[FridgeSeal]

> The user has a choice not to use products that are made by companies that don't respect them.

Yeah, much like how I get a choice to not use Jira at work, or to not use Facebook Messenger or not use LinkedIn right? The argument that everything ultimately comes down to individual user choice ignore so many externalities that it’s borderline unrealistic.

[denkmoon]

I have a social life without facebook, and I have a job without linkedin. You don't need them, you choose to use them.

[tomc1985]

No, you don't need them, but have fun filling in those blanks on your own time for 10x-100x the effort. Hope none of those missed connections are important, and I hope nobody gives you a pregnant pause after you insist, "no, I don't use Linkedin" at your next networking event.

Network effects are strong. Too strong.

[wolco]

You are buying into the hype.

Most people will find work through indeed linkedin may give you a 5% boost. If you say you don't have a resume..

Why would you need facebook messenger installed when you want fb events. Just login to the web version click events.

[scarface74]

That’s just it. I don’t have to “find work”. Work finds me. I would have never found my latest job - working for BigTech in the comfort of my own home on the East Coast - if a recruiter hadn’t contacted me out of the blue. Every job I have gotten since 2012 (5) has been through a contact who found me through LinkedIn. Why would I reduce the ways someone contacts me?

[cringepirate]

Because for some is us the signal to noise ratio was too low (did I get that the right way around?).

For me LinkedIn for me was a total waste of time. Good you find it useful use it, but I don’t and I don’t like the company so I am deleted my account.

Also most of the contacts weren’t other devs or dev companies but recruiters. A lot of those recruiters flooded the feed with bullshit recruitment feel good articles and other trite. That combined with all the estalking and slimes dudes on there it just isn’t somewhere that is worth being around.

[scarface74]

It’s just like the general rule of the Internet - Don’t read the comments. The purpose of LinkedIn for me is a Rolodex of former coworkers and a curated list of local recruiters. I have a separate email for LinkedIn. I would go through it once a week to see if there was anything interesting.

I have a very light profile up.

[cringepirate]

I literally setup almost everything I personally need in about a day on a VPS. As for services like LinkedIn I almost never got anything of value from it, it is worse than most job board it is filled with slimey recruiters these days and not a lot else.

I bought a NAS for backups with freenas and moving my email to a domain with a provider literally took me a few minutes (plugging DNS entries into my domain provider). It not that hard.

People should be making tools for helping people move away from platforms. I am personally going to write it all up and identify pain points.

I get plenty of business through (gasp) word of mouth and ex-colleagues. So I am fine.

[pitay]

How someone get off GMail if they have already been using it for a decade or quite a few years more than that? Has anyone done this? How do you do that with the fewest issues possible?

Having the most important communications with other people and companies, and the login verification all in the hands of one company which could shaft your access in all sorts of ways (screw up, removing service, ban) is just terrible in the long term. And if someone is using their ISPs email address, that is something that would keep them signed to that ISP even though another may offer a service much better for them.

Anyway, anyone migrated away from their email provider after a long time signed up and could answer some of the questions in the first paragraph? Thanks.

[fsflover]

> How do you do that with the fewest issues possible?

You just create another email and register all your new accounts with it. Whenever you get any old notifications to your old email you recofigure them to your new email account, one by one. After about a year you will be practically free. You do not have to delete your Gmail account, you can just forward all its emails.

[ninjanomnom]

I've personally never used facebook actively and deleted my account soon after I made it. LinkedIn I have an account but I honestly never find a use for it even though I wouldn't be super against it.

A lack of both of these would not inconvenience me in any way personally and I find the claim that going without them being a lot of work questionable. Maybe I've just been lucky in who I work for/with?

[FridgeSeal]

I have a social life without Facebook yes, but I have a huge chunk of friends who use it to communicate and organise things. Another example: I go mountain biking - local clubs use fb pages and groups almost exclusively to inform people about trail closures, updates, events, etc.

[cringepirate]

I used to drink regularly down the pub. After a while I got sick of putting on weight and feeling rubbish and decided to give it up. The people I drank with after a few weeks stopped calling me (because I wasn't interested in going for a drink) and I haven't spoke to them in years. They wasn't such great friends were they?

If I had friends that didn't bother with me because I wasn't on the platform (facebook) they probably wasn't worth bothering with in the first place.

You can always find an excuse as to why you keep on using these services, some odd thing that you claim you need. I just decided I wasn't going to use them anymore and stop making excuses for having to deal with companies that couldn't give a fuck about me.

[dividedbyzero]

> They wasn't such great friends were they?

Sounds like acquaintances. You ought to have a bunch of those, they are great to have, very valuable, and lots of fun. All of my close friendships started out as acquaintances. I got my current appartment via an acquaintance – quite nice and below market price. My current job, my partner of many years, lots of great ideas and input, lots of useful advice ... having acquaintances is great. They won't follow you to the end of the world though – they're not that invested in you, by definition, that's why you can have many of them.

> If I had friends that didn't bother with me because I wasn't on the platform (facebook) they probably wasn't worth bothering with in the first place.

If you insist everyone accomodate your communication preferences, but will not accomodate their communication preferences at all, maybe you weren't worth bothering with in the first place. If you trade them for a little bit of moral high ground that easily, that's not exactly great friendship either. If it's just Facebook, but Telegram is fine – I personally could work with that. Some people with old phones can't have all the messengers – might be a problem for them. No Whatsapp? Party planning just got a lot more annoying, because someone will have to play relay for you. Just taking phone calls, nothing else? The 20th century is long past and I'm glad for it, just get some kind of messenger like literally everyone else, even my parents. We still frequently escalate to phone calls, because it's easier for them – but we try to meet each other midway.

> You can always find an excuse as to why you keep on using these services, some odd thing that you claim you need.

Or maybe there are legitimate needs that these apps and platforms fulfill, like making connecting with people and all sorts of communication really, really easy and frictionless, and for them that's worth the – so far – largely theoretical price we all pay; that's my personal stance in this. Maybe the benefits of a one-person-boycott aren't that compelling – it's not going to make a difference at all, unless everyone does so, but they don't, an when they do, they'll all flock to LibreOpenFree Network, so you won't even have to give up your contacts. A one-person boycott isn't going to keep Facebook from assembling a detailed shadow profile on you, unless you go to really great lengths that very, very few people are capable of, and then they still learn what your contacts leak about you.

If you're fine without social media, you got your social circle that agrees with you and sticks to phone calls, or maybe you're fine without lots of people in your life – great for you, you do you. But telling others who are not in that situation in what I read as quite a condescending tone that their social needs are just excuses, odd things they claim they need, that feels rude and not helpful at all.

[cringepirate]

> Sounds like acquaintances

No. They were drunks (I was becoming one myself). I told you in the sentence before that once I didn't come to the pub they weren't interested in spending any time with me. That what addicts are like.

This really isn't difficult stuff to understand. The acquaintance relationship only existed because of substance abuse basically. There is no friendship of shared interest outside of that.

I was thinking about writing a rebuttal to everything else you said. But there really isn't much point because you can't even understand this part of social interaction.

All my real friends btw, keep in touch via email, text etc. As for me demanding I use a communication medium, everyone has a cell phone with SMS and everyone has an email address. If people can't be bothered to do that ...