To be real, how do you keep in touch with your friends and family? I live 2100km away from them. God damnit, I wish to get rid of this cancer, but I just can't.
If it's a cancer, where is the urgency? Somebody with actual cancer would cut the tumor out and worry about everything else later.
Anyway one important point is that you won't "keep in touch with your friends and family" the way you do now; that's called "being on Facebook." By insisting that things always be exactly as they are now, you get yourself stuck in a rut.
I believe you're already familiar with all the different ways of keeping in touch with someone. Tell them you're leaving Facebook, get their contact info, and leave. I keep in touch primarily through email and text (either of which can include photos or other attachments), and very infrequent voice calls. I have fewer relationships, of higher quality. Not everybody is a special unique snowflake who deserves my attention. Nor am I so special that they need my validation. The entity that sold everybody on that whole idea is Facebook, the one that wants to own the channel of communication. Use a different channel, and the problem is solved.
I call them. Like people did in the olden days of 15 years ago. This isn’t hard.
Not to mention I feel an actual connection with them when I’m talking to them over the phone. I never once felt a real connection with them or anyone else by their Facebook wall or Twitter feed.
He mentioned he's 2100km away from them which may cost extra. I'm not sure why he doesn't call with whatsapp, but perhaps his parents are too oldschool besides using facebook.
You've already got a lot of replies, but here's my 2c from someone who moved away from his home country.
Facebook allowed me to be comfortable in not contacting the people who I cared about. All I had to do was "like" a post, or very rarely comment. Hell, I didn't even have to do that. I knew they were doing well.
However the truth of it was that I was not really engaging with them, I was mostly checking their pages sporadically and not actually talking to them. As it turned out they were not doing so well but were curating their social media persona so that extended family would not worry. The knock-on effect obviously being that I was unable to help them and because I was lulled into a false sense of connection I believed I felt that I didn't need to directly 1-to-1 engage with my friend.
This is anecdotal, sure, but after talking with others they also share the feeling of "connection" but lacking depth, and intimacy. It's just enough to make you numb to the desire to chase it.
I've deleted facebook now. I am a stoic and independent independent person but it has forced my hand more to reach out to family and friends. Now; I definitely have a better relationship with my Mother for example.
Christmas cards are the best! My Mum used to keep hers from previous years and make decorations with them. A pretty good quality of life metric is how many Christmas cards you get (and send).
>> A pretty good quality of life metric is how many Christmas cards you get (and send).
Funny you would say that. When I first got married my wife was in an absolute stress about making sure we sent Christmas cards to everybody who had come to our wedding. The fact I didn't have addresses for some of them was a source of much frustration.
After rationalising our card list to the 5 to 10 people we are actually friends with, Christmas is a lot more calm. I'm sure some of the people we used to send cards to are a lot happier too, as they now no longer feel obligated to send us cards in return.\
I suppose my point is that in my experience most people only have 10 to 20 people (if that) they would consider friends. It's only since Facebook and the like that we have considered great numbers of followers our "friends".
Email and text messages. Just a text every once in a while is a good way to keep in touch, and is more personal and real than anything Facebook has to offer.
Voice/Video connections. Start with all the free or low-cost VOIP solutions to do voice and video calls. Skype is great for a lot of interpersonal stuff, and can do conference video easy.
Email - that's what I primarily use with my family, including both parents as long as they lived. None of my family has ever been on FB.
Text/Mobile. Works great, its more direct, and if the conversation gets thicker, you can just ring & use voice.
Post -- send physical letters and objects! all kinds of fun, even tho it isn't instant...
If you really need a central place to post images, just get a website of your own, there's dozens of hosting providers, or use some other photo sharing service.
Seriously, there is zero reason to actually use FB. It is toxic, just dump it.
Signal needs a phone, even with the desktop client. A better alternative is Wire (wire.com), which you can signup for with your email address OR phone number. It doesn't mandate a phone number. All chats are end-to-end encrypted, just like Signal (not with the exact same protocol and implementation). You can have group chats, just like on messenger or any other chat platform.
Wire also syncs conversations across devices, unlike Signal that's tied to one device (a phone).
You can have multiple accounts on Wire, just like you would use multiple email addresses, each one for different purposes.
