My parents have flipped to Google photos. They're tired of Facebook too and don't know what instagram is.

Email sucks. It's the dumpster fire where every single web-site I've ever interacted with thinks they can monopolize my attention. Facebook got big when email was the dominant way of sharing with family & friends and there are a lot of good reasons why.

Email (once abused) sucks because it was born when trust was implicit between both parties in a communication, plus the creators wouldn't even imagine that wonderful tool one day would be used for mass spamming, "419" scams and the like. Those days are long gone sadly, but the protocol is there in the open to be hardened and made more modern (just like NNTP could become a social networking killer if properly extended). Add basic security by default, write clients so conversation mode becomes the norm and you get a mail client that would be much much easier to push to other users. Example: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary

100 times easier than reinventing the wheel, and we get the huge benefit of using well known open protocols and decentralized servers that can talk to each other, and are already there.

And Facebook isn't? Gmail tabs work pretty well for me. Yes, a lot of email comes in but my Primary tab is relatively clean. Email is still my primary communications method for home and work with texting in 2nd place for more immediate needs.

Added: What email was/is bad for is the family member/friend who just had to share jokes, what we call memes these days, etc. with 100 of their closest friends on a daily if not hourly basis. Facebook etc. have largely replaced that sort of thing and that's for the best. But sharing baby pictures with the grandparents? Email's is fine, even best, for that.

> And Facebook isn't?

I posted as much above. Both are dumpster fires, for different reasons.

You can add filters to your email to ensure that you see messages from your friends and family. Facebook hides a good portion of these messages no matter what you do.