Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email
blog.chaddickerson.com
blog.chaddickerson.com
I've never really scrolled through the frontpage, I don't look at people's posts and photos, happy to message them through text or WhatsApp, but I absolutely need the events. Without them, I'd lose so much touch with all but my closest friends.
People tend to respond to this concern with "if they don't invite you individually they aren't that great a friend" but that's my point - they're not, but they're people I like and I like to see them a few times a year at birthdays and other celebrations, and I'd feel my life diminished if I didn't have them. But there are dozens, I don't have time to catch up with them for coffee, and I don't honestly love the pressure of one-on-one time with people who aren't very close to me, anyway.
People who advocate deleting Facebook, do you not have/want such relationships? Or do you not care for catching up in that way? Or do you have some solution? Because for me it's the absolute core feature of Facebook.
I don't think I've ever received an invite to a casual event over text/email/phone either, except in conversations of the "Hey, what are you up to?"/"Going to a party, want to come?" ilk.
I just text everyone I want to talk to.
Maybe it's because I went to a decently sized high school (a little under 2000). Or maybe it's because I currently live in a large city (top 20 populated city in the U.S.) Or maybe it's because I'm an extrovert.
But I would probably be overwhelmed by the sheer number of events my social network would produce on FB. I already accompany friends to events thrown by friends of friends pretty frequently.
How often do you go to these birthdays of people you barely hang out with? The average person has like 300 friends on FB. The median number is about 150-200. That's a lot of birthdays.
So if I left Facebook I'd either never know about any of what's happening, or everyone would have to go out of their way to invite me especially, which I don't see as a viable long term thing for me or for them, over time they would increasingly forget to invite me - I've seen it happen with others who've tried to leave and had to return to get back in the loop!
Plus even if I posted to say that I was leaving Facebook my post wouldn't be seen by everyone so they wouldn't know, and if I disabled my account the post would disappear altogether.
So I'm locked in for the foreseeable future out of social necessity.
PS - I've never heard of Evite, until I just realised I thought it was being used as shorthand for an electronic invite, not an actual website.
You could have the same thing in an email thread if you linked a spreadsheet in an email, but people are less likely to keep both in sync because the things are in two different contexts. And even so, what would you use? Google Apps? That’s just trading one data-hungry overlord for another.
I'm 40. For me it depends on who is sending the invite. My wedding invites about 4 years ago were via email with a bespoke RSVP website (my first foray into react.js). 150 out of 180 people showed up from around the country of ages ranging from the upper-teens through the upper eighties. We shared the photos via Facebook (with links to S3 for originals if anyone wanted them)
My older friends and family (50+) send evites if they're savvy or call.
Most of my friends and family who were born / raised / never-left Chicago aren't even on Facebook unless they run a business that does well to promote there (tattoo artists, for example). For them, it's text, pre-announced phone calls, and drop-ins. The rest are like...
My friends and family from NYC, Austin, Seattle, and elsewhere who are within a decade of my age generally use facebook for larger events and text for smaller ones. Sometimes email. Sometimes a whatsapp group. It changes often.
This past NYE was at a bar in Indianapolis and we were invited by way of an SMS with a link to the Facebook RSVP (and ticket purchase) page. It was a 90s night, so I suppose that places the age group.
The people I know under 30 or so stopped inviting me to things after I got married. Their loss; we still like to party.
So... many many ways. I don't love facebook, but if everyone's using it, I suppose I can live with it.
Pretty much never had this happen to me. It's the host who invites and invites are sent via FB usually.
Birthday parties are usually 10-30 people and invites are sent to, for example, school friends, many of whom you see maybe once a year if that much because you now live in different cities or even different countries.
> I've never really scrolled through the frontpage, I don't look at people's posts and photos
Most people who tell everyone they are so happy they deleted facebook were for some reason or another not able to do that. For them, it was an addiction. So I'd guess getting rid of their addiction is simply more important than events.
