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Comment by offtop5 | Hacker News Reader

I'll do that soon , but too many of my friends ( real life people, I haven't meet anyone from the internet in over 4 years) only can contact me on FB.

I do my best to limit my use of FB services

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This is absolutely untrue. Tell those friends to contact you via text, email, chat messenger, or maybe even a phone call!

I'm curious. They can't phone or email you?

Neither are great replacements for facebook messenger. And other IM tools aren't either because, well, the people you want to talk to don't use them.

Everyone has SMS

SMS doesn’t do groups or images. Maybe RCS will one day work?

MMS does, and does so transparently across platforms (iOS, Android). You must have a very old phone if it does not work for you.

Back when it made sense to send MMS messages (i.e. when everybody haven’t had something like WhatsApp) they were ridiculously expensive while sms was free on most plans. Nowadays it’s different but for example on my plan, sending MMS while on roaming is not plain data depending on the destination.

The criteria was that everyone needs to have access to the messaging platform. SMS checks that box. SMS does not do literally everything, but that's not the most important quality of a messaging platform.

SMS isn't a great option if you're communicating with people in multiple countries, and often not if you're traveling internationally yourself. Signal might be, if only we could get everybody to use it.

You can deactivate your Facebook profile but still continue to use Messenger, so that's an option.

Will definitely consider this. One issue maybe that I do get invited to a handful of events.

How exactly does this work. No longer having a public page , but people being able to contact me would be great .

Both have lower barriers for entry, and protect your privacy better. Given the nature of the post under discussion this seems relevant to proceedings

They won't. Been there. I asked a lot of people to contact me on phone, sms, email, etc. but not on facebook. Most of them I haven't spoken for years now, ever since I silently deactivated FB. Turns out they were/are not actually interested in me.

Better that you know. Can invest time in better friends.

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