Email is a system which you can assume virtually 100% of users have and doesn't force users to participate in a social network that has been shown to be harmful for a lot of users.

Further email doesn't force you to participate in any particular service at all because it is a federated service.

Assuming that someone should get a facebook to talk to you is like assuming someone should switch to sprint to call you.

Imagine how moronic the world would be if all the different phone networks were disconnected from one another.

Regardless of the morality, weirdness or absurdness, that ship has sailed. Many, many groups only use facebook, and if you want to be a part of them, you have to as well.

I agree it is suboptimal, and whether or not it is worth the tradeoff is an individual decision, but that is the world we live in.

The group level is where most of the rubber meets the road here.

I bet most teens do not use email for anything except work stuff.

I work at a youth centre. The teens I know really have the widest range of options of contacting each other. They use FB mostly for school and family. Email is used mainly for sending documents or attachments.

If they're hard to reach it's because they chose to, not because you're using the wrong comm channel :)

How is your guess about other people useful info?

How is the parent comment's guess about 100% of people having email useful?

That it is true, and a communication system?

But if many don't use email much, how does it help? I barely check my personal email. And no one in my normal life knows my business email. Once in while a family member or friend will send something unimportant via email. Either I never see it. Or I see it a week or month afterward. My career relates strongly to the internet too.

If you don't respond to email and I don't communicate with you in person or on the phone I assume you are uninterested personally or professionally and take my friendship or business elsewhere.

Answering email is really a pretty normal expectation.

So is facebook for friendship lol

If you ask for their email and they offer to friend you, and you decline, should they assume you don't want to be in the loop for things?

Your arguments for email as a platform equally apply to facebook. Yeah email is decentralized and oldsr, but that stuff doesn't matter to regular people who want the easiest tool for the job.

I would estimate at most 10% of my Facebook friends have the same email address today that they had on the day we connected.

Huh? "Preferred" doesn't cut both ways. It never does, unless it's a shared preference. Using any shared method of communication to contact each other is what real friends do.

Also a group that "just decides" outliers are not worth the hassle, are not friends. They seriously are not. Friend groups are pretty much defined as the sort of groups that do not do this. Except in cases of grave social misconduct, often destroying the "group" or "friend" aspect in the process.

They are a group, yes. And indeed, some groups will sometimes just decide to ostracise outliers if it conflicts with the group identity. Nothing inherently wrong with that, btw, this can be very useful for certain types of group. As long as it doesn't become the main type of group you identify with. Because then, as we see from all the people making excuses all over this thread, not adhering to certain rules of the group-identity becomes an existential fear of epic proportions, because it touches upon a very fundamental behavioural aspect of our biology--fear of being cast out of the tribe (which used to mean suffering followed by near-certain death).

Facebook is currently exploiting this behavioural trigger (together with an addictive cocktail of other triggers) in a quarter of the world's population.

If you’re considered an outlier then you should probably start finding new friends.

Generally back when I used facebook the cloests friends I had had 0 interaction on facebook and we usually just direct message through messenger or imessage.

Fscebook at that time was just for maintaining those “outlier” relationships until I realized its better to have closer bonds with fewer people.