Wire is still way behind Telegram on UX, but is a good option for those who don't want to use a phone number or give their phone number to some centralized service. You set usernames and can @mention them (a recent addition to the client — I'm mentioning this as an example to indicate how far behind it is from Telegram, which had this a long time ago).
Lastly, Wire also allows you to backup your chats and restore them on another device. Signal explicitly blocks this from being done.
What's the funding situation like for the company? The GPL/AGPL model does offer some protection, but it's cold comfort to the typical user if the central server goes away and we're left with a fragmented ecosystem of free replacements.
Part of the appeal of Signal is that it's supported by a well-endowed non-profit.
I have no idea about the funding situation of Wire. I thought I'd read about it being VC funded. It also has paid subscriptions for businesses, though how big that is and how fast it's growing are not known. Signal's funding is only a recent event, and one could ask how long that would last too, since Signal doesn't even have a paid service.
Having seen may messaging services come and go, I wouldn't in the least bit be surprised if either of these disappeared in a decade or a decade and a half from now.
That makes Wire an especially hard sell, since it risks not just going away, but also being converted to something more nefarious.
> Signal's funding is only a recent event, and one could ask how long that would last too, since Signal doesn't even have a paid service.
Recency doesn't make a difference for users considering joining it now (only for why they may not have joined previously). $50M should be plenty to run a service for, say, 10 years, assuming they don't hire a huge number of employees.
As Wikimedia has demonstrated, a paid service isn't required to survive long-term. Certainly, users (and maybe companies) would be willing to donate to a non-profit foundation, whereas doing so to a for-profit company like Wire seems implausible.
Especially in the context of the OP article, the source of the funding of the app and service is pertty important, as it informs the motives, and for-profit motives generally seem to have been, historically, not in the best interests of the users.
I'm aware, which is why I specified "primary/signup device" in my original comment.
Is the desktop client a "first class" one? Can I use it exclusively, including for initial signup?
A sibling comment implies the answer is "no", but it's ambiguous, since "linking" could just mean the SMS validation, which, IIUC, need not actually match the phone number on the device [1].
[1] presumably a tablet would work and does not necessarily even have an associated phone number, but that's still not a desktop.
Use messenger. I use it exclusively unless I need to look up who lives where I'm visiting.
Recently i was traveling in some part of the world and remembered that an old friend might be living there. I then found out he erased his facebook account. And so I ended up not being able to reach out to him. It's really hard nowadays to keep in touch with international friends without Facebook.
They do, but not everyone has the same email they did the last time you connected with them. I recently had to google pretty hard to find an accidentally published work email address for an old friend to whom I wanted to send condolences.
I call every once in a while. People I don't feel comfortable calling I probably shouldn't be stalking on Facebook anyway. And having even a 30 minute phone conversation every six months with an old friend will do amazing wonders for that relationship that years of vapid Facebook shadowing won't.
(And if the above makes me seem old, I'm young-ish: 28.)
I find that fb stuff sometimes doesn't translate well into real life relationships when I don't interact with the person often. For ongoing friends it's just another source of smalltalk, but if I don't see them often I don't know if I can make fun of that one facebook affirmation gif.
Something different from what everyone else is saying, though I agree calling, email, and text are good.
Liking a post isn't "keeping up". It is you being aware of their actions. But that doesn't count as keeping up. Keeping up requires the emotional connection, like what you have with friends and family. Liking or seeing posts doesn't make this emotional connection grow, but it makes you think it is.
That being said, I've found that catching up with people I haven't seen in awhile is actually nicer without facebook. You end up having more to talk about. They will tell you about their events in the recent time. There is the emotional response with this too.
The other thing is that you can still be friends with someone you haven't seen in a year. I think the only thing Facebook accomplishes in this respect is making it feel more difficult to reconnect with someone (because "you're already connected").
Why not just use email, text messages, VoIP, and videocalls? I live in Japan and all my relatives live in the US. I don't use facebook, twitter, instagram, or any other ad-based social media, but still communicate with them a few times a week.
I mean, I just email and text my family. They are on Facebook, but I removed myself. Sure, I may miss some rant about some politics or a photo, but I still know when the family events are occurring and attend.
Phone and email, though my situation is likely different from yours, so that may not work for you.
Maybe start a group blog or private forum or something and try to let folks know they can find you there, but you're phasing out participation from FB?
