
Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email - bellinom
https://blog.chaddickerson.com/2019/01/09/replacing-facebook/
======
wyattpeak
There's one aspect of Facebook which seems to always be ignored by these
"deleting Facebook" posts and it confuses me.

I've never really scrolled through the frontpage, I don't look at people's
posts and photos, happy to message them through text or WhatsApp, but I
absolutely need the events. Without them, I'd lose so much touch with all but
my closest friends.

People tend to respond to this concern with "if they don't invite you
individually they aren't that great a friend" but that's my point - they're
not, but they're people I like and I like to see them a few times a year at
birthdays and other celebrations, and I'd feel my life diminished if I didn't
have them. But there are dozens, I don't have time to catch up with them for
coffee, and I don't honestly love the pressure of one-on-one time with people
who aren't very close to me, anyway.

People who advocate deleting Facebook, do you not have/want such
relationships? Or do you not care for catching up in that way? Or do you have
some solution? Because for me it's the absolute core feature of Facebook.

~~~
gnicholas
I have been on Facebook for a decade and can count on one hand the number of
events I cared about that I was invited to on FB. Maybe this is because I'm
"old" (late 30s). Or maybe some friend groups simply do not use FB in this
way. Most events I'm invited to are via email, evite, or text.

~~~
wyattpeak
That makes sense, I wonder if it is just a generational thing (late 20s).
While I'm aware of evites, I've never received one, and my circle of friends
seem to basically set up a Facebook event and then forget about it.

I don't think I've ever received an invite to a casual event over
text/email/phone either, except in conversations of the "Hey, what are you up
to?"/"Going to a party, want to come?" ilk.

~~~
B0btheBuilder
I am also younger (mid 20s) and I've had my FB deactivated for several years
now; I also don't have Instagram or Snapchat. I admittedly do use Meetup.com
and its app. Initially, I deactivated FB because I felt it was an addictive
time-sink (as Semaphor mentioned elsewhere). Now, I spend a lot of time
wondering whether I should completely delete it, because I honestly don't feel
like I'm missing much.

I just text everyone I want to talk to.

Maybe it's because I went to a decently sized high school (a little under
2000). Or maybe it's because I currently live in a large city (top 20
populated city in the U.S.) Or maybe it's because I'm an extrovert.

But I would probably be overwhelmed by the sheer number of events my social
network would produce on FB. I already accompany friends to events thrown by
friends of friends pretty frequently.

How often do you go to these birthdays of people you barely hang out with? The
average person has like 300 friends on FB. The median number is about 150-200.
That's a lot of birthdays.

~~~
geggam
Friends on facebook doesnt mean friends in real life. Most peoples circle is
less than 50.

------
gnicholas
> _My email list is broadcast-only but any replies go directly to me._

This sort of mass-email is weirdly impersonal because it tells the recipient
that you want them to know what you're up to, but you don't want to write a
message just to them. Also, it would be very awkward to opt-out ("hey dude, um
please don't send me your mass-email updates anymore."), unlike company emails
which there's no awkwardness around unsubscribing.

I'm not saying this isn't better than FB, but it still has some downsides
(some of which the author may be overlooking because they don't bother him).

~~~
Gys
> weirdly impersonal because it tells the recipient that you want them to know
> what you're up to, but you don't want to write a message just to them. Also,
> it would be very awkward to opt-out ("hey dude, um please don't send me your
> mass-email updates anymore.")

You mean, like a post on FB ? Or Tweeting ? Readable for all ‘friends’ or
‘followers’ ? Who very likely are not really interested in your message ?

~~~
gnicholas
If you follow someone on Twitter, that means you want to get their updates.
And it's trivially easy to mute people on Twitter/FB so that you can stop
seeing people's messages without risking offending them or hurting their
feelings.

Another reply mentions having people who don't want to read your email
newsletter set up filters to get rid of them. This is possible, but more work
than a two-click mute on social media platforms.

