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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I read such posts (moving everything off Google/FaceBook/...), whatever the rationale, I feel like I am living in a parallel universe.

All my friends are on Facebook and as much as I dislike Facebook's piracy invasion, it's an excellent tool to keep in touch with people.

I could drop Google Talk, but as much as federation is a good thing, ironically I wouldn't have many people to talk to, since they use Google Talk/Hangouts.

Perhaps a decentralised file sharing tool is better. But everyone is using Dropbox and Bittorrent Sync will be too outworldish for colleagues/family/friends.

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It's worth remembering how so many came to use these services in the first place – as a tech 'front liner' I too was once guilty of unconditionally mocking others and saying "you should be on Gmail!".

Now the tech front is reversing its position, and hopefully the rest of society will eventually follow. Unfortunately the scene isn't set just now, because there simply aren't good alternatives to Gmail – nothing free or self hosted comes remotely close to its clean UI.

When such a thing exists, selling regular users on moving away from Google will be a much easier proposition

[If you're reading this and thinking of cloning Gmail – for fuck's sake don't waste your time "innovating" on the UI and getting it horribly wrong! (This was really the biggest tragedy of the Reader transition). Do a pixel perfect conversion. Except for artwork, cloning a UI is perfectly legal as demonstrated by case law going back 20+ years in the EU and USA.]

So you didn't have friends before Facebook and Google? :) I feel that people who put so much emphasis on Facebook live in a parallel universe, too.

Let's not forget these are just tools. Most of the relationship people have on Facebook are as shallow as they get because it's easy to shoot a message on such systems. But do you really care about EVERYONE you have in your networks ? Would you really miss something crucial in your life if you didn't have it ?

Before people used to bond because they had things in common (Usenet, IRC with specific topics of interest), the "new" social networks are just about gathering numbers and bonding with people you have just met once or twice in your life and with you have little in common. At least, that's how I see most people around me using Facebook.

I use FB to organize stuff in my local circle of friends, I use it to keep in contact with people who I met who went back to their home country, I use it for people I meet once a year when going to a festival so we can meet up again, I use it for people I might want to contact again (ordered into acquaintances so they don't show up on my newsfeed) and I think I have 3-6 people I've never met before, those are the ones that should have pages but use accounts ;)

Doing all that w/o facebook would be a giant PITA.

»Facebook and Twitter are not social networks, they are just platforms. _We_ are the social network.«

– Amr Gharbeia (https://twitter.com/gharbeia ), a few years ago at a conference, commenting on their activism in Egypt and coping with overload and unavailability of Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Also fully agree with your other points. I don’t use Facebook (Twitter though) and just email people whom I care about. Works fine, and those who really care have no problem with you not being on Facebook.

I've stopped using Facebook and behold - all my best friends are still here. If a friendship can't exist without Facebook, then they probably aren't your friend at all...

It's a bit different when friends are spread out all over the globe. If I want to message someone 13 hours away it is either Facebook or email, and facebook has been replacing those short messages that email or IM used to be used for.

But why? Why can't people use email anymore? This is a genuine question! I rarely feel like I would need something other than email for anything, so I don't understand how facebook replaced that?

Depending on your friends, facebook offers various advantages. You can see what they've been doing", see if they are online, send a simple 'hey' that wouldn't really be written if you were to use email.

People do use email still... But pretending facebook doesn't offer any value is an exercise in reality distortion.

FB gives you a great way to stay peripherally involved in people's lives. It allows you to have numerous but low-cost touch points such that when you next have a chance to properly catch-up you already know what the major events have been.

It's the complete opposite of email where I think "I'll wait until I have something proper to say" and then never send anything. On FB, it's totally normal to leave one-line comments. Having said this, I barely use FB anymore (due to privacy concerns).

Edit: I should also add that I've never used email in the social way that people seem to refer to. I really don't understand how that would be possible. FB allowed new types of social exchanges that didn't exist before (for me, at least).

I think I start to get it, thank you. So facebook basically replaces blogs/microblogging and photo sharing websites? i.e. blogs for the passive or peripheral involvement. Regarding your second point, mailing lists and group emails combined with personal emails are a good medium of social interaction IMO.

It's more like having RSS feeds in your reader for blogs that are rarely updated and you may have forgotten about (although not quite as you have to actively mark feeds as read).

An email (whether direct or via a mailing list) is an interruption (at least to me), whereas a Facebook post just drops off the bottom of the page if I ignore it.

EDIT: Sorry, that was poorly worded.

The discovery side of it is more like an RSS reader (or maybe a group email). But the key distinction (for me at least) is that I can be totally passive - I don't even need to mark things as read - or I can engage.

Moreoever, it's socially acceptable to be passive whereas ignoring an email (even a group email) is considered more like wilfully ignoring them (e.g cold-shoulder, blanking, etc)

Isn't there an old saw about every big "Web 2.0" business being something that took what people were already doing but made it "social"? So Facebook made blogging social, Twitter made texting social, etc.

10+ years ago I knew a bunch of people who had personal blogs, but of course most of them were filled with "sorry for the lack of posts recently" type posts.

I'm not on Facebook, but I understand why it's popular. The more people who might be reading, the more reason there is to post stuff. So it makes sense that everyone winds up in the same network.

For me, it's not about the direct messaging - it's the feed.

Someone on the other side of the world posts a photo of something they've been doing, I comment on it and we have a conversation.

For this to happen without the likes of Facebook, they would have to explicitly share that photo with me, something that may or may not be likely depending upon what the photo is about, what their perception of my interests are and whether they think I want to be bothered with it.

They can, but they do not. Why send an email to each person, when you can just post baby pictures or what you are doing to everyone on your feed? Then you don't have to worry about missing someone.

You could just as well use an address book group to send email to everyone or to a specific group. But I worry much more about spamming people with stuff they're not interested in than missing someone.

Sharing on Facebook is a passive thing. You put a picture on your profile and your friends decide if it's worth their time to look at further. You never explicitly told them to look at it, you merely gave them the opportunity. It's like hanging a picture on the wall of your home.

Email is a very explicit share. You are telling someone to look at this, because you sent it to them. This is much more personal. There's a social stigma in over-emailing, as much as there is a social stigma in not reading the emails a friend sends you. Emailing pictures is more like calling a friend. Yeah it's nice to hear their voice directly, but what if they don't want to hear what you have to say at this moment?

Email has changed. I don't reply to every link or picture people send me, nor do I expect a reply on each and every email I send.

There are certainly different social assumptions between email and Facebook, but the differences have long started to blur, depending on what context we're talking about (e.g work vs friends, etc.)

I agree with fauigerzigerk. I would say that email can, at this point, be used to "bump" stuff, to inform people, etc. without commitment or expectancy of an answer. At least, that's the way I use it.

You can't email someone 13 hours away? [0] What difference does it make if they're spread out all over the globe or not, whether you can email or FB them?

I do get the idea, sometimes I feel a little bit excluded without an FB account, but I have never had the problem that somebody didn't have an email address. Not even kids.

People seem to make up all sorts of excuses, but in the end it always boils down to 1) suffering minor inconveniences and 2) the (often[1] irrational) fear of social exile.

As other people have pointed out, changing networks is not that hard. It's a false belief that it is. Years ago my local friends were mostly on MSN[2], East European/Middle East folks were on ICQ and Y!C, US people were using AIM. So I used Trillian and later Pidgin. What you saw was this, people are moving around all the time, and many of the persons were 2 or 3x in my contact list because they too were on multiple networks. Google chat just sort of edged itself in there as well.

Think of it like this, remember how easy it was to find all your friends on FB because of that network? And didn't the same happen with email, and with AIM/MSN/iCQ/etc? I see friends and acquaintances trickle in on G+ without any effort for that reason (except I don't want to use G+ either). Now FB pushes its "help" quite aggressively, but even without that, people connect in networks, point eachother to their friends, it's very peer-to-peer :)

[0] I mean, it happens ... http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

[1] note I'm not saying "always", I can imagine certain high school scenarios where this fear might be somewhat real, although one has to wonder ...

[2] unfortunately I lost my MSN acct because the not-hotmail domain I registered it to expired a long long time ago and it stopped working--if anyone knows a solution to that I'd love to hear it because I would love to see that old contact list back :) (however I could also reg a new account and repopulate my contacts via-via just as easy)

>You can't email someone 13 hours away?

>facebook has been replacing those short messages that email or IM used to be used for.

I don't agree with this. I have had friends spread all over the globe and we still managed to have a call once a week and text regularly. Facebook does nothing to promote or enhance true friendships, it is social lip gloss at best. Yet too many people are to unfilled and shallow to truly see it.

Not really. My friends are spread out all over the globe. I do not use Facebook. I still manage to email and IM them without any headaches or complaints.

That's lucky. What IM do you use? Skype? ;)

It is not "lucky," it is a result of the fact that my friends are actually my friends. For what it's worth, I use jabber.

Here's the thing. My friends and I use Facebook to organise evenings out and other outings. We have one friend that refuses to use Facebook, so now we post an event in Facebook, and then someone has to go to the effort of keeping the outcast informed. It's actually quite a pain for your friends if you refuse to use the tool that they are using to organise themselves. It makes your friends do extra work to accomodate you...

All my other tools don't track everything I do with them, don't sell the information to advertisers, and don't spam me with dozens of emails.

I don't get why it's necessary to justify not using such a "tool".

I know this not the crux of your post, but have you tried turning off email notifications from Facebook? I did sometime ago and I haven't gotten an email from them in years. Moving Facebook notifications out of my inbox and into a space that I had to explicitly poll went a long way towards reducing how annoying FB could be.

1) Facebook do not sell your information to advertisers. 2) The emails are pretty easy to remove - case in point, I stopped them sending me emails in 2009, and have not received one since. Linkedin on the other hand, go straight into spam because they just won't stop sending me mails...

First thing I did was disable all email notifications. Not a trivial task: I had to turn off like 30 different types of notifications one by one. However, these sly bastards just kept coming up with new notifications, that were turned on by default. So I kept getting emails from facebook, even though I thought I had disabled all of them.

That was my experience a year or two ago. At some point I deleted my facebook account, because the value I got out of it wasn't sufficient to tolerate all those annoyances: changing email notifications, constantly changing privacy settings and policies, annoying ads, annoying messages from people I barely know...

I got rid of everything a few years back. The only thing they introduced was the mentions, and i disabled that a few weeks ago (after my friends learned about it). I didn't have the same experience, to be honest. I found Linkedin much more difficult.

Mind you, the constantly shifting privacy settings are weird, its easy to be really granular (go to your Activity Log) but it is effort. You can also change privacy on a post by post basis, but its sticky, so you need to be careful. The ads never really bothered me (except for the dating ones just after i came out of a long term relationship). In fact, I never ad-blocked facebook because I could x out of ads I didn't want to see. The annoying messages from people is not really Facebook's fault, though I feel your pain....

It's you and your friends who decided to make him an outcast by forcing him to choose to stay in a particular closed site when there are so many open options to organise meet-ups, including simply firing an email with CC/BCC to all parties.

Even now there are still simpletons who don't understand the reasoning of those deciding to stay away of these sites. I'm saying just understanding it, not necessarily agreeing to it.

I really like email lists. Everyone has email. Most get it on their phone. I feel your pain... and this is my suggestion for a work-around.

You make it sound like this is the fault of the person who is not on Facebook, as opposed to the fault of the people who chose to use a system that has zero interoperability with other systems. From where I sit, the problem is you for choosing to use a closed system to organize social events. The problem is you for allowing Facebook to control your social life in this fashion.

Making someone into an outcast because they do not use your favorite social networking system is the problem here.

If you were truly his friend you wouldn't be moaning about him in public...

After quitting facebook I realized that my true friends would still be my friends. Two months have passed and (in my case anyway) I feel like I am building better friendships with my friends because of using email/sms/voice calls more often instead of facebook.

>All my friends are on Facebook and as much as I dislike Facebook's piracy invasion, it's an excellent tool to keep in touch with people.

Ever tried mail and the ocassional phone call or meeting?

Do you really have to keep in touch with people seeing what they did on their vacations, bs inspirational quotes and baby photos?

>> Do you really have to keep in touch with people seeing what they did on their vacations, bs inspirational quotes and baby photos?

You may mock, but keeping involved in the minutiae of each others' lives does enable the maintenance of friendships over longer distance and time spans. Minutiae that we wouldn't necessarily make the effort to email or chat about.

As I get older my friends (and myself) have dispersed all over the globe, and even the ones not so far off have less time to give (and possibly less inclination) to spend time just hanging out.

That said, it doesn't have to be FB, or a centralised service at all.

Out of sight out of mind I guess. It doesn't really bother me that I fall out of daily touch with friends far away. A couple times a year I'll sit down and write them a letter (..email).

I am not on Facebook because I feel that they are an untrustworthy company. That said, if I felt I needed it, I would have to set up a web browser dedicated to it, or always be in Incognito mode while using it.

I agree that everyone uses Facebook, but for Google products other than search uses seems much more scattered. I personally know only techies on Google Talk/Hangouts, no "regular people", and many of those techies are thinking of moving away from it. The "regular people" I know all use Skype, with a minority using AIM for text-chat. Skype would be harder for me to drop (unfortunately, because the client is incredibly annoying), but Google Talk is easy.

mjn: That's actually suprising to me; among my friends most of the non-techi people use Google Talk (a few on AIM and Skype as well, but not many). Most of my techi friends used Google Talk as well but started moving away after federation was killed off. Now many of them use a mix of other XMPP providers (DuckDuckGo, Jabber.org both being popular) and direct messaging on IRC.

Come on now, "everyone is using" may have something to it, but its also a marketing/mind-trick of keeping people locked in to these services.

I remember in 2004, 2005 when Gmail began, why would anyone use gmail, everyone is using hotmail (shared experience). Why would anyone begin using skype, everyone is using msn? Why would anyone begin using Facebook everyone is on MySpace?

Someone has to be the first, take the step. Its us geeks that have to take the lead, do it. Just imagine if 5% of hn people would all begin using alternative software, improving it in the process. Free software at its best. Just a dream?

Time to jump of the trainwreck of these "cloudy" "services".

People could start using gmail because emails work independently from the provider. If gmail provides the nicer user experience you lose nothing from switching.

People started using Facebook because it was exclusive for a group of students. They were friends in reallife already and Facebook made it easier to coordinate.

People started using Skype because it allowed calling real phones cheaply, msn doesn't.

A large fraction of HN readers probably use Linux and free software. A fraction of them probably even improves the software they use. That doesn't mean that the average person wants to switch too.

5 years from now, "People started to use seamless encryption and pseudo/anonymizing services and protocols because it was exclusive, cheap and safe."

You are right in pointing out that all the services we switched too, had some USP, I believe I2P, ownCloud, Citadel, Tor, gnunet, OTR/XMPP all have their USP too, and that is safety and freedom to express and say what ever the fuck comes to mind without self-censorship or fear for what consequences/blackmail it might have in the future.

I have a thing to not talk about the "average person" because it means too many things and more often than not is a patronizing way of saying idiots. But lets go with it this time, the average person has no incentive to use productive equipment like a PC at all and they are perfectly fine with a consume-only, digitally-rights-managed, locked-down, surveillance device. We hackers should just give up on them, let them eat cake. /rant.

> People started using Facebook because it was exclusive for a group of students.

Citation needed, from a different source than the FB founders.

It's a very juicy marketing lie to spread but I've seen social and IM networks of all types come and go and the only reason ever has always been "because my friends are there".

All the rest is just feature candy, stuff to attract the pioneer trend-setters. The great mass of people just herded there, couldn't care less about exclusivity or particular features (cause learning to use features is hard and exclusivity is scary), not until it was shoved in their faces.

The trend-setters don't care nearly as much about "my friends are already there", because if they did, they wouldn't be trend-setters.

So right now what I'm seeing that among those people who care about features, what is in demand but not currently available: decentralized and private (and on some level, not-Facebook, not-Google), and another important thing I keep hearing echoed but not quite emphasized are group chats (quite available already but it also seems to be a deal-breaker for new platforms if it's not there, just saying, in case anyone wants to build the next encrypted social messaging whatnot).

There also dont seem to be any safe/encrypted way to have a group chat with deniability, and not even a safe way to have audio and/or video communications that dont drop or lag randomly, are slow or require a programmer to setup. (Looking at you Jitsi).

Its a big problem, to get all this right, but whoever does it is doing humanity a great one. I propose to fund it by donations, not ads or subscriptions.

>People started using Facebook because it was exclusive for a group of students.

>Citation needed, from a different source than the FB founders.

Facebook was only limited to a number of higher education institutions for the first few years of its life. You needed to be a student at a college / university to get access as it wasn't open to the general public, and it took a couple years before it was widespread across all schools before going public. I was among that set of people who were able to use it.

I remember people started using gmail because it's the first free email that offer virtually unlimited space, so I don't have to keep deleting old emails like I did in Hotmail.

gmail won because it filtered spam out and didn't show you flashy ads.

all flies eat shit, do you eat shit too?

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