Comment by drnick1
1 day ago
Just stop using Meta products. It's really not as hard as it seems. Nobody needs FB to communicate with friends and family. Send texts or emails or use your phone.
1 day ago
Just stop using Meta products. It's really not as hard as it seems. Nobody needs FB to communicate with friends and family. Send texts or emails or use your phone.
The hardest part about not using Meta products is deciding not to use meta products. When I stopped using Facebook, I had resigned myself to spending a lot of time and effort to stay in touch with my friends and family. As it turns out, all I had to do was mention that I was using Signal, and the people closest to me, then pretty close to me, then kinda close to me all started using that too. The network effect cuts both ways.
It’s amazing how strong the Meta FOMO is. I stopped using Facebook over 10 years ago and never even opened Instagram or WhatsApp, and I really am not missing out on anything in life. My actual friends know how to contact me and they do! And it’s really not that hard to say “Sorry I don’t have Whats App, just call me at xxx-xxx-xxxx.”
If someone is prepared to not be my friend because they only want to communicate via a Meta app, then I don’t see why I’d want them as a friend.
The annoying thing is how many businesses and communities rely on Meta platforms instead of their own websites and sometimes it's the only way to contact them. If I want to check if the small neighborhood grocery has something in stock? No phone, only Instagram DMs. When I was on vacation abroad and wanted to see if an out of the way farmers market was still happening despite rain? Only Facebook.
The good thing is that it isn't everywhere: Taiwan, Japan, and China usually have apps like Line or WeChat as options. In Europe there's more usage of WhatsApp (which is still Meta owned but also not social media). But in the US (and countries in the Americas), I still see a heavy reliance on Instagram and Facebook.
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Right. If being on meta is what keeps the "friendship" going and leaving the platform would have negative effect on the relationship, then on my opinion it wasn't a friendship to begin with. But that might just be my outdated view of how humans work.
My issues with Signal are two:
1/ meta products trigger organic conversations. People post on Instagram and Facebook that they’re traveling and I will reach out to them if I’m close by. People don’t use Signal that way.
2/ the Facebook groups are very useful for local communities. As a traveler, I reach out to Expat groups for feedback.
The sticky bit I have is facebook marketplace - it's wiped out the other classified marketplaces in my area.
I'm not making any serious money off the old stuff I sell, but the alternative to selling it (or even giving away low-value stuff that's still functional) on facebook is basically just throwing it out / destructively recycling it.
I maintain Meta accounts for two purposes. Facebook Marketplace, and following local businesses on Instagram because it's become the de facto platform for many artists/bars/restaurants/popups to distribute information. I don't add friends, I don't "like" posts, and I don't doomscroll the garbage they put in my feed.
I'm willing to give Meta the information that I enjoy old cars, bar trivia, and breakfast sandwich pop-ups.
The instagram thing is annoying. Like the primary to find out about social events in my city seems to be Instagram. Yoga teachers post their schedules there, bars/venues post their events there, reddit is often an afterthought and still I'd prefer something else. But what??
What does facebook marketplace have over craigslist?
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The FOMO everyone here is responding with is wild.
>It's really not as hard as it seems
Only on HN could someone post a take like this without getting laughed at. Outside our very geeky HN bubble, hardly anyone (let's say in Europe, but all my friends in the US use it as well) uses anything other than WhatsApp. There's literally zero reason for the average user to switch.
Haha I love the super out of touch takes on here sometimes. Not using WhatsApp or Facebook where I live absolutely introduces major difficulty to communication and even every day interactions where almost 100% of communication in various social groups is happening on these platforms. Should I ask them to move?
Where there's a will, there's a way. If your friends want to, they'll find you.
I'm in Europe, with a bunch of non-geeky friends, coming from all walks of life who have Signal installed.
As a sibling comment to yours stated, the hardest decision was deciding to stop using Meta.
I have a militant "let the leaves fall where they may" attitude towards stopping relationships with companies I detest (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta...) It all always works out fine.
I travel a lot within Europe and socialize, and Signal adoption is pretty limited continent-wide. You are lucky. Even when people do have Signal, a stock response if I ask “Do you have Signal?” is “Oh, sure, I use it to buy drugs”, which probably doesn’t help the app’s image in the eyes of the surrounding society.
I'm not on what's app. So you need to switch to something else if you want to chat with me.
WhatsApp as the only contact point is a pretty strong signal that the user is from a developing world country. I'm not from that part of the world, so I don't use WhatsApp.
If you count -all of europe- as a developing country, sure.
In europe we never had free unlimited texts. Internet was cheaper than calling/texting, especially with everyone having wifi at home and work. So a cross-platform messaging app appeared and has replaced text and calling.
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As the other person mentions, WhatsApp adoption is vast in Europe, including the bulk of the continent where “developing world country” isn’t a reasonable label. I travel frequently across Europe, and when I book reception-less accommodation, WhatsApp is often the only way that self-check-in details are provided. Saying that “I don't use WhatsApp” might even lead to the reservation being immediately canceled on their part.
I’m pretty sure it is extremely popular almost everywhere except the US (and maybe China? I think they have their own thing). We’re the odds ones out in this case.
In Spain whatsapp is universal and necessary for everything personal and professional.
Some hard core committed communists prefer telegram, but even they usually have to have whatsapp too. No one uses signal or even knows what it is.
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In Israel it's the de-facto standard way to communicate. If I'd even suggest to someone to switch to Signal, I'd get laughed out of the room.
You are years behind. It was in 2016 that, when traveling and wanting to exchange contacts with cool local people I met, I first began to get the response “My e-mail address? I don’t have email.” Already then many younger people were only on social media, and it was expected that you would exchange those contacts. And some countries never had the email moment at all, so even older people don’t use it.