The problem is that those posts never come straight out and say that they are about an addiction.
Good to see I'm not the only one thinking that. I have started to see posts with "here is how I quit Facebook and why you should to" as an alcoholic telling "here is how I quit drinking and why you should to". I like having a beer or two in the weekends and like to use 5-10 minutes in the mornings to scroll through the frontpage of Facebook, both of them are not harmful in any way. Getting problems because an addiction is something totally different and not a problem most have
That's a bit drastic. You would probably see a few of them more, and a few of them less. People managed relationships just fine before facebook.
Also events will still get to you though the contacts you do keep, did you know so&so got married, etc. People love sharing information (or gossip).
I get the fear, I faced it myself but in my case deleting FB, improved my life.
I do use whatsapp though.
I'm aware people managed before, but things have changed. I was just responding to a person talking about the myriad ways they get invited to things. Those simply don't happen to me. Everything is Facebook.
Marriages aren't really what I'm worried about (if I'm being invited to a wedding they're presumably the sort of friend who'll contact me directly) - it's the "Hey, it's my birthday, let's go down to the pub and knock back a few" sort of things.
I'm not afraid. If I were told tomorrow that I could never use Facebook again I'd be just fine, but I actually don't want to lose those things. I'm not really looking for head-patting, but people's experiences and whether/how they preserved those relationships.
Also, I think this is also politics. It's not good when people basically force you to use Facebook, otherwise you'd be cut off mostly. A change is impossible when some people aren't taking a stand.
AFAIK most people who removed facebook from their life got an improvement out of it and fromt he feedback some of them gave, they did miss a few of those events but it did not matter much to them and the others they got invited or learn about through their newly rebuilt social links and did not miss.
Congrats, now you don't get invited to any of that person's events. Repeat until you only goto close friends events(who also start excluding you from invites because of accidental snubs)
After a while I had to get a new Facebook account, because people kept messaging my wife over messenger, asking her to forward the messages to me.
I've also reconnected with childhood friends through Facebook.
I agree that the low friction (and also low expectation) invites for Facebook events are a really great feature.
Since deleting FB of course I've missed out on some parties, and I've lost touch with a couple of people I only spoke to on Facebook. But the upside is that I'm no longer on Facebook and I think that's an extremely fair trade. If you're worried about it, slowly move your contacts onto another messaging service and have them contact you through there.
Personally, the upsides are much greater than the downsides. If I run into an acquaintance at a party it's actually a nice surprise, and I don't already know everything they've been up to since we last met, I have to ask questions to find out.
For me, part of the motivation for removing facebook was removing the relationship load (for the lack of a better term), which categorizes the types of people you're describing. I'm sure people are different here, but I personally get plenty of exposure from non-core relationship from other sources (instagram(facebook 2.0 lol), twitter, etc.). The cost of keeping facebook just for those types of people didn't make sense for me.
I anticipated losing events to be a big deal, but it's worked out (maybe ignorance is bliss and I'm just missing out on everything).
I don't consider the hundreds of people that I had on facebook that I only met a couple of times a year to be my friends anymore. They're just acquaints at this point and I really have no interest in them or their lives or catching up with them just because we used to work together or used to hang out through mutual friends years ago.
We occasionally run into each other, we shake hands and exchange a few words and then part ways. However I know that I could pick up my phone right now and call a lot of them and they will be up for a coffee or lunch in the next few days but it's not like I would invite them over to my place for drinks, dinner etc for my birthday or some other celebratory reason.
I have a handful of people in my life that I would consider being my friends that I keep in touch with on a regular basis and I don't need facebook or any social media to maintain a meaningful relationship with them.
I made a few Telegram and Viber groups with people I want to stay in touch with, and we invite each other this way to evenings out or parties.
I have Twitter to keep up to date with musicians or news websites, and LinkedIn to keep in touch with ex-colleagues.
IMHO who says "if they don't write to you they are not your friends" is a bit lazy, as you can have groups on IMs (Telegram, Signal, Viber) and stay off Facebook property without too many issues.
