that app I told you about the other day? Turns out that the founder is this guy who cloned Facebook in Russia, and the government went after him and stole his company, how insane is that? He's now cloning WhatsApp, but better, could you please check it out?"

etc etc if there's a will there's a way

> "Hey did you check out that app I asked you?"

  - "Installing an app is always so complicated"
  - "Why not stick with WhatsApp. It works fine for me"

> "Hey, the other day I wanted to text you and it's so much more comfortable if I can type from my laptop, would you please install it? It's just like WhatsApp, you won't even see the difference."

"What's wrong with your phone?"

> "Hey, remember that app I told you about the other day? Turns out that the founder is this guy who cloned Facebook in Russia, and the government went after him and stole his company, how insane is that? He's now cloning WhatsApp, but better, could you please check it out?"

"What's better? And why would I trust a Russian more then WhatsApp. I don't really think it is a good idea to install it"

I haven't even made up those answers, I've heard them one way or the other. For most people, their phone just has to work and unless they mean a lot to you, they won't really bother installing it. If most of your friends are tech savvy, then your chances are good they are curious to try it out, don't mind it at all, or even support you. But most just don't care and are afraid they break things if they installed a new app.

I can even fully understand their decision. A friend of mind decided to ditch WhatsApp altogether and now I can only call her because I'm not willing to pay 15¢ just for a normal text message. She only did it because she wanted to have to deal less with social media but I don't want to. I turn off notifications for WhatsApp every now and then if I don't want to get distracted but all in all, I ust WhatsApp for 95% of all my personal text conversations.

Woah. Your professor requires students to have whatsapp? That's messed up.

We are not required to have it but she has my number and prefers to use WhatsApp to message me (nothing important just little annoucements and suggestions such as what topic to choose for my final oral exam). All official stuff is still written on paper. She probably uses WhatsApp because everybody at my age (who lives in my country) uses it all the time and she thinks this is more reliable to conntact me.

I'm sure if I fussed enough, I could get a handful of my friends to use some app I was fixated on, just for me, and they'd do it just to avoid stressing our friendship to its end as I drone on and on about privacy and encryption and sheeple.

Yes, but this wasn't something that no one cares about. Typing on your laptop is objectively better.

Thanks for the tip on telegram. Whatsapp's requirement that your phone be connected is needlessly aggravating.

Exactly. But back in those days Telegram was WAY ahead of WhatsApp (in terms of features). Nowadays, the ability of logging in onto the webapp without your phone is pretty much the one thing that Telegram does better. I read somewhere (maybe on HN?) that to have end-to-end encryption for some reason it has to work the way WhatsApp does it. I don't know why, but it's consistent with the fact that Telegram does not allow encryption on the webapp. I'm not an expert on this though.

"Doing something about it" is a good idea. As others have noted, your approach is unrealistic to the extreme.

A far better approach would be to create a tool/alternative platform that allows people to interact with Facebook and their Facebook friends, without directly using the app. It might be a bit of an arms race with Facebook if the tool is scraping the site, but there isn't a lot they can do to stop it if a lot of the users are using a Chrome extension or various other client side tools.

That means that people that come to your tool/app/page are not stuck interacting with only those other users who have left Facebook. Which of course would be terrible, except for tiny little pockets of people here and there who only interact with one another and all have the same concerns about Facebook. (maybe the OP belongs to such a group...but I've never known anyone like that)

If you were to build this, you wouldn't have the immense disadvantage of having a tiny network to begin with. Eventually, as more as more people join you, you can tweak your strategy, when you are no longer such an underdog. Obviously, such a system would have to be open source, and open to all the "alternative platforms" as well. Maybe to participate people have a choice of a paying a small subscription or viewing "nice" ads, or maybe none of the above if enough of their contributing friends approve them. Or something. Maybe it would be a WeFunder project. All options should be considered.

I'd suggest anyone thinking about this first do some reading on Game Theory, Tragedy of the Commons, etc. Don't design something that expects everyone to individually do something that is against their interest, or you WILL fail.

Why? I like Facebook. It's a pretty well designed social application. I'm using it a lot more than I was a year ago, primarily for interacting with technology groups on it.

Some people just like complaining.

Really people should complain about Twitter's inability to innovate at all. They were the one Western Social Network capable of taking FB on, and yet it's basically the same thing it was 5 years ago. I use Twitter a lot too, but I wish for what it could be.

For me, it's two reasons. First, they have a history of changing their policies that mess with what the user has explicitly set in the past (e.g., changing all the e-mails to facebook.com ones, changing private things to public). That's what prevents me from using Facebook.

But, for those that use Facebook, the apps have a history of being poorly written and do things that drain your battery even when you're not actually using the app. That's why people want to use the web interface. At least with the web interface they know the web browser should be reasonably behaved. Making this change to push people to the app instead of using the web means that you now have to watch your app battery usage more closely if you start using Messenger.

On iOS (I don't know about Android) you can see how much time app is spending in background. If it's an app designed to run in the background like a music or podcast player, seeing a lot of background time is normal. For an app like Facebook, that's a problem. Every few days I check my battery usage per app and it all breaks down pretty much as I expect. The apps I use the most are all using the most battery and in the rough proportions I expect. That's not been the case recently with Facebook at least according to the stories I've read documenting the problem.

Facebook apps are fine for battery usage for me.

The only reason why Facebook has as much power as it does is because of user lock-in, but that use lock-in is only strong because no one fights it actively.

Therefore, I started evangelising from WhatsApp to Telegram

Telegram is also a close silo. Tell your friend to use programs that use an open protocol like XMPP [1].

Please read [1]

[1] https://communicationfreedom.wordpress.com/jabberxmpp/

No, that's not what I wrote. You copied two phrases of mine together to give them a different meaning.

I've known of a few people that have tried that and ended up with less people to talk to. Most people don't care about news like these or the privacy complaints. Messenger is just the easiest way to get in touch with people in their social circle. Unless it's your significant other or best friend, they're not going to install a new app and make a new account just for you.

> Why don't you get all your friends off there?

That is a bit naive. If you have friends from different backgrounds and periods of your live with different interests than yourself, i can tell you that most of them could care less than to change the messenger of choice because someone likes a different messenger more for reasons they don't care about.

Sounds like you're really cool.

It's not clear to me why I should be upset that messaging was split out from one app to another? Why is that "being led like sheep"?

It's not that you have to install two apps instead of one, it's that you have to install one app instead of none. Previously you could access it from any web browser.

My comment on sheep is being misunderstood in the original post.

I'm not calling people sheep for liking an app. I'm calling people sheep for not questioning the lore "that no one leaves <insert social media> because all their friends are there".