[MisterTea]

I have been off social media completely since 2016. Only have a Facebook left for family and the occasional marketplace browse. When I do check it I only log in via browser and spend maybe 5-10 minutes on the site. I posted a few times that people should contact me via email if they want to chat though so far no one has taken up my offer.

[yepguy]

If it works for you, great! I've tried that before and it didn't work for me. I like the stuff I find on Hacker News, and I need Instagram to keep up with my friends, so this was the solution I came up with mostly to keep myself from compulsively checking both of those in an unhealthy way.

[MisterTea]

Keeping up with friends in my circle means a group chat. We moved around a few platforms but settled on google chat as that was most common among everyone. HN isn't very social to me, just a water cooler.

[brailsafe]

> I need Instagram to keep up with my friends

Wdym? I think this idea should be included in your top-level comment about things Instagram wants you to do. I can believe it's likely that other people have very different relationships with people that are dependent on a particular platform, but I do my best not to accept that and make it clear that I probably won't check anything other than a DM whenever I feel like it, which consequently categorizes Insta as an unimportant means of connection.

Put another way, my relationships are defined by the communication and connection we have in real life or DMs regardless of the platform. Seeing posts does not count as friendship to me, and if I don't hear from someone or think about them because I disabled my insta, then it wasn't meant to be.

A sibling replyer said they use group chats, which is fine for some, but I find has personally just become another passive comms dump that I actively refuse to participate in; there's too much noise.

All that said, a real friendship formed in person after a real time investment can survive with very little or zero fake interaction from social media. It's ok that I see my bros from my home town maybe once a year. If I fear not receiving any direct communication from anyone should I decide to dip out of social media, then it's possible I have no friends and I should sit with that feeling until I can take action on that. People get too complacent imo thinking their posts count as friendship.

[yepguy]

A good chunk of the social events I attend are coordinated mainly through very busy group chats, and then announced with Instagram stories (yes really, even though they disappear after 24 hours). I'm not really in a position to change that either, so I'd rather get the 1 update from Instagram than sift through hundreds of group chat messages.

I agree with you in principle, though. There are better tools for all of this that they just won't use.

[brailsafe]

I occasionally feel like I miss out on impersonal events that do only get announced that way, and I definitely miss out on a bunch of group chat events, but personally I guess I just feel like that's ok, and if I was meant to be there someone would have hit me up. There are exceptions, like recently having attended a wedding (very personal) with a specific group of close contacts, but I received the invitation personally. There are some people that I've lost regular contact with or didn't form friendships with on the basis that they relied entirely on group chat to organize things, which I just refuse to participate in, and that's not for everyone. If nobody can be bothered to contact me, then I can't be bothered to show up. That said, if I was trying to monitor meetup groups or raves or something, I'd probably just do what you're doing.