I've lost the count of how many local events I've subscribed and went to: flea markets, farm fairs, shop and cafe openings, celebrations, sales, hikes, hobbyist meetups, the list just goes on.
It's much much much easier for people to setup and coordinate events of almost any size through Facebook events. Nothing else comes even close. It's also incredibly easy to share and invite other people (within the FB platform/ecosystem of course).
That's actually a very, very good point! I deleted my account about two years ago and that's probably the biggest downside. Not grave enough though to make me come back.
There's only ever been like one event I was interested in and I just didn't have time to go to it, and it wasn't by any of my friends.
I feel like this is a cultural thing too, I'm Puerto Rican, and we just start calling everybody over the phone left and right when we have events. When I got married, my mom RSVP'd everyone over the phone practically.
I really want to see a social media type of site that does what G+ tried to do unrelated to any major social networking company (or advertising firm) that lets you have "circles" and have events, but somehow makes money without ads or selling anybody's data.
I have deleted Facebook before, so it doesn't phase me to stop logging on to it, I only keep it for family, but I may find myself replacing it with my own personal blog, and letting everybody know if they need me they can email me and my life updates will be on my personal blog instead.
To your specific concern about meeting up with folks who "aren't that great a friend" - my solution has been the one-on-one coffees and it forces me to be much more mindful about who/how I reach out to.
I think catching up can be fun though. It doesn't need to be pressure filled if you're genuinely curious about what's happening in someone else's life, because we are all trying to do our best and that looks really different for different people.
Getting together with folks allows you to see how other people approach it if you ask questions.
This just got a lot more meta than Facebook, but hopefully there's something here that's helpful :)
Also, if anything, I had noticed fewer people using Facebook for anything over the past few years, including events.
This sort of mass-email is weirdly impersonal because it tells the recipient that you want them to know what you're up to, but you don't want to write a message just to them. Also, it would be very awkward to opt-out ("hey dude, um please don't send me your mass-email updates anymore."), unlike company emails which there's no awkwardness around unsubscribing.
I'm not saying this isn't better than FB, but it still has some downsides (some of which the author may be overlooking because they don't bother him).
Also, I don't see a problem if a person finds my emails uninteresting and unsubscribes.
Sure, but do all of your recipients know that? The point is that some people would be very uncomfortable doing this, even if you wouldn't subjectively be offended by it. And as the author notes, doing an opt-in system makes things complicated and potential excludes less tech-savvy folks.
Also, less tech-savy folks could just ask for help and I'd subscribe them manually.
You mean, like a post on FB ? Or Tweeting ? Readable for all ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ ? Who very likely are not really interested in your message ?
Another reply mentions having people who don't want to read your email newsletter set up filters to get rid of them. This is possible, but more work than a two-click mute on social media platforms.
Don't get me wrong — I'm not saying FB/Twitter are "better" — just that this solution occupies a middle ground that creates different privacy/relationship issues.
It was four clicks for me to set up an email filter on Gmail in response to a message in my inbox.
And there's considerably more filtering options, had I wanted something non-trivial, than there are on FB or Twitter, which are all or nothing -- after all, on email I have the option to more than mute, such as to classify the message based on various parameters.
If someone posts a heartfelt post on Facebook and not a single person likes or comments, isn’t there the same outcome?
With FB, you go to the site to get basically this stream of opt-in announcements. With email, they are mixed with things that might require urgent action and direct personal messages and spam and what-not. Of course, I don't have FB on my phone and if I did it would be more intrusive.
And if for some reason you feel obligated to be someone's "friend" on Facebook, you can still opt out of seeing their updates. Not so with email, unless you write a filter that sends it straight to the trash.
Right, so how is that not the same thing as opting out on FB? Because it’s 3 or 4 clicks (in Gmail) instead of 2?
When you force people to learn things like that, you know what you're called? A spammer.
