Do you go to parties? Serious question. It's hard to discover events without Facebook these days. It's the only place some promoters advertise.
What I've noticed is that I actually meet people IRL more often now, because the events I get information about are the ones that really matter to me, and they don't get lost in a constant buzz of less important but attention-grabbing stuff.
I also realize I can miss talking to someone. It's a feeling I haven't had in a long time, because people used to show up in my feed every day and it was like they were there anyway. Now I can get a sudden urge to just shoot a few texts back and forth with someone about something that's actually meaningful and not just the usual facebook wall banter.
I'm quite introverted, so being selective is something that suits me well, but facebook also made me even more socially lazy and avoidant than I really am.
Maybe I just have friends who don't care too much, but I wouldn't expect any of my friends to notify me if they're going to a run of the mill event without me, but they would suggest it/notify on Facebook about it. It's a lot less personal, I feel, to notify someone on Facebook than to message someone personally and invite them. Chances are, they'd see I'm no longer on Facebook and think I've gone into some kind of social seclusion.
It also doesn't help solve the problem of me finding something I want to go to (that my friends might be interested in) but they didn't see themselves. There was recently a Studio Ghibli film showing in my city, and after I found it on FB, I suggested it to two friends and we went. I wouldn't have found that event without FB, and even if I did, it would feel awkward (for an equally introverted person like me) to specifically message the two people and ask - now they have some kind of obligation, and they can't claim they just haven't checked Facebook in a while if I sent them a text/Telegram/whatever.
However it has forced me to be more engaged with my friends, since without Facebook they have to make a concious effort to invite me, rather than spot my name on a list. I've spent more time personally messaging and catching up with friends as a result.
Facebook makes keeping up with people frictionless, but relationships thrive on doing it the hard way, and giving up time for each other. Facebook makes it easy to have a thousand acquaintances regardless of how many deeper friendships you have.
I've never really been interested in going to a random party or event I wasn't directly invited to. I mostly got spam when I was using Facebook.
Not all of us use it for reading the 'timeline' and seeing what our friends' cats are doing this week. Organizations also use it for updates, scheduling, sharing ideas, etc. Email could work, but mailing lists lack many little features that make Facebook practical here.
I guess the modern alternative would be something like Discourse, but it's hard to tell a non-profit to replace "free, and add people with a couple clicks" with "$100/month, and make everybody create new separate accounts".
I know it is a silly anecdote, but i end up checking out my facebook feed out of boredom about once every few months, get disappointed in it, and then forget about it for another few months. It also helps that FB has dedicated first party apps for a lot of fb functionality that doesnt require the main fb app. I havent had the FB app on any of my phones since about 8 years ago, simply because i didnt feel the need, not because I felt some strong conviction against FB. Messenger app + Local app (for FB messaging and events respectively) has been a golden combo that worked great for me. Local, surprisingly, has amazingly clean UIUX that combines both event discovery and organization of your current events in a very seamless way.
Just a note, i am not affiliated with FB as a company in any way, and neither have i worked there. I just think that a lot of people tend to focus on the trashy common denominator part of FB (timeline) and ignore the good stuff. And FB makes it really easy to avoid the trashy stuff by having clean dedicated apps for functionality that i actually care about.
For FB if there was something that allowed event planning, but didn't require people to create accounts for it (basically event planning with RSVPs, but handled through email or text).
It'd be nice if this extended to optional accounts that had up to date contact information - this is the main thing I'd worry about missing (though I think Apple could just implement this by optionally pushing changes to the people in your phone with your contact information when it changes).
For Twitter - there's a lot of value if you curate people you're interested in and engage with their tweets. People you would otherwise have no access to and interesting discussions/links/discovery happen there.
Twitter can be great, but requires some effort. I think this would be helped by 'index lists' of users that are interesting to follow for new people (though this would cause a similar bubble issue that financial indexes have) but at the moment looking at someone you find interesting for who they follow is a decent way to find people.
Each with their own search, usually!
I can see the downsides to this, but in trade you're getting a bubble that protects you from a lot of nonsense.
> For FB if there was something that allowed event planning, but didn't require people to create accounts for it (basically event planning with RSVPs, but handled through email or text).
That sounds like a fairly small project, and I can see the value. Maybe I'll code it up in the near future.
> For Twitter - there's a lot of value if you curate people you're interested in and engage with their tweets. People you would otherwise have no access to and interesting discussions/links/discovery happen there.
> Twitter can be great, but requires some effort. I think this would be helped by 'index lists' of users that are interesting to follow for new people (though this would cause a similar bubble issue that financial indexes have) but at the moment looking at someone you find interesting for who they follow is a decent way to find people.
I'll concede this, but in my brief Twitter experience it was very easy for the noise to drown out the signal, and I didn't feel it was worth it to work around that problem. It doesn't solve a data problem I have: my data problem isn't that I don't have enough data sources, it's that I have too many, and too low quality.
Only mentioning this because I personally didn't understand the value of Twitter for a long time and didn't understand why people used it, but now I think I do.
I've had very little difficulty contacting, i.e. academics whose papers I've read, or programmers who have written blog posts.
You do miss some randos interjecting into the conversation, but these interjections detract from the conversation more often than they contribute. When I'm conversing with Joe Armstrong I'm not interested in the interjections of some rando who did an Erlang tutorial once and feels that qualifies him to have opinions.
You also can learn unknown unknowns from things that are shared/discussed.
Direct email contact is great, but has a higher threshold to engage in. I think it’s different than twitter, it compliments it - but I think it’s also a lot less frequent because of that higher threshold.
Let me know what you think!
Can you invite people to events that don't have an account via SMS and have it handled that way or do they need an account and the app?
I think being able to support people not on the app is the big thing I want (then the network may grow or not overtime, but at least it's immediately useful even without other people on it).
One other suggestion would be a default retention period or “fuse” people can set that something like 6 months, but can be set anywhere from 1 day to 1 year.
The other networks make it so hard to scrub old posts, I think there’s value in old stuff getting automatically dropped.
Signup for the app is as simple as possible, just a phone number (to reset your account), name, and password is required.
The reason an account is required is Thread does a lot more than just event planning - it includes messaging, photo sharing, location sharing, and more.
I want to invite people whether or not they also have the app.
One upside of DDG is the bangs. If I know what I want is on wikipedia, just prepend !w.
I think folks need to learn how people searched pre-pagerank.
People treat google queries like a venn diagram with their top result being at the intersection, rather than using logical operators like AND, quotes, and -.
(Ex: "yoda -baby")
Bangs are a common term across DDG users, and can be shared references, personal shortcuts not so much. It's a bit like language as a common understanding rather than individual headspaces. In a sense, bangs are social.
How useful that is or isn't I don't know entirely, but bang-based search seems to be a distinctive class of activity, and gives rise to its own forms of communication and discovery. I've learned (and shared) new sites/services through bangs.
This too in a world where many teams have their own websites, boards and the participants almost uniformly posting their rides to strava. Strava has been trying its clubs / posts stuff with very minimal success sadly :/
Email: Fastmail. But again, just using email less is helpful. My most common form of communication is using text messages to set up meeting in person.
Facebook: Does this even need a replacement? I haven't made any intentional effort to replace Facebook since I stopped using it, and don't feel any sense of loss. The same goes for Twitter/Instagram. The only thing these services ever did for me was make me feel angry, lonely, or inadequate.
Random side note: Stack Overflow has a serious content quality and up-to-date-ness issue. An alternative is using documentation, reading code, and mastering debuggers/REPLs. This gives you a much better understanding of your tools, and gives you much better solutions as a result.