[echevil]

For any social network to work you’d need most of your connections to get onboard the same thing, whether it’s Facebook or anything else. It’s easy for some people to start emailing their friends but it’s hard to imagine that the general public start doing the same thing, and without that, the alternative won’t go very far.

In fact I’d find it much more annoying than Facebook if I start receiving such emails from friends.

[rubidium]

Here’s the fundamental thing. We don’t need digital social networks. Email, just like mail, is sufficent.

[baroffoos]

Pretty much. There is simply no reason why I need to know what all my friends are doing and how they are feeling every single day. I just wish we had a good alternative for event organizing because that imo is the greatest value in facebook.

[bigbugbag]

Good news is that the people behind the "De-google-ify Internet" who gave us many alternatives including peertube are currently working on this.

The solution is called Mobilizon, it was initiated at the end of 2018, is currently at prototyping stage and is scheduled for release in late 2019 as stated on the official website: https://joinmobilizon.org/en/

[abrichr]

>I just wish we had a good alternative for event organizing

There are many alternatives, see: https://blog.thefetch.com/2013/05/28/10-cool-sites-for-event...

[samatman]

Sadly, the very fact that there are many alternatives means that none of them are good.

The goodness of an event planning platform comes from everyone using it. Metcalfe’s law in action.

I say this as a non-Facebooker, fyi. Events kept me on the platform well after the rest of it became net-negative.

I do maintain my social graph and as a result use Messenger sometimes. If someone really wants to talk I go elsewhere for the conversation.

[bigbugbag]

Does not necessarily means they're not good though. If those several alternatives are federated through activitypub and part of the fediverse, as Mobilizon will be when released, then strength is in the number of alternatives.

Then again Metcalfe's law has a flipside relative to the cost of exclusion from the network to those included and society, and this costs grows bigger as the dominant network grows bigger. Among the effects of such exclusion is the existence of parallel networks such as the alternatives mentioned here, and what makes them very good is that they cater to some of those excluded from the dominant network. Dark side of Metcalfe's law in action.

Had facebook not been an antisocial closed network preying on its users but open and federated as the internet has been deisgned then things would have been different, right now the problem seems to be that facebook captured a majority of internet users in some geographical areas and does everything possible to keep them captive.

[zapzupnz]

It may be sufficient, but sufficient isn't the same as ideal. What people have come to expect of social media, of forums, etc. does not translate particularly well to email.

Yes, it can be done, but it's not going to be how people, _ordinary_ people, expect. The world has had 10 years to get used to the Facebook and Twitter workflow, they're not going back just because we think email is sufficient.

[astrobe_]

Also people have been been trained to misuse email. My coworkers, who are all in IT, can't quote correctly. I am bewildered by the level of ignorance of what email has to offered shown by some comments here. How to stop receiving messages? Well, just make a filter if you don't want to hurt the sender's feelings.

I blame it on the webmail wave that offered to the newbie Internet users of the nineties poor interfaces to email. People used it and said: "email sucks". No, that's just webmail that sucked. And stills sucks compared to native clients (except for Outlook that equally sucks in a different way).

When you take a good look at email it is the ideal medium for social micro-networks:

- no registration, no opt-in. All you need to start a conversation is an email address. - no vendor lock-in: thousands of email clients exist, on all platforms. - with a decent client, you manage your messages the way you want, not the way some company wants.

Let's put it differently: how to create a social micro-network in three easy steps: 1. Get the email addresses of the people you want to talk with 2. Send them an email when you want to say something 3. (optional) write a blog post about how to use group email well and put it in your signature.

Also, although I dislike it for it is often misused and abused, HTML-mail covers 99% of fancy formatting needs.

> What people have come to expect of social media, of forums, etc. does not translate particularly well to email.

Agreed. Email is for communication. Social media are for fun, distraction and procrastination. Social media are MMORPGs.

[zapzupnz]

> Social media are for fun, distraction and procrastination. Social media are MMORPGs

To be fair, you get out of social media whatever you want. If you want to use it for fun, distraction, and procrastination, you can. If you want to use email for those things, you can. I have friends who do.

Personally, I'm fine with social media being websites/apps and mail being mail. Nobody emails me cookie recipes, 'interesting' GIFs and links to funny videos, discounts on snake-oil medication, surveys to find out what Disney Princess I am, inflammatory political posts, or megabytes upon megabytes worth of photos that I don't really want to delete because I know I'll need to come back to them again at some point.

More importantly, everybody being away from email means I'm far less likely to be spammed. What I get in my inbox is what I want to see, nothing more, nothing less, and with no bloat. I'm happy with the status quo, much more than when people actually emailed me and I had to swift through messages to find out what to keep or delete — in the days before Gmail, might I add.

Email's my sanctuary, I'll not have that taken away. :-)

[kkarakk]

and they're not going to untrain themselves because you want them to. you're just going to get tagged as the email spammer

[astrobe_]

Well we are back to square one: people grow discontent with social media (addiction, privacy violations, fake news), some guy suggests that the old tech from the 20th century can cover their actual needs pretty well.

I personally believe people should transition out from social-media-everything because social media are to society what pollution is to climate.

[vertexFarm]

Luckily I've solved both problems by removing all the friends from the equation. No annoying emails, no dystopic social media platforms! Just me and a bottle or five. What's the downside?

[abrichr]

In case you're serious, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/loneliness:

>Not surprisingly, feelings of isolation can have a serious detrimental effect on one's mental and physical health. Loneliness can be a contributing factor to heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, arthritis, among other critical diseases. Lonely people are also twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease. At the root, isolation compromises immunity, increases the production of stress hormones, is harmful to sleep, and impacts cognitive abilities. All of this feeds chronic inflammation, which lowers immunity to the degree that lonely people even suffer more from the common cold. Loneliness can be a chronic stress condition that ages the body and causes great damage to overall well-being.