Don't get me wrong — I'm not saying FB/Twitter are "better" — just that this
solution occupies a middle ground that creates different privacy/relationship
issues.

~~~
NotAnEconomist
> This is possible, but more work than a two-click mute on social media
> platforms.

It was four clicks for me to set up an email filter on Gmail in response to a
message in my inbox.

And there's considerably more filtering options, had I wanted something non-
trivial, than there are on FB or Twitter, which are all or nothing -- after
all, on email I have the option to more than mute, such as to classify the
message based on various parameters.

------
sigfubar
I’ve deleted my Facebook account a few months ago after almost a decade of
using it exclusively to sign up for random things. Clicking on the big blue
button seemed easier than entering my e-mail and selecting a password, so I
kept doing it until the privacy implications of this practice convinced me to
abandon it.

However, I won’t be starting a mailing list any time soon.

Perhaps others lead vastly more interesting lives than I do, but I don’t feel
any need to launch a personal mailing list about my life any more than I felt
the need to share a stream of minutiae on Facebook. Moments that are genuinely
dear to me - such as those relating to my family life - are none of anyone
else’s business anyway.

3,000+ contacts over 20 years? My goodness, that’s a lot of people. I’m an
immigrant 2x removed from his home country, from where I left too early in
life to have developed relationships that could continue in the online age. I
came to my current country too late to have gone to school here, so I don’t
have the implied social network which usually comes with that particular
experience.

99% of people I’ve interacted with happen to have been colleagues of mine at
one time or another, or folks I’ve met while sitting on either side of the job
interview table. While I have enjoyed some very productive work arrangements
in the past, none of these people have kept in touch with me after myself or
them have moved on to another company.

All this is to say: I would be astonished if anyone wanted to read about the
details of my life. These aren’t useful - or indeed enjoyable - to anyone but
me and my family, which is where the details shall remain.

------
cyberferret
Forget going email - I am thinking of going back to snail mail. I received a
written card invitation in the mail yesterday from a good friend [0] inviting
our family to a dinner, and it felt indescribably nice to get it and read it.

Something nice about holding it in your hands and reading it, then placing it
on my desk somewhere so I could see it and be reminded of the good feelings
every time I glanced at it.

[0] -
[https://twitter.com/dsabar/status/1085727043956830209](https://twitter.com/dsabar/status/1085727043956830209)

~~~
navs
I write letters to a friend in the U.S. from NZ at least once every 2 months.
If you don't have stamps and envelopes handy it can be annoying at times but
there's something about spending an hour reading, re-reading and then writing
a personal letter by hand.

Also, once you write something, there's no backspace. You either re-write the
page completely or leave a mess.

------
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.

~~~
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...](https://blog.thefetch.com/2013/05/28/10-cool-sites-for-event-
organization/)

~~~
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.

------
davesque
For me, it's more like, "How I never replaced email with Facebook."

~~~
bigbugbag
Same here. Though I had not foreseen that email would be replace by mobile
number among the younger generations who often now do not even have email or
do not use it or do not expect email to be used for actual people to people
communication.

------
agumonkey
\- there are innate structures in relationship, and changing that (facebook
blurs the naturally local/private lines) harms people

\- no beginning or end in the streaming era of web (unlike the slow static
documents early model)

\- not knowing is ok, great even

facebook is an amplifier of huamn relationship, but amplitude is not a measure
of quality

------
charleshan
Here's how I replaced Twitter with email.

[https://www.tinyfollow.com](https://www.tinyfollow.com)

e.g. Weekly digest of the tweets by Paul Graham:
[https://i.imgur.com/kd8SCKv.png](https://i.imgur.com/kd8SCKv.png)

~~~
EduardoBautista
Wow, this is something I did not know I wanted. After having left Twitter a
while I find myself missing some of the tweets from the more interesting
people I followed.

I mainly stopped using Twitter because of the ads, slowly ruining third party
clients (Tweetbot was what I used), and the tracking.

Thanks for sharing this!

~~~
bigbugbag
Why not use rss-bridge[1] to make a rss feed for you twitter needs ? There are
several public instances that allow you to do exactly that.

[1]:[https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge](https://github.com/RSS-
Bridge/rss-bridge)

~~~
kewpiedoll99
This is something I definitely wanted and didn't know about. Thanks!

