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Comment by branon | Hacker News Reader

You've commented twice here to the effect that there are many reasons why a person might be forced to use Facebook. Care to elaborate? I can't think of any.

If the society in which one lives is backwards to the point of mandating a Facebook account to interact on a basic level... it might be time to turn on, tune in, drop out.

Gualdrapo's post doesn't actually say anything about why he _needs_ to use Facebook. Neighboorhood groups and FB marketplace are not necessary to live. I think we might be conflating needs and wants here.

Being accustomed to doing things in specific ways is not a need.

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> If the society in which you live is backwards to the point of mandating a Facebook account to interact on a basic level... it might be time to turn on, tune in, drop out.

That's why it's de facto forced on to you. Ministries (Americans: Departments, not religious ministries) are usually only reachable either on Facebook or by physically traveling hours to their office. Facebook groups are the communication platform for any community point-of-contact, and most are set to only be accessible by having a Facebook account.

As a society, is it avoidable? Yes. As an individual? Good luck convincing others. It might be hard to wrap your head around it if you were not living in such an area, so thank your government that you have a say on your communication.

> Ministries (Americans: Departments, not religious ministries) are usually only reachable either on Facebook or by physically traveling hours to their office.

Can you give one example? A link to their website or FB page would suffice.

I understand this. It seems like this situation would be avoidable by an individual, but not by society at large because most individuals would take the path of least resistance.

Could you send mail through the post? Call on a telephone?

> Could you send mail through the post?

Technically? But in my experience as a foreigner that have lived in Thailand, mail services are atrocious. It's unlike in Singapore or UK where it's excellent. It's even weirder considering parcels on the Amazon-equivalent (Lazada and Shopee) are faster on this one.

> Call on a telephone?

Mobile-to-telephone charges are obscene to the point that it's cheaper to use an international VoIP service to call (just to remind you that most people here are those who would skip and never experienced any telephones altogether) and unsurprisingly these are the kinds of government to ban unapproved VoIP to its citizens.

I have used Thailand here, but it's the same in Brazil (or from what I heard nowadays, was, but they still apparently used Meta's services extensively) except for the citizen-legal VoIP loophole.

Because family members use it and they don't want to use alternative communication methods, because groups you are involved in use it for organization and if you want to stay involved in said groups then you have to use it, because the country you live in has a large amount of its social web woven through facebook.

There are lots of reasons. Yes they aren't literal needs as in you are going to die, but sometimes the cost of not using facebook is significantly greater than the cost of using it.

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