Ditto for phones, if you mean the PSTN – as time goes on, fewer and fewer people have ever really used that. When people around the world are communicating via their smartphones with a phone-number-based protocol, it’s overwhelmingly WhatsApp, and guess who owns that?
How do they not have email when it's required to sign up for various sites, plus having android phones requires gmail, plus official documents, bank accounts, job applications etc. tend to ask for email; email is used for work as well...?
Notice how in the last several years, a lot of popular sites have allowed signing up with phone numbers, no email address required. Besides making the service more accessible to a generation that doesn’t use email, getting a person’s phone number is great for profiling them for advertising reasons.
In many countries, either WhatsApp or a PSTN number for receiving an SMS is used today for the things that you think are done with email. I have lived in two countries that have highly digitized government services, and they were provided over an official app where email wasn’t part of the signup flow.
Sure, maybe some people use email at work (but WhatsApp has eaten into even that in some regions), but then that address is so associated with work that they don’t use it for social contacts.
What's actually being said is that these people are not your friends/family and probably shouldn't be.
That definitely sounds harsher than intended. It's a meditation really. Nobody needs FB and Instagram. (please read as a meditation)
Everyone is free to define “need” and who their friends should be as strictly as they want, because, sure, some people could become total hermits. But it’s not going to strike most people as a reasonable definition.
You mention “FB and Instagram”, and I haven’t used either in a decade myself. But the OP did mention “Meta products” and you are ignoring the elephant in the room: WhatsApp. In many countries it has completely replaced the PSTN: you cannot contact a business (they won’t answer normal calls and may not post email addresses), cannot get the necessary info on how to check into the reception-less accommodation one booked, and one will find it hard to maintain contact with people one may well wish to maintain contact with.
"just don't meet people because they don't communicate via your one specific method"
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Good luck trying to not use Meta products (specifically WhatsApp) as a (non-tech) professional outside the US needing to communicate with their counterparts.
The best compromise for such people, I guess, would be a work phone number that's solely for business WhatsApp communication.
I don't think it would be difficult to explain, especially in a professional capacity, that you don't use Whatsapp or Facebook because it does not meet your privacy requirements of your business.
I don’t know about other places, but in SF, everything around schools is coordinated over WhatsApp—you’d be really doing your children a disservice to opt out.
And I hate it. I had deactivated all my Meta accounts but reactivated WhatsApp because of school stuff.
Tell your school board to use a dedicated messaging platform built for schools. Cite privacy laws. That's what I did, and it worked.
Unless you're talking about parent groups. Because then you're fucked. Every parent group everywhere uses Facebook or Whatsapp and don't care that not everybody uses it. You will be excluded.
I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of the philosophy: “you’re not missing out on anything worthwhile by being excluded by people who want to exclude you.” Don’t voluntarily interact with people who make “uses a particular app” a condition of that interaction.
I assume parents. Not actual schools. Same situation here on East Coast. School uses ParentSquare but so much coordination is over iMesssage and WhatsApp.
Which privacy laws?
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> Tell your school board to use a dedicated messaging platform built for schools. Cite privacy laws. That's what I did, and it worked.
My daughter's school uses a clunky proprietary platform that is way, way worse than WhatsApp. I wish they used WhatsApp! Actually, they also do this, because being non techies their use of tech is all over the place and they adopted the worst of both worlds: school digital platform (very clunky) and, because it sucks, also WhatsApp. So important communications reach me both ways.
Sigh
> Just stop using Meta products. It's really not as hard as it seems. Nobody needs FB to communicate with friends and family. Send texts or emails or use your phone.
I'm in WhatsApp groups with friends who live abroad, SMS is not an option. We could use another chat app, but then I'd have to convince every friend from every group to use something else. WhatsApp is what every friend I have agrees on.
I belong to several hobby groups that exist only on Facebook or Reddit (or Discord, but I dislike it for several reasons). I'd like to ditch both Facebook and Reddit, but that would mean leaving those hobby groups, and given the joy they bring me, I'm not willing to pull the plug yet.
So you see, it's really not that easy.
All it would take is WhatsApp going paid plans only. All of Europe will switch to Telegram as primary messaging platform in a couple of days. Hence a paid only WhatsApp will never happen until every plausible alternative will be made impossible either by acquisition or by law.
> All of Europe will switch to Telegram as primary messaging platform in a couple of days.
I don't think you realize how much Telegram is associated with hated Russia and the local far-right in several European countries.
Whatsapp became successful by being cheaper than SMSes in Europe. But yeah people probably switch to the next convenient app.
i missed a flight once (it was a small private cessna while on vacation). turns out they had tried calling me on WhatsApp, which i don’t use.
The only way to know the correct meshtastic configs for Taiwan is to join the meshtastic Taiwan Facebook group.
Or attend an event in person. They advertise their in person events on the meshtastic Facebook group.
Actually it... is but not (just) for the reasons people give (social utility)
You delete a FB acct? It reactivates. Fun! Almost like the company is built off fraud
Ha, I fell for that the first time, not getting me twice. That was my wake up call for how insular the HN bubble is and how utterly convinced people here are that they represent or understand normies.
I'm thinking about it, but WhatsApp has a real hold on the Brazilian population. Removing it would mean losing the primary way my family and many people I know communicate. It’s ubiquitous here, sadly.
There are lots of other important uses for these platforms.
For the down voters: Such as finding local business information or events in your community, and tons of other stuff which isn't anywhere else.
Facebook + Instagram already has more current information than the rest of the web combined.