------
wrs
I'm not sure what Mailchimp is doing in this scenario. Couldn't you just…you
know…send an email? Using BCC, of course.

~~~
extra88
* Mail email hosts are not cool with sending messages to large quantities of recipients because it looks like spamming, sending via a host that exists for sending mass email solves that.

* The Mailchimp platform provided some automation for the author when first asking people to opt-in. Presumably each message also includes an Unsubscribe link at the bottom which is less awkward to use than replying to the author, asking that they stop sending the email.

* TFA mentions Mailchimp's templates, it's not easy to create readable formatting of lengthy emails in standard email clients.

* It eliminates the possibility of screwing up and addressing the email to recipients using a line other than BCC.

~~~
baroffoos
Mailchimp basically is a spam company, except its "legitimate spam" because
you signed up for a website once and forgot to opt out of spam letters. I
could block every single email from mailchimp and I doubt I would miss
anything that wasn't spam.

------
ilovecaching
For me, Facebook is still the only way to keep up with my closest friends and
family. I live 3k+ miles away from were I grew up, and it's Facebook's
asynchronous form of communication that allows me to spend minimal effort to
keep abreast of what's going on there.

Another thing that Facebook offers is the ability to get to know who I'm
dealing with when I friend a new colleague or someone I just started hanging
out with. It's a great way to spark conversation "oh hey, I see you made
cocktails last night, I love run rummers!". Or, "I see you liked Datsik, want
to go to a concert with me?". That's essentially how I met my wife.

------
simplecomplex
My family does monthly email updates mainly because not everyone is on
Facebook. No noise. Just what's new with everyone, once in a while. There's no
ads, no posts about what they had for lunch, no reposts about their political
opinions, etc.

We don't even use mailing lists. We usually just reply to the last one, and I
have a contact group with everyone in the family.

~~~
gowld
Who is "everyone" in your family? According to ancestry.com that's an absurdly
large group.

~~~
simplecomplex
Me, siblings, parents, grandparents, aunt, uncle, and a cousin.

------
troquerre
I made a chrome extension that blocks my Facebook news feed but still allows
me to use messenger and see notifications. I'd estimate that I use FB ~90%
less now. News feed was the biggest distraction — their algorithm is
incredibly optimized to suck you into the rabbit hole.

My chrome extension in case anyone is interested:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/marathon/nkhecjgkf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/marathon/nkhecjgkfpkkcejhbmfjghcokmhbmoed?authuser=1)

~~~
richjdsmith
I did the same just by using a couple of element targets from withing uBlock
origin.

Here they are for anyone interested:

www.facebook.com###u_jsonp_3_0 > div
www.facebook.com###feed_stream_5a55a64611d#####0189168 > div
www.facebook.com###stream_pagelet www.facebook.com###notificationsCountValue

The second one, you will likely have to figure out yourself - it looks like
each feed stream has a unique id.

------
scottlocklin
I've got a better idea. Write people you actually give a shit about an actual
email or ... god forbid a letter or holiday card instead of mass broadcasting
what you had for lunch today.

Worked for me!

------
a3n
I once took a picture, and offered to email it to my younger co-worker. (I'm
old.) He paused, and said "Email? I don't remember the last time I used email.
Why don't you text it to me?"

There are people who just don't use email, and not because they're not tech
savvy.

~~~
crumpets
Given that it’s required to sign up for online billing and most online
services, I think your younger coworker either doesn’t understand how to set
it up on his/her phone or was just straight up lying because the email address
was embarrassing or some other reason to hide it.

~~~
a3n
So you set it up, sign up for whatever, and never use it again except to sign
up for something.

------
phs318u
Not sure how best to express this thought but it seems to my geriatric mind
that some kind of p2p-ified (server+client in one) variation on NNTP could
provide a "social network" with similar qualities to email but (unlike email),
is something I pull from rather than gets pushed to me. Discoverability might
be an issue though.

Is any of this making any sense?

~~~
aeontech
Well, there's Scuttlebutt: [http://scuttlebutt.nz](http://scuttlebutt.nz)

Previous HN Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877603](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877603)

------
User23
Why stop there? [https://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html](https://www-cs-
faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html)

~~~
maxxxxx
It's nice to be in such a privileged position. Unfortunately not an option for
most of us.

~~~
Arbalest
A secretary certainly sounds expensive. Even if you had a remote Secretary as
a Service who prints directly to your home printer as an implicit inbox (which
you can't hear printing, because that would be too much like getting a
notification), it would still cost too much.

------
buzzert
> My email list is broadcast-only but any replies go directly to me.

If I were to do this, I actually think it would be cool if those in the
mailing list could choose whether they want to reply to the whole list or to
just me (as easy as removing the list from the CC line). That way, there can
be a semi-public discourse with your friends, if you still want something like
the "comment thread" from facebook.

~~~
gowld
Have you ever worked at a company with reply-all spam?

------
twalling
You can accomplish with something like TinyLetter
([https://tinyletter.com/](https://tinyletter.com/)) or Revue
([https://www.getrevue.co](https://www.getrevue.co)). Not sure why he went the
slightly more difficult route of using a service like MailChimp. (which also
happens to own TinyLetter)

------
a3n
I send an email every few days to a small handful of friends and family.
They're all on Facebook, I'm not. I put them all in the To: list. Some of them
reply all, some only to me. It's all good. No software was written, no
permission was asked.

This doesn't replace Facebook. It doesn't have to. Facebook is nuclear
overkill for this little part of my life.

------
sm4rk0
Being in the same situation as the author (deleted FB account few months ago),
I was just thinking how it would be nice to have a mailing list with
friends&family in it but didn't know where to start, when this article hit top
30.

I would appreciate if someone would list few Mailchimp's pros and cons and/or
maybe few alternatives, from privacy/freedom perspective.

~~~
veddox
Here's their privacy policy:
[https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/](https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/)

Their service is good, but as far as I can see, they're willing to sell just
about everybody's data to just about anybody.

------
thisisweirdok
I run a forum for my family. Don't have to worry about shit. People can use it
as much as they want. Invite their friends, etc.

------
stevenicr
Many of the downsides to this from the comments I've seen so far seem to be
fixable with a new UI/UX for email clients.

Like if thunderbird had a "my lists" view - which put extended family in one
area, close friends in another, work associates in another.. and the viewing
of messages inlined pics nicely and did an infinite scroll kind of thing,
basically creating a timeline/feed...

If someone could get ssl and pgp or similar in the mix, this could stick. Just
maybe.

Actually I am sure there are lots of family groups that have things to send to
each other that they don't want thousands of other people to access, and
friends groups as well - so this could be federated snapchat kind of fb
replacement with some UI tweaks, an app and a web portal.

NOw I wonder if email, can be secured and connected to mastadon, riot.im and
similar to expand the options for viewing, as well as replying.

------
z3t4
I make photo-albums in plain HTML, use basic HTTP authentication, then send
out the links via e-mail.

------
mark_l_watson
He has an interesting idea in using a free MailChimp account. I would have
thought of just having a local email list but it seems very ‘tidy’ to use
MailChimp instead. I have set up MailChimp for a customer but never used it
for myself.

I just put on my TODO list to start 2 lists: one for family and friends and
one for interesting tech.

I will never totally leave FB because I use it to pimp my books and open
source projects, but I think spending more that 10 minutes a week engaging
with FB is a waste of time. Opportunity Cost.

------
brandonmenc
My family (parents, sister, some cousins) "replaced" Facebook with iCloud.
Shared photo albums with comments and iMessage covers pretty much everything.

~~~
bigbugbag
This bears some same issue facebook has:

1: Some of the people who matters may not have an apple device/account now or
may not have one in the future

4: With Apple services, you're not free to switch platforms and your data is
not on your own computer

------
tammer
I’ve been banging this drum for a while, but to me it’s clear as day: the
company that cracks this and makes the process described within easier and
monetizable will be the next unicorn.

People are starving for ownership of a one-to-many communication address
(which email is designed for, but has not been well executed by email clients
since email has been seen first as business/office tech).

------
NoPicklez
Lesson 2: Email is more intimate and leads to better conversations.

Lesson 3: You control the narrative completely in email which provides a much
better opportunity for story-telling.

Facebook Messenger?

Facebook isn't just a place to post publicly on your wall. Arguably the reason
why Facebook messenger exists on the platform is provide intimacy.

~~~
bigbugbag
Anything that exists on facebook is there to profit facebook not the user.

if facebook messenger exists, it is not to provide intimacy but for some
reasons aligned with facebook interests such as getting the people online on
facebook longer to peek further in their life and social links to feed the
investor storytime narrative that facebook will collect more data to
eventually be able to target people efficiently enough at some point in the
future so that investor will make a big ROI.

Then again email vs instant messaging is an old debate and email does provide
much better conversation and intimacy due to its asynchronous nature.

~~~
NoPicklez
That's not what I or the user was referring to.

The user and I are referring to the difference in posting and discussing as a
public post rather than talking through Messenger or email which is a more
intimate service because its not broadcast publicly.

Not the information and data privacy behind what Facebook might do or not do
with that information behind the scenes.

------
Markoff
why would you even share photos through horrible Facebook compression? i
shared them with my family through Google photos before abandoning Google
services, later sharing through WhatsApp (yes i know, horrible compression)
and going to finally move to Signal since they started now to support sharing
of photos/videos (though only in beta), until now you could share only one
photo or video making it useless

also the people i wanted to stay in touch are anyway on WhatsApp, signal or at
worst can email them, so i don't see any added value in Facebook

------
torgian
I could care less about Facebook, but it’s the only way (easy way) for me to
stay in touch with old squad mates, and international friends.

~~~
timbit42
You could? How much less could you care about Facebook?

------
CapitalistCartr
My wife's family keep a group message chat going indefinitely; it seems to
work for them.

~~~
gowld
That only works if everyone in the group likes each other well enough, and the
boundary of the group is agreed by consensus -- not most families :-)

------
rooleongai
社交媒体带来的碎片化阅读真的已经影响到了我们的生活，我现在开始有意识的避开即时社交平台，重要的事情会通过邮件解决

~~~
zapzupnz
In case anybody's wondering, Google Translate says:

The fragmented reading brought by social media has really affected our lives.
I am now consciously avoiding the instant social platform, and important
things will be solved by mail.

------
imlina
I thought this was going to be a tech blog on how he hooked up his email
address to Messenger

------
miles_matthias
I would use Google groups for this instead of a true newsletter product, but I
totally agree with this approach. It's similar thinking to the philosophy
behind ctolunches.com.

An earlier thread had me think about productizing this actually:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18585534](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18585534)

My thought:

For a social network, I see it being a cross between a Google Group and a
newsletter. * List my profile somewhere with a sign up box to "subscribe to
updates and conversation from Miles and his network." * Every 3-6 weeks, I
receive an email from the platform asking me what's been up with me, and I
simply reply, which then gets sent to people who subscribed from updates from
me. * Calendar integration -- when I add an event to my calendar, I have the
option of including it in my next update to my email network to let them know
I'm doing it. (ex: I'm speaking next month at some conference) * Community
participation -- if anyone who subscribes to my email updates/network wants to
email my network (ex: do you know anyone who...), I get an email saying my
subscriber Bob wants to ask my network a connection, would you like to include
it in your next email update to your network? If I respond yes, then it is
also listed in my next email update to my network. Something like that would
be awesome.

~~~
Alex3917
We built some of this functionality for FWD:Everyone, but haven't yet gotten
it to a point where it's polished enough to release. One of the issues we ran
into is that Gmail translates unicode characters into images, which are then
difficult to resize to get them to properly match the surrounding typography.

We also didn't build this as a fully automated service, but rather as
something that generates MJML that you then have to compile and embed within
an HTML email. But it does let you embed all the replies to an email in a new
outgoing email, which you can conceptually see here in this marketing email we
sent out:

[https://www.alexkrupp.com/fwdeveryone_email_blast.html](https://www.alexkrupp.com/fwdeveryone_email_blast.html)

