The only solution I can see is making sure you have their email addresses and reach out to them with meaningful emails. They all still have email addresses.

One of my favourite things is reconnecting with people after time apart. With tools like Facebook, this rarely happens any more. It feels weird not to see someone for a while, then you reconnect in person and know too much about what's gone on in their lives. It takes the intimacy out of the person-to-person conversation of catching-up.

I'd rather get the yearly email update from old friends, than to track their lives voyeuristically through the web.

> It takes the intimacy out of the person-to-person conversation of catching-up.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels this way.

I disagree. It gives you stuff to talk about when you meet. Ask details of things you saw in a post or a picture etc etc.

Besides, there are so so so many aspects of people's lives they do NOT post or tweet about. My "reconnect after a long time" chats are usually spent exploring those

> I'd rather get the yearly email update from old friends, than to track their lives voyeuristically through the web.

This is a good idea. I should starting writing something like this, as I know my older family members would enjoy it.

Delete your Facebook. There are a more benefits than being able to email; you'll stop pretending to be friends with those kids from high school, don't see your ex's new life, and you can get drunk with your friends without your aunt knowing.

I did that for three years and regret it. I realize now that I should have just shaped my use to fit my needs: unfriend or unfollow people I don't care to follow, write more messages rather than scrolling through the newsfeed, and join events and groups more deliberately.

Now I actually use it to keep in touch with people I care about, rather than just pretend that's what I'm doing.

I missed out on some things during my three years with Facebook off, and although I learned so much from having done it, I wouldn't do it again.

This exactly. I deleted my Facebook years ago, and everyone about whom I care communicates with me via iMessage (short), Skype, and email--which in my view are the simple, not too problematic originals. My family, spread across two coasts of the US, and Eastern Europe actually has email threads going in which we keep up with each other, share findings, and make fun of one another.

> and you can get drunk with your friends without your aunt knowing.

Unless your friends are on facebook. If that's the case then there's some second-hand facebooking/instagramming that you have to be aware of.

Real friends don't care if you are on Facebook or not.

I think he meant that evidence of your drinking might still show up on Facebook, especially if those photos are tagged with your name.

I may be wrong, but unless your aunt was then browsing your friends posts / was following those friends, she wouldn't see those photos.

True but, all the same, drunk/stoned people equipped with phones are very dangerous for your privacy. They are actually dangerous whether they are drunk or sober, especially if they are clueless about Facebook's privacy settings.

Mine are set in such a way that you can't add me as a friend if you're not already friends with a friend of mine. If we then are friends, you can't post anything to my wall nor can you tag me in any way without my consent. Granted, the picture will still be there (and possibly visible by anyone if it was posted by one such clueless individual), but then again deleting your Facebook account won't magically erase all the pictures you appear in either.

The actual problem is that any idiot has a smartphone and a Facebook or Instagram account. And they take pictures. And post them.

There doesn't need to be any aunt following your friends. A cousin is more than enough. And there are countries where related families tend to be scattered over a relatively small area, so having friends in common between you and your relatives is but a rare occurrence.

I believe that if you are tagged in the photo (which resolves to a link to your account) then it is possible for that photo to show up in any of your Facebook friends' feeds (if your sharing permissions are too broad). However, once you delete your account I'm not sure if Facebook scrubs all those linkages.

I know, I'm not on facebook and my friends either text or call to let me know about anything. @infinite8s explained what I meant.

What do you mean "pretending"?

I unfollow or block assholes, but there is a whole world of folks I keep up with ranging from distant relatives to musicians I played a one off gig with.

These folks are about as good friends as the people at local businesses I know well enough to say "hi, how's your daughter" or whatever.

I don't have to be radically intimate with people in order to count them among my friends. It's a scale, and it comes and goes based on how we interact. But it's not pretense.

I would do this but sadly I was dumb enough to use it with OAuth in numerous places

Maybe this isn't a great solution, and I haven't tried it, but you could defriend everyone, and set your privacy settings so nobody can see or find you. For most purposes, you'd cease to exist on Facebook.

Why is this a problem?

It means deleting your Facebook account will also prevent you logging into those other services. I had to delete a Spotify account and start over after I initially signed up via a Facebook login.

(I should note that the Spotify staff were amazingly helpful and actually migrated me over to an email-login account when asked.)

That's because you used FB to register instead of creating your own account. I suggest doing that in future, and use a password manager.

At one point Spotify were requiring users to link their accounts to Facebook. http://www.whathifi.com/news/spotify-no-longer-requires-face...

Ouch. Big reason not to register.

SyneRyder's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11569891) was specifically adduced to demonstrate the dangers of logging in with Facebook, and mentions that doing so was an accident, so explaining the dangers and suggesting that he or she not do it again seems patronising.

My family does a great job of using mail, as well as some friends, but others are annoyingly stuck in the land of Facebook messaging. I get that it's convenient, because I have more friends on Facebook than I do friends' email addresses, but I don't like that it's such a locked-down medium. I don't even notifications on my phone about Facebook messages because I uninstalled the apps after the battery issues. Email is a way better way to reach me quickly.

The single biggest thing about getting a smartphone to me was how much more useful it made email. At the time I was still using email constantly, but a lot of other people weren't. Having easy access to it on your phone, with notifications, rather than as something you have to remember to log in to all the time and check for updates, really opened it up.

Didn't facebook used to offer email?

EDIT: http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-i...

I set my dad (in his 70s) up on Gmail and he uses that to contact me, my uncle and a few friends. For the first year he used "Home" as a subject and put the time he sent the email in the body, but he seems to have understood that isn't needed now.

I think what helped adoption was that both myself and my uncle were living in different countries, so email was the easiest way to reach us given the timezones. He also found out how to email photos, so he likes sharing what he has been up to and seeing what we are doing.

Emails are basically the same as letters, which he is was used to writing, so it was fairly easy for him to understand that. I haven't tried introducing him to a chat app, but I don't think he would be able to get it so easily.

The best strategy I've found is to simply be unavailable on those other platforms. Regularly initiate conversations on email, and they will get used to it.

>It generally feels like they'd rather use Facebook or WhatsApp

My family and friends are 100% SMS, which sucks if you like me have a distaste for phones (not just smartphones, just phones in general). Emails is much more in line with my way of communicating.

Of cause at work it's often illustrated that other people aren't to skilled in writing emails. More often than not I resort to guessing the message hidden within the broken sentences, poor spelling and screenshots of things I know nothing about.

Aren't there SMS<->email services?

>I'm not quite sure how to convince them, though.

By sending them email?

Same thing as IRC. Recommend clients that don't suck for the platforms they are using, and that are adapted to their technical level.

IRCCloud or – if you set it up for them – Quassel for IRC then?

I’m sure for email we could find an equivalent solution.

Here's something that has been in the back of my mind for some time. It's not 100% reliable, nor is it adequately tested but it's a thought:

When I start a conversation, when I am the initiator in the exchange, I use my favourite mean of communication (email or whatever). When I receive a message I go along the sender's favourite mean of communication.

It depends on the practical need for synchronicity. When async is ok (intervals of hours or days betweeen responses are acceptable), even a small group conversation can be migrated from FB to email, with a short explanation.

It is also possible to receive a message on one channel, while replying on another channel.

Well, my preferred form of communication is e-mail and thus I tend to start conversations via e-mail (if an instant response isn't required). Guess what? Some people started replying to my e-mails via Facebook! I am somewhat okay with using FB as "the new sms" but I don't want to store my personal correspondence on their servers.

It's because of the UX. Email has traditionally been letter sized messages, each message takes up your entire screen or some other large fraction. Email for most people is HTML flyers sent to them by companies so it would be difficult to render a message and letter based UX with the same standard. The amount of friction to send a message is pretty high too.

Also because of the design of email, the speed of interaction is pretty slow compared to a message style UX. The creators of these apps favor low bandwidth network communications, so sending the word 'ok' to someone doesn't involve a large header, the rest of the conversation quoted in the same email. It's just the word 'ok' and maybe a conversation/user id.

Same. If there was an app that could send FB messages, whatsapp, and SMS to my email where I could respond from, I'd pay for it.

To be honest for me it's all a bit odd. It's like, I just don't fit into socializing in $CURRENT_YEAR with ordinary people. I feel a bit like an old fuddy.

WhatsApp has some weird thing whereby I need a smartphone and a telephone number and shit.

Facebook - let's not even go there.

My ideal communication feels like call > e-mail. SMS possibly as an ephemeral 'i'm outside the museum, i can see you from here' type thing.

Basically anything else I just don't really get (for one on one). IM is so distracting that unless I'm doing something mindless like playing a video game, I'd be better off in a call.

IM's good if you're at your desk shooting the shit with your friends/coworkers. Unlike the phone, it's asynchronous, so you can reply when it's convenient. You also don't have to worry about eavesdroppers. It's better than SMS because a longer SMS ends up getting split over multiple messages and they can sometimes get stuck in the ether for a while, and you can use your keyboard instead of holding your phone and making it obvious that you're not working. It's better than e-mail because you don't want a gazillion one-sentence emails of BS going back and forth.

I generally keep email for "official" business or more thought-out messages to friends, Hangouts for more banal chit-chat, and I can always go back and search that if it turns into a more important conversation. SMS for the few weirdos who don't do Hangouts, and then voice is an absolute last resort. Real-time telecommunication just demands too much immediate attention- whomever I'm speaking to will say something that leads my mind to wander off and I'll miss a sentence or two, and then I can't go back and re-read what was said. Hate, hate, HATE calls!

Even though I prefer email to all other protocols, that would be a great way to kill my inbox. It seems a but counter intuitive, but having so many chat/communication standards acts as a way to organize all my messaging activity. Email is formal, SMS is slightly less formal but more direct, Whatsapp is completely informal but more convenient for casual conversations than SMS, and though I don't use Facebook Messenger I'm sure it has a spot somewhere in there.

I mean certainly you could build that bidirectionally with their APIs, except for the SMS, though I suppose you could with a Twilio number or something. But the flow is so different. I might exchange twenty one-line messages with someone over Facebook. That would be pure hell in email.

I wish every product developer thought Email-First.

I believe with facebook at least, you can send and receive messages with email.