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Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

Network effects have most people stuck on at least one of them. If all your friends use instagram/fb/whatsapp to keep in touch / make plans, leaving the platform is akin to cutting ties with your community.

Which is why there is a role for gov in regulating privacy and mandating interop between platforms. Asking people to “just stop using them” isn’t a realistic ask.

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I want to push back on this narrative - I got off facebook and now my friends just text me instead. A few of my friends also got off facebook. Sometimes I can't see a facebook event so I text a friend asking for details. It's fine.

I'm with you. But it doesn't work 100%.

I dumped Meta probably a decade ago, and anyone who wants to get in touch with me does so through e-mail.

But I still have two relatives stuck on FB Messenger. Even if I contact them via SMS, they still respond to my dormant account in FB Messenger, because Messenger is where all of their friends are. To them, it's the only messaging app, and have no idea why it doesn't work sending messages to me.

Of the people who accumulated in my Facebook friends list over the years, the only ones I know who actively use Facebook still are almost entirely using it to have stupid political arguments with each other. It really has snowballed and bred derangement.

You can enable email notifications specifically for Facebook events btw. I quit, but leave that enabled.

In some countries it has become difficult to live without a WhatsApp account. I'm doing it, but it's a pain since WhatsApp is used for everything that phone calls were once used for: schedule appointments, keep in contact with your kids' teachers, buy and sell goods, etc. The same numbers often won't pick up the call, or it will be simply turned off (since it's used just for WhatsApp).

Imagine living without a phone, or whatever is equally important in your area. Sure, it is possible, if you're at the right level of masochism.

Facebook isn't the worst of it. WhatsApp is, in those areas where it is the de facto standard app for texting. This is not the case for Americans so they are mostly blissfully unaware of it, but just imagine literally not being able to text anyone.

Actually it is very realistic to stop using Meta products - I've done it. And the more people stop, the less effective the network effect becomes.

People in my community are bragging about getting off social media - it's like a new status symbol around here.

Being off their social media products is one thing, I am myself, but being off of WhatsApp is like being off the grid in most countries.

In the early 2010s not being on Facebook meant you couldn’t really engage with university clubs, neighborhood groups, etc.

Now a lot of that stuff is on WhatsApp.

Besides that, pretty much everything “after school” is being arranged over Facebook, as well as community “blogs”, newsletters etc.

Facebook solves this problem extremely well. I still remember the “good old days” of poorly managed Wordpress sites, shared Google calendars, mailing lists, and texts, and I’m not particularly keen on going back to that.

The sad truth is that there is nothing on the market today that solves this problem in a combined package, and you can add discoverability to the mix. If you’re interested in X you can search for it on Facebook and 9/10 times you’ll find what you’re looking for, from menus for restaurants to opening hours. Yes, Google does this as well but somehow people (here) are more aware of the feature on Facebook.

Yeah, it's a tradeoff. I don't mean to be glib, but on one side we have a loneliness epidemic, mass misinformation campaigns, and centralized control, and on the other side we have better information about restaurants, easier after-school arrangements, and community blogs. I really don't mean to say that the benefits are not real benefits - they are! I just think their price is way too high.

I would rather prefer the good old days with wonky WordPress sites and mailing lists. It is true that most business owners moved to Facebook at some point, but the price to pay is having all content undiscoverable and inaccessible, unless your user has a Facebook account.

I finally ripped the bandaid off with Instagram early this year. I can't say it's done wonders for my social life. Mental health has been a lot better though.

It's not wrong to ask people to be leaders instead of followers. The message and pressure will sometimes get through. It's better than doing nothing.

Yep, I've tried, but if I say, e.g. "let's use Matrix!" it ends up being the app they only have to talk to me, and most of what they say is "why can't you use the app everyone else uses". Most people already have a second choice that isn't much better than a Meta app (or is also Meta).

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