Even technical users seem to want to move away from email for more than office communication and password resets. A lot of projects move off mailing lists and on to forums, issue trackers, etc. because the affordances just match modern expectations.
I cannot imagine everyone thinks that why. Why even take the time to do it ? Are billions of people really that bored ? Then surely its time for humanity to end ;-)
Disclaimer: I am not on FB or Twitter (or whatever) - too busy otherwise, probably
Receiving one of the mailings feels much more personal to me than I guess seeing a fb post would (I've been off it for several years), and seems more likely to prompt a personal reply from me.
Not sure I understand the worry about awkwardness with opting out - surely it's just as easy to ignore an email as a post on "social media"?
However, I won’t be starting a mailing list any time soon.
Perhaps others lead vastly more interesting lives than I do, but I don’t feel any need to launch a personal mailing list about my life any more than I felt the need to share a stream of minutiae on Facebook. Moments that are genuinely dear to me - such as those relating to my family life - are none of anyone else’s business anyway.
3,000+ contacts over 20 years? My goodness, that’s a lot of people. I’m an immigrant 2x removed from his home country, from where I left too early in life to have developed relationships that could continue in the online age. I came to my current country too late to have gone to school here, so I don’t have the implied social network which usually comes with that particular experience.
99% of people I’ve interacted with happen to have been colleagues of mine at one time or another, or folks I’ve met while sitting on either side of the job interview table. While I have enjoyed some very productive work arrangements in the past, none of these people have kept in touch with me after myself or them have moved on to another company.
All this is to say: I would be astonished if anyone wanted to read about the details of my life. These aren’t useful - or indeed enjoyable - to anyone but me and my family, which is where the details shall remain.
Something nice about holding it in your hands and reading it, then placing it on my desk somewhere so I could see it and be reminded of the good feelings every time I glanced at it.
Also, once you write something, there's no backspace. You either re-write the page completely or leave a mess.
In fact I’d find it much more annoying than Facebook if I start receiving such emails from friends.
>Not surprisingly, feelings of isolation can have a serious detrimental effect on one's mental and physical health. Loneliness can be a contributing factor to heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, arthritis, among other critical diseases. Lonely people are also twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease. At the root, isolation compromises immunity, increases the production of stress hormones, is harmful to sleep, and impacts cognitive abilities. All of this feeds chronic inflammation, which lowers immunity to the degree that lonely people even suffer more from the common cold. Loneliness can be a chronic stress condition that ages the body and causes great damage to overall well-being.
There are many alternatives, see: https://blog.thefetch.com/2013/05/28/10-cool-sites-for-event...
The goodness of an event planning platform comes from everyone using it. Metcalfe’s law in action.
I say this as a non-Facebooker, fyi. Events kept me on the platform well after the rest of it became net-negative.
I do maintain my social graph and as a result use Messenger sometimes. If someone really wants to talk I go elsewhere for the conversation.
Then again Metcalfe's law has a flipside relative to the cost of exclusion from the network to those included and society, and this costs grows bigger as the dominant network grows bigger. Among the effects of such exclusion is the existence of parallel networks such as the alternatives mentioned here, and what makes them very good is that they cater to some of those excluded from the dominant network. Dark side of Metcalfe's law in action.
Had facebook not been an antisocial closed network preying on its users but open and federated as the internet has been deisgned then things would have been different, right now the problem seems to be that facebook captured a majority of internet users in some geographical areas and does everything possible to keep them captive.
The solution is called Mobilizon, it was initiated at the end of 2018, is currently at prototyping stage and is scheduled for release in late 2019 as stated on the official website: https://joinmobilizon.org/en/
Yes, it can be done, but it's not going to be how people, _ordinary_ people, expect. The world has had 10 years to get used to the Facebook and Twitter workflow, they're not going back just because we think email is sufficient.
I blame it on the webmail wave that offered to the newbie Internet users of the nineties poor interfaces to email. People used it and said: "email sucks". No, that's just webmail that sucked. And stills sucks compared to native clients (except for Outlook that equally sucks in a different way).
When you take a good look at email it is the ideal medium for social micro-networks:
- no registration, no opt-in. All you need to start a conversation is an email address. - no vendor lock-in: thousands of email clients exist, on all platforms. - with a decent client, you manage your messages the way you want, not the way some company wants.
Let's put it differently: how to create a social micro-network in three easy steps: 1. Get the email addresses of the people you want to talk with 2. Send them an email when you want to say something 3. (optional) write a blog post about how to use group email well and put it in your signature.
Also, although I dislike it for it is often misused and abused, HTML-mail covers 99% of fancy formatting needs.
> What people have come to expect of social media, of forums, etc. does not translate particularly well to email.
Agreed. Email is for communication. Social media are for fun, distraction and procrastination. Social media are MMORPGs.
I personally believe people should transition out from social-media-everything because social media are to society what pollution is to climate.
To be fair, you get out of social media whatever you want. If you want to use it for fun, distraction, and procrastination, you can. If you want to use email for those things, you can. I have friends who do.
Personally, I'm fine with social media being websites/apps and mail being mail. Nobody emails me cookie recipes, 'interesting' GIFs and links to funny videos, discounts on snake-oil medication, surveys to find out what Disney Princess I am, inflammatory political posts, or megabytes upon megabytes worth of photos that I don't really want to delete because I know I'll need to come back to them again at some point.
More importantly, everybody being away from email means I'm far less likely to be spammed. What I get in my inbox is what I want to see, nothing more, nothing less, and with no bloat. I'm happy with the status quo, much more than when people actually emailed me and I had to swift through messages to find out what to keep or delete — in the days before Gmail, might I add.
Email's my sanctuary, I'll not have that taken away. :-)
- no beginning or end in the streaming era of web (unlike the slow static documents early model)
- not knowing is ok, great even
facebook is an amplifier of huamn relationship, but amplitude is not a measure of quality
e.g. Weekly digest of the tweets by Paul Graham: https://i.imgur.com/kd8SCKv.png
I mainly stopped using Twitter because of the ads, slowly ruining third party clients (Tweetbot was what I used), and the tracking.
Thanks for sharing this!
* The Mailchimp platform provided some automation for the author when first asking people to opt-in. Presumably each message also includes an Unsubscribe link at the bottom which is less awkward to use than replying to the author, asking that they stop sending the email.
* TFA mentions Mailchimp's templates, it's not easy to create readable formatting of lengthy emails in standard email clients.
* It eliminates the possibility of screwing up and addressing the email to recipients using a line other than BCC.
Another thing that Facebook offers is the ability to get to know who I'm dealing with when I friend a new colleague or someone I just started hanging out with. It's a great way to spark conversation "oh hey, I see you made cocktails last night, I love run rummers!". Or, "I see you liked Datsik, want to go to a concert with me?". That's essentially how I met my wife.
We don't even use mailing lists. We usually just reply to the last one, and I have a contact group with everyone in the family.
My chrome extension in case anyone is interested: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/marathon/nkhecjgkf...
Here they are for anyone interested:
www.facebook.com###u_jsonp_3_0 > div www.facebook.com###feed_stream_5a55a64611d#####0189168 > div www.facebook.com###stream_pagelet www.facebook.com###notificationsCountValue
The second one, you will likely have to figure out yourself - it looks like each feed stream has a unique id.
There are people who just don't use email, and not because they're not tech savvy.
When I said email is the best way to contact me he said "Wow, going old school".
When I asked him, he said "Whats App" all the way, never uses anything else!
Is any of this making any sense?
Previous HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877603
Initially, the fact that we could email each other instead of writing letters was awesome. But after about 2 years, all I got were 1-2 liners, and no one wrote thoughtful emails any more. And it got much worse once IM became popular.
Recently, a friend who thinks likewise moved to another continent. Although we do occasionally email, we mostly communicate every few months via letters. Hope it remains that way.
I can so relate to this.
If I were to do this, I actually think it would be cool if those in the mailing list could choose whether they want to reply to the whole list or to just me (as easy as removing the list from the CC line). That way, there can be a semi-public discourse with your friends, if you still want something like the "comment thread" from facebook.
I would appreciate if someone would list few Mailchimp's pros and cons and/or maybe few alternatives, from privacy/freedom perspective.
Their service is good, but as far as I can see, they're willing to sell just about everybody's data to just about anybody.
Definitely not something to use for friends and family.
This doesn't replace Facebook. It doesn't have to. Facebook is nuclear overkill for this little part of my life.
Like if thunderbird had a "my lists" view - which put extended family in one area, close friends in another, work associates in another.. and the viewing of messages inlined pics nicely and did an infinite scroll kind of thing, basically creating a timeline/feed...
If someone could get ssl and pgp or similar in the mix, this could stick. Just maybe.
Actually I am sure there are lots of family groups that have things to send to each other that they don't want thousands of other people to access, and friends groups as well - so this could be federated snapchat kind of fb replacement with some UI tweaks, an app and a web portal.
NOw I wonder if email, can be secured and connected to mastadon, riot.im and similar to expand the options for viewing, as well as replying.
I just put on my TODO list to start 2 lists: one for family and friends and one for interesting tech.
I will never totally leave FB because I use it to pimp my books and open source projects, but I think spending more that 10 minutes a week engaging with FB is a waste of time. Opportunity Cost.
1: Some of the people who matters may not have an apple device/account now or may not have one in the future
4: With Apple services, you're not free to switch platforms and your data is not on your own computer
People are starving for ownership of a one-to-many communication address (which email is designed for, but has not been well executed by email clients since email has been seen first as business/office tech).
Lesson 3: You control the narrative completely in email which provides a much better opportunity for story-telling.
Facebook Messenger?
Facebook isn't just a place to post publicly on your wall. Arguably the reason why Facebook messenger exists on the platform is provide intimacy.
if facebook messenger exists, it is not to provide intimacy but for some reasons aligned with facebook interests such as getting the people online on facebook longer to peek further in their life and social links to feed the investor storytime narrative that facebook will collect more data to eventually be able to target people efficiently enough at some point in the future so that investor will make a big ROI.
Then again email vs instant messaging is an old debate and email does provide much better conversation and intimacy due to its asynchronous nature.
The user and I are referring to the difference in posting and discussing as a public post rather than talking through Messenger or email which is a more intimate service because its not broadcast publicly.
Not the information and data privacy behind what Facebook might do or not do with that information behind the scenes.
also the people i wanted to stay in touch are anyway on WhatsApp, signal or at worst can email them, so i don't see any added value in Facebook
The fragmented reading brought by social media has really affected our lives. I am now consciously avoiding the instant social platform, and important things will be solved by mail.
Worked for me!
An earlier thread had me think about productizing this actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18585534
My thought:
For a social network, I see it being a cross between a Google Group and a newsletter. * List my profile somewhere with a sign up box to "subscribe to updates and conversation from Miles and his network." * Every 3-6 weeks, I receive an email from the platform asking me what's been up with me, and I simply reply, which then gets sent to people who subscribed from updates from me. * Calendar integration -- when I add an event to my calendar, I have the option of including it in my next update to my email network to let them know I'm doing it. (ex: I'm speaking next month at some conference) * Community participation -- if anyone who subscribes to my email updates/network wants to email my network (ex: do you know anyone who...), I get an email saying my subscriber Bob wants to ask my network a connection, would you like to include it in your next email update to your network? If I respond yes, then it is also listed in my next email update to my network. Something like that would be awesome.
We also didn't build this as a fully automated service, but rather as something that generates MJML that you then have to compile and embed within an HTML email. But it does let you embed all the replies to an email in a new outgoing email, which you can conceptually see here in this marketing email we sent out: