13 ms·

Going old school: how I replaced Facebook with email

269 points by bellinom 8y ago

agumonkey 8y ago
- there are innate structures in relationship, and changing that (facebook blurs the naturally local/private lines) harms people - no beginning or end in the streaming era of web (unlike the slow static documents early model) - not knowing is ok, great even facebook is an amplifier of huamn relationship, but amplitude is not a measure of quality
sm4rk0 8y ago
Being in the same situation as the author (deleted FB account few months ago), I was just thinking how it would be nice to have a mailing list with friends&family in it but didn't know where to start, when this article hit top 30. I would appreciate if someone would list few Mailchimp's pros and cons and/or maybe few alternatives, from privacy/freedom perspective.
- veddox 8y ago
  Here's their privacy policy: https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/ https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/ Their service is good, but as far as I can see, they're willing to sell just about everybody's data to just about anybody.
- bigbugbag 8y ago
  Mailchimp is a marketing company, their main product is sending massive spam and they have serious privacy concerns (collecting data and doing what they want with it). Definitely not something to use for friends and family.
gnicholas 8y ago
> My email list is broadcast-only but any replies go directly to me. This sort of mass-email is weirdly impersonal because it tells the recipient that you want them to know what you're up to, but you don't want to write a message just to them. Also, it would be very awkward to opt-out ("hey dude, um please don't send me your mass-email updates anymore."), unlike company emails which there's no awkwardness around unsubscribing. I'm not saying this isn't better than FB, but it still has some downsides (some of which the author may be overlooking because they don't bother him).
- bacon_waffle 8y ago
  I have a few friends who send out periodic group emails like these, though IIRC only one uses mailing list software to do it. I really enjoy the mailings, and keep meaning to start sending them out myself. Receiving one of the mailings feels much more personal to me than I guess seeing a fb post would (I've been off it for several years), and seems more likely to prompt a personal reply from me. Not sure I understand the worry about awkwardness with opting out - surely it's just as easy to ignore an email as a post on "social media"?
- sm4rk0 8y ago
  "Broadcast-only" means subscribers can't post to it. But they still can reply to the list owner. It could be mixed with a blog, if you wanted to make it possible for subscribers (and others) to publicly interact. Also, I don't see a problem if a person finds my emails uninteresting and unsubscribes.
  - gnicholas 8y ago
    > Also, I don't see a problem if a person finds my emails uninteresting and unsubscribes. Sure, but do all of your recipients know that? The point is that some people would be very uncomfortable doing this, even if you wouldn't subjectively be offended by it. And as the author notes, doing an opt-in system makes things complicated and potential excludes less tech-savvy folks.
    - sm4rk0 8y ago
      There are ways to solve this: 1. It could be written in message footer that I won't take unsubscribes personally. 2. That person could just create a filter for that mailing list to avoid unsubscribing. Also, less tech-savy folks could just ask for help and I'd subscribe them manually.
- Gys 8y ago
  > weirdly impersonal because it tells the recipient that you want them to know what you're up to, but you don't want to write a message just to them. Also, it would be very awkward to opt-out ("hey dude, um please don't send me your mass-email updates anymore.") You mean, like a post on FB ? Or Tweeting ? Readable for all ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ ? Who very likely are not really interested in your message ?
davesque 8y ago
For me, it's more like, "How I never replaced email with Facebook."
- bigbugbag 8y ago
  Same here. Though I had not foreseen that email would be replace by mobile number among the younger generations who often now do not even have email or do not use it or do not expect email to be used for actual people to people communication.
User23 8y ago
Why stop there? https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  It's nice to be in such a privileged position. Unfortunately not an option for most of us.
  - Arbalest 8y ago
    A secretary certainly sounds expensive. Even if you had a remote Secretary as a Service who prints directly to your home printer as an implicit inbox (which you can't hear printing, because that would be too much like getting a notification), it would still cost too much.
- BeetleB 8y ago
  Ha! I came here to post that one of his problems (Lesson 2) with Facebook used to be my angst with email. Although I had email at an earlier age, most of my friends who moved away did not - and phone calls were too expensive. So we kept touch for a few years via letters until everyone got email. Initially, the fact that we could email each other instead of writing letters was awesome. But after about 2 years, all I got were 1-2 liners, and no one wrote thoughtful emails any more. And it got much worse once IM became popular. Recently, a friend who thinks likewise moved to another continent. Although we do occasionally email, we mostly communicate every few months via letters. Hope it remains that way.
- phs318u 8y ago
  > `...I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.' --- Umberto Eco I can so relate to this.
wrs 8y ago
I'm not sure what Mailchimp is doing in this scenario. Couldn't you just…you know…send an email? Using BCC, of course.
- extra88 8y ago
  * Mail email hosts are not cool with sending messages to large quantities of recipients because it looks like spamming, sending via a host that exists for sending mass email solves that. * The Mailchimp platform provided some automation for the author when first asking people to opt-in. Presumably each message also includes an Unsubscribe link at the bottom which is less awkward to use than replying to the author, asking that they stop sending the email. * TFA mentions Mailchimp's templates, it's not easy to create readable formatting of lengthy emails in standard email clients. * It eliminates the possibility of screwing up and addressing the email to recipients using a line other than BCC.
  - baroffoos 8y ago
    Mailchimp basically is a spam company, except its "legitimate spam" because you signed up for a website once and forgot to opt out of spam letters. I could block every single email from mailchimp and I doubt I would miss anything that wasn't spam.
- bigbugbag 8y ago
  Mailchimp is something I would stay from as it is a massive spam marketing company with privacy issues. Not something I want to use to stay in touch with friends and family.
echevil 8y ago
For any social network to work you’d need most of your connections to get onboard the same thing, whether it’s Facebook or anything else. It’s easy for some people to start emailing their friends but it’s hard to imagine that the general public start doing the same thing, and without that, the alternative won’t go very far. In fact I’d find it much more annoying than Facebook if I start receiving such emails from friends.
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  Luckily I've solved both problems by removing all the friends from the equation. No annoying emails, no dystopic social media platforms! Just me and a bottle or five. What's the downside?
  - abrichr 8y ago
    In case you're serious, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/loneliness https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/loneliness: >Not surprisingly, feelings of isolation can have a serious detrimental effect on one's mental and physical health. Loneliness can be a contributing factor to heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, arthritis, among other critical diseases. Lonely people are also twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease. At the root, isolation compromises immunity, increases the production of stress hormones, is harmful to sleep, and impacts cognitive abilities. All of this feeds chronic inflammation, which lowers immunity to the degree that lonely people even suffer more from the common cold. Loneliness can be a chronic stress condition that ages the body and causes great damage to overall well-being.
- rubidium 8y ago
  Here’s the fundamental thing. We don’t need digital social networks. Email, just like mail, is sufficent.
  - baroffoos 8y ago
    Pretty much. There is simply no reason why I need to know what all my friends are doing and how they are feeling every single day. I just wish we had a good alternative for event organizing because that imo is the greatest value in facebook.
twalling 8y ago
You can accomplish with something like TinyLetter (https://tinyletter.com/ https://tinyletter.com/) or Revue (https://www.getrevue.co https://www.getrevue.co). Not sure why he went the slightly more difficult route of using a service like MailChimp. (which also happens to own TinyLetter)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
imlina 8y ago
I thought this was going to be a tech blog on how he hooked up his email address to Messenger
sigfubar 8y ago
I’ve deleted my Facebook account a few months ago after almost a decade of using it exclusively to sign up for random things. Clicking on the big blue button seemed easier than entering my e-mail and selecting a password, so I kept doing it until the privacy implications of this practice convinced me to abandon it. However, I won’t be starting a mailing list any time soon. Perhaps others lead vastly more interesting lives than I do, but I don’t feel any need to launch a personal mailing list about my life any more than I felt the need to share a stream of minutiae on Facebook. Moments that are genuinely dear to me - such as those relating to my family life - are none of anyone else’s business anyway. 3,000+ contacts over 20 years? My goodness, that’s a lot of people. I’m an immigrant 2x removed from his home country, from where I left too early in life to have developed relationships that could continue in the online age. I came to my current country too late to have gone to school here, so I don’t have the implied social network which usually comes with that particular experience. 99% of people I’ve interacted with happen to have been colleagues of mine at one time or another, or folks I’ve met while sitting on either side of the job interview table. While I have enjoyed some very productive work arrangements in the past, none of these people have kept in touch with me after myself or them have moved on to another company. All this is to say: I would be astonished if anyone wanted to read about the details of my life. These aren’t useful - or indeed enjoyable - to anyone but me and my family, which is where the details shall remain.
buzzert 8y ago
> My email list is broadcast-only but any replies go directly to me. If I were to do this, I actually think it would be cool if those in the mailing list could choose whether they want to reply to the whole list or to just me (as easy as removing the list from the CC line). That way, there can be a semi-public discourse with your friends, if you still want something like the "comment thread" from facebook.
- gowld 8y ago
  Have you ever worked at a company with reply-all spam?
CapitalistCartr 8y ago
My wife's family keep a group message chat going indefinitely; it seems to work for them.
- gowld 8y ago
  That only works if everyone in the group likes each other well enough, and the boundary of the group is agreed by consensus -- not most families :-)
simplecomplex 8y ago
My family does monthly email updates mainly because not everyone is on Facebook. No noise. Just what's new with everyone, once in a while. There's no ads, no posts about what they had for lunch, no reposts about their political opinions, etc. We don't even use mailing lists. We usually just reply to the last one, and I have a contact group with everyone in the family.
- gowld 8y ago
  Who is "everyone" in your family? According to ancestry.com that's an absurdly large group.
  - simplecomplex 8y ago
    Me, siblings, parents, grandparents, aunt, uncle, and a cousin.
phs318u 8y ago
Not sure how best to express this thought but it seems to my geriatric mind that some kind of p2p-ified (server+client in one) variation on NNTP could provide a "social network" with similar qualities to email but (unlike email), is something I pull from rather than gets pushed to me. Discoverability might be an issue though. Is any of this making any sense?
- aeontech 8y ago
  Well, there's Scuttlebutt: http://scuttlebutt.nz http://scuttlebutt.nz Previous HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877603
ilovecaching 8y ago
For me, Facebook is still the only way to keep up with my closest friends and family. I live 3k+ miles away from were I grew up, and it's Facebook's asynchronous form of communication that allows me to spend minimal effort to keep abreast of what's going on there. Another thing that Facebook offers is the ability to get to know who I'm dealing with when I friend a new colleague or someone I just started hanging out with. It's a great way to spark conversation "oh hey, I see you made cocktails last night, I love run rummers!". Or, "I see you liked Datsik, want to go to a concert with me?". That's essentially how I met my wife.
cyberferret 8y ago
Forget going email - I am thinking of going back to snail mail. I received a written card invitation in the mail yesterday from a good friend [0] inviting our family to a dinner, and it felt indescribably nice to get it and read it. Something nice about holding it in your hands and reading it, then placing it on my desk somewhere so I could see it and be reminded of the good feelings every time I glanced at it. [0] - https://twitter.com/dsabar/status/1085727043956830209 https://twitter.com/dsabar/status/1085727043956830209
- navs 8y ago
  I write letters to a friend in the U.S. from NZ at least once every 2 months. If you don't have stamps and envelopes handy it can be annoying at times but there's something about spending an hour reading, re-reading and then writing a personal letter by hand. Also, once you write something, there's no backspace. You either re-write the page completely or leave a mess.
scottlocklin 8y ago
I've got a better idea. Write people you actually give a shit about an actual email or ... god forbid a letter or holiday card instead of mass broadcasting what you had for lunch today. Worked for me!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 8y ago
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brandonmenc 8y ago
My family (parents, sister, some cousins) "replaced" Facebook with iCloud. Shared photo albums with comments and iMessage covers pretty much everything.
- bigbugbag 8y ago
  This bears some same issue facebook has: 1: Some of the people who matters may not have an apple device/account now or may not have one in the future 4: With Apple services, you're not free to switch platforms and your data is not on your own computer
thisisweirdok 8y ago
I run a forum for my family. Don't have to worry about shit. People can use it as much as they want. Invite their friends, etc.
charleshan 8y ago
Here's how I replaced Twitter with email. https://www.tinyfollow.com https://www.tinyfollow.com e.g. Weekly digest of the tweets by Paul Graham: https://i.imgur.com/kd8SCKv.png https://i.imgur.com/kd8SCKv.png
- EduardoBautista 8y ago
  Wow, this is something I did not know I wanted. After having left Twitter a while I find myself missing some of the tweets from the more interesting people I followed. I mainly stopped using Twitter because of the ads, slowly ruining third party clients (Tweetbot was what I used), and the tracking. Thanks for sharing this!
  - bigbugbag 8y ago
    Why not use rss-bridge[1] to make a rss feed for you twitter needs ? There are several public instances that allow you to do exactly that. [1]:https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
    - kewpiedoll99 8y ago
      This is something I definitely wanted and didn't know about. Thanks!
miles_matthias 8y ago
I would use Google groups for this instead of a true newsletter product, but I totally agree with this approach. It's similar thinking to the philosophy behind ctolunches.com. An earlier thread had me think about productizing this actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18585534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18585534 My thought: For a social network, I see it being a cross between a Google Group and a newsletter. * List my profile somewhere with a sign up box to "subscribe to updates and conversation from Miles and his network." * Every 3-6 weeks, I receive an email from the platform asking me what's been up with me, and I simply reply, which then gets sent to people who subscribed from updates from me. * Calendar integration -- when I add an event to my calendar, I have the option of including it in my next update to my email network to let them know I'm doing it. (ex: I'm speaking next month at some conference) * Community participation -- if anyone who subscribes to my email updates/network wants to email my network (ex: do you know anyone who...), I get an email saying my subscriber Bob wants to ask my network a connection, would you like to include it in your next email update to your network? If I respond yes, then it is also listed in my next email update to my network. Something like that would be awesome.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Alex3917 8y ago
  We built some of this functionality for FWD:Everyone, but haven't yet gotten it to a point where it's polished enough to release. One of the issues we ran into is that Gmail translates unicode characters into images, which are then difficult to resize to get them to properly match the surrounding typography. We also didn't build this as a fully automated service, but rather as something that generates MJML that you then have to compile and embed within an HTML email. But it does let you embed all the replies to an email in a new outgoing email, which you can conceptually see here in this marketing email we sent out: https://www.alexkrupp.com/fwdeveryone_email_blast.html https://www.alexkrupp.com/fwdeveryone_email_blast.html
NoPicklez 8y ago
Lesson 2: Email is more intimate and leads to better conversations. Lesson 3: You control the narrative completely in email which provides a much better opportunity for story-telling. Facebook Messenger? Facebook isn't just a place to post publicly on your wall. Arguably the reason why Facebook messenger exists on the platform is provide intimacy.
- bigbugbag 8y ago
  Anything that exists on facebook is there to profit facebook not the user. if facebook messenger exists, it is not to provide intimacy but for some reasons aligned with facebook interests such as getting the people online on facebook longer to peek further in their life and social links to feed the investor storytime narrative that facebook will collect more data to eventually be able to target people efficiently enough at some point in the future so that investor will make a big ROI. Then again email vs instant messaging is an old debate and email does provide much better conversation and intimacy due to its asynchronous nature.
  - NoPicklez 8y ago
    That's not what I or the user was referring to. The user and I are referring to the difference in posting and discussing as a public post rather than talking through Messenger or email which is a more intimate service because its not broadcast publicly. Not the information and data privacy behind what Facebook might do or not do with that information behind the scenes.
wyattpeak 8y ago
There's one aspect of Facebook which seems to always be ignored by these "deleting Facebook" posts and it confuses me. I've never really scrolled through the frontpage, I don't look at people's posts and photos, happy to message them through text or WhatsApp, but I absolutely need the events. Without them, I'd lose so much touch with all but my closest friends. People tend to respond to this concern with "if they don't invite you individually they aren't that great a friend" but that's my point - they're not, but they're people I like and I like to see them a few times a year at birthdays and other celebrations, and I'd feel my life diminished if I didn't have them. But there are dozens, I don't have time to catch up with them for coffee, and I don't honestly love the pressure of one-on-one time with people who aren't very close to me, anyway. People who advocate deleting Facebook, do you not have/want such relationships? Or do you not care for catching up in that way? Or do you have some solution? Because for me it's the absolute core feature of Facebook.
- gnicholas 8y ago
  I have been on Facebook for a decade and can count on one hand the number of events I cared about that I was invited to on FB. Maybe this is because I'm "old" (late 30s). Or maybe some friend groups simply do not use FB in this way. Most events I'm invited to are via email, evite, or text.
  - Semaphor 8y ago
    I'm younger (early 30ies), I've never even heard of evite, I've probably gotten one e-mail invite in my life and haven't gotten a text invite pretty much since FB became open for everyone. A few invites arrive via snailmail, but the vast majority of invites are on FB. And that's not even mentioning public events, what do you do, look through all clubs and bar websites individually when you want to go out?
    - gnicholas 8y ago
      Never heard of Evite, that's incredible! I didn't realize that 5 years could make that big a difference. As for clubs and bars, I have a 4-year old so not hitting those much. But even before that, I never "liked" businesses on FB anyway, for privacy/tracking reasons.
troquerre 8y ago
I made a chrome extension that blocks my Facebook news feed but still allows me to use messenger and see notifications. I'd estimate that I use FB ~90% less now. News feed was the biggest distraction — their algorithm is incredibly optimized to suck you into the rabbit hole. My chrome extension in case anyone is interested: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/marathon/nkhecjgkfpkkcejhbmfjghcokmhbmoed?authuser=1 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/marathon/nkhecjgkf...
- richjdsmith 8y ago
  I did the same just by using a couple of element targets from withing uBlock origin. Here they are for anyone interested: www.facebook.com###u_jsonp_3_0 > div www.facebook.com###feed_stream_5a55a64611d#####0189168 > div www.facebook.com###stream_pagelet www.facebook.com###notificationsCountValue The second one, you will likely have to figure out yourself - it looks like each feed stream has a unique id.
- timbit42 8y ago
  Another good FB plug-in is FBPurity. You can disable all kinds of things including the newsfeed.
torgian 8y ago
I could care less about Facebook, but it’s the only way (easy way) for me to stay in touch with old squad mates, and international friends.
- timbit42 8y ago
  You could? How much less could you care about Facebook?
a3n 8y ago
I once took a picture, and offered to email it to my younger co-worker. (I'm old.) He paused, and said "Email? I don't remember the last time I used email. Why don't you text it to me?" There are people who just don't use email, and not because they're not tech savvy.
- crumpets 8y ago
  Given that it’s required to sign up for online billing and most online services, I think your younger coworker either doesn’t understand how to set it up on his/her phone or was just straight up lying because the email address was embarrassing or some other reason to hide it.
  - a3n 8y ago
    So you set it up, sign up for whatever, and never use it again except to sign up for something.
  - nsgi 8y ago
    I rarely check my personal email because of the volume of spam and other noise I receive, so if a friend tried to contact me that way I probably wouldn't get it. I don't set up email notifications on my phone for that reason.
- grecy 8y ago
  Yep. I'm 36 and just hung out with a 26 year old. When I said email is the best way to contact me he said "Wow, going old school". When I asked him, he said "Whats App" all the way, never uses anything else!
a3n 8y ago
I send an email every few days to a small handful of friends and family. They're all on Facebook, I'm not. I put them all in the To: list. Some of them reply all, some only to me. It's all good. No software was written, no permission was asked. This doesn't replace Facebook. It doesn't have to. Facebook is nuclear overkill for this little part of my life.
stevenicr 8y ago
Many of the downsides to this from the comments I've seen so far seem to be fixable with a new UI/UX for email clients. Like if thunderbird had a "my lists" view - which put extended family in one area, close friends in another, work associates in another.. and the viewing of messages inlined pics nicely and did an infinite scroll kind of thing, basically creating a timeline/feed... If someone could get ssl and pgp or similar in the mix, this could stick. Just maybe. Actually I am sure there are lots of family groups that have things to send to each other that they don't want thousands of other people to access, and friends groups as well - so this could be federated snapchat kind of fb replacement with some UI tweaks, an app and a web portal. NOw I wonder if email, can be secured and connected to mastadon, riot.im and similar to expand the options for viewing, as well as replying.
rooleongai 8y ago
社交媒体带来的碎片化阅读真的已经影响到了我们的生活，我现在开始有意识的避开即时社交平台，重要的事情会通过邮件解决
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  In case anybody's wondering, Google Translate says: The fragmented reading brought by social media has really affected our lives. I am now consciously avoiding the instant social platform, and important things will be solved by mail.
z3t4 8y ago
I make photo-albums in plain HTML, use basic HTTP authentication, then send out the links via e-mail.
mark_l_watson 8y ago
He has an interesting idea in using a free MailChimp account. I would have thought of just having a local email list but it seems very ‘tidy’ to use MailChimp instead. I have set up MailChimp for a customer but never used it for myself. I just put on my TODO list to start 2 lists: one for family and friends and one for interesting tech. I will never totally leave FB because I use it to pimp my books and open source projects, but I think spending more that 10 minutes a week engaging with FