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Comment by konstantinentia | Hacker News Reader

I similarly relocated away from family. Turns out that if they know you don't use Facebook they will go out of their way to update you directly. Just believe that you are worth it, and my friend, you are.

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That, plus if they don't update you personally and all you get from them is passively watching their facebook feed I have bad news for you. I'd take a bi yearly call from my grandma over the daily shitposts of any member of my family that I haven't talked to in 10 years.

Maybe think about calling your grandma more often, before it's too late.

Same here. Going off FB just gives me a reason to call my friends and family, and for them to call me.

I've been trying to get my family to install signal for our family group chat to no avail... i feel signal is so much smoother than fb msgr, but no one outside my techie / ativist friend groups ever agree to even try it.

I think a large part of the difficulty here is that mostly people already use multiple messaging services out of a group including things like vanilla SMS, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and Snapchat, and some might eve use all of them, so they're hesitant to add yet another one into the mix. I'd personally be thrilled to delete all of the messaging apps on my phone besides one if the one that remained allowed me to message with my full set of family and friends, but unfortunately that isn't likely to be feasible anytime soon.

remember like a decade back there was a instant messanger aggregator? it was called like, chatzilla or something, i forget. but in the logic of today's walled garden system of tech fiefdoms, would never happen without some regulatory requirement.

I don't have WhatsApp in a country where practically everybody has WhatsApp, and while I certainly get included in enough things and am not dissatisfied (especially since quite a few have now also installed Signal), I'm also certainly getting left out of a lot of things still.

Again, not that much of a problem to me, but certainly something I wouldn't deny is happening.

Agreed! ^ My entire family lives pretty far away, but I facetime with them a lot more often since I got off FB.

I find a group chat on Whatsapp much better than Facebook for keeping up with my immediate family.

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