I'm pretty sure if you replaced "social network" by "ticket tracker", you would had made quite a bit of people laugh here, still here we are, unable to accept that some tools are just much more efficient in a task.
For me Facebook is something where I can reach everyone that I need to reach at once. The sad thing is the best social network is the one that people use. Sure everyone got an email, as this is a requirement to even have a social network account, but it's the usage that people does of it that make it impossible to use it as such.
I remember at nearly every team project at my university, we tried to make Slack happens, or Discord, or whatever else to communicate, instead of Facebook, but the response was never as instant and each time we came back to Facebook, simply because that's what most people in the group were online on at the same time.
Personally my actual usage of Facebook is mostly to quickly organize events, it's only useful to reach "everyone" at the same time. I remember one of the best example of event we organized, it was mid afternoon, I was in class with a friend and we decided to organize a friend gathering that night. We had nothing, not even somewhere to do it. We simply created a Facebook event, we invited about 20 friends to the event, 5 hours later we had a place, we had food, plenty of board games and more than a dozens people present.
Sure we can send 20 emails or SMS, hope that everyone read them in the afternoon, have everyone send a bunch of answers in random order, again hope that everyone read the one that are important mixed with all the random "I'm in". That's 20x more effort for each and everyone involved. At that event, my friend and I were the organizer, and we only had to send an handful of messages, the event was the source of truth easy to follow by everyone. Minimum effort, quick and easy.
Sure we can text you on the side, but the truth is, that add friction for each and everyone that aren't on Facebook. If something get updated and I forget to tell you, well I'm now responsible for you missing the update.
The older I get, the less this kind of thing happen, so yeah Facebook is less important, but that still why I used it, and it's still what makes it the best social network. It allow you more easily, more quickly, and more efficiently to be social.
> Now, instead of getting an endless stream of reposted political image captions and photos of people's lunches I get messages about the things that are actually worth seeing: news about family, friends, life events, funny stories — all without the dross and anger-inducing cruft of a social media "feed."
I would like you to have a talk to everyone grandparents. The amount of emails chains I got from my family when I was younger...
I personally don't really follow people posts, in fact almost no one does them in my friend circle, it's mostly stuff shared from the news, which isn't important.
> none of the drawbacks: tracking, advertising, stalking, third-party influences.
Gmail and Hotmail don't track email and advertise?
> More importantly, what happened is that I found out who my actual friends are. I think the whole social media "friends" button has cheapened the word. We don't make a distinction between friends, acquaintances, associates, and people we just know. Your real friends will e-mail you.
That's kind of weird. Think a bit about it, why would a "real friend" e-mail you? Are you a "real friend" by not sending a message to your friend over Facebook because that's what he use? That would means you are not really a real friend to anyone... I'm sure that's not the case. You didn't found out who your actual friends were, you simply lost actual friends by making it harder to contact you and you slowly made them become acquaintances.
The idea being that people can optionally make accounts with just their contact information which they can then give people access to (this way contacts stay updated by everyone with access rather than local copies on everyone's device that goes out of date).
The app would handle basics like RSVP, sending out SMS reminders for people, tracking number of people coming etc. Right now handling this over SMS and tracking it is a pain so people default to FB, but I think there's an opportunity here to get a foothold.
I reduced my social media usage because they were a huge time sink with the endless feeds, but I agree with you. It takes two to tango, so saying doing so lets one finds out who your real friends are is just condescending imo. Friendships don't start out 'real'; like any relationships, they require constant reaching out to people and be a part of their lives, and this has to work both ways.
I believe that this social networking framework has a great future.
Look at these projects which created using this engine: Minds https://www.minds.com Pleio https://pleio.nl GCconnex and GCcollab https://github.com/gctools-outilsgc/gcconnex
There is even a Platform that will make building apps based on Elgg easier https://wzm.me/
Right now this project needs more cotributors to help it develop even more https://github.com/Elgg/Elgg
I read the landing page, clicked about, looked at the first page of the API docs and it's still not really obvious to me what it is for or how it's actually used.
What problem is it solving? Standard web backend for common social media platform stuff?
Basically, yes it's, you can make own online community, or niche social network for your users/products. But this is very useful to make unique social app based on an open source framework.
If you want to launch startup then social interaction between people is very important and Elgg allows you to do it quickly. In addition, it's very secure code with wide features for growth and integration with other applications.
Federated social media could be the solution.
I tried hosting on my own server, but it's just too much of a time investment for one person.
When I dumped social media two years ago, I gave my "friends" my e-mail address.
Now, instead of getting an endless stream of reposted political image captions and photos of people's lunches I get messages about the things that are actually worth seeing: news about family, friends, life events, funny stories — all without the dross and anger-inducing cruft of a social media "feed."
E-mail has all of the benefits of social media: photos, group chat, near-instant delivery; with none of the drawbacks: tracking, advertising, stalking, third-party influences.
More importantly, what happened is that I found out who my actual friends are. I think the whole social media "friends" button has cheapened the word. We don't make a distinction between friends, acquaintances, associates, and people we just know. Your real friends will e-mail you.