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by jjulius 393 days ago
Group texts! "Hey y'all, what's everyone up to this week/end? Any good shows/happenings!?"
2 comments

That has a much higher activation energy than checking a feed, and only works in smaller groups. If you are checking across groups, you are managing N group chats and texting all of them.
> If you are checking across groups, you are managing N group chats and texting all of them.

Exactly! I have different groups of friends and acquaintances with different tastes, interests, senses of humor, etc.

I appreciate moving between them and interacting directly with them very much. It never feels like I'm "managing" anything, nor does it feel like work. It feels like community.

Friendship takes intent and commitment! We don’t need social media, we just need to want to maintain relationships.
An events app is just a simple tech solution for optimizing the number of opportunities to work on those relationships. Just like a calendar is a tech solution for making appointments.

Nothing wrong with that.

I would hardly call, given the age and history of use of them, a calendar a "tech solution".
It works in smaller circles, yes.
I recognize that this is certainly going to be a YMMV response, but I've got circles of friends and acquaintances in most of the areas I'm interested in. I can reach out to all of them if I'm feeling up for whatever, or I can reach out to specific ones depending on what I want to get into this weekend. I appreciate that sense of community more than a cold events calendar can get me. I don't need to know what all of my friends are up to all of the time, and if it's important to me, I can reach out directly.

Heck, even RSVPs to calendar events can be misleading and don't actually tell me why my friend marked themselves as attending. Sometimes people use it as reminders, or maybe they were interested last month but aren't anymore and forgot to remove the event from their list. Maybe plans have changed and they're not going, or maybe their reason for going would be wildly different than mine. I'd rather find out from them what's happening and what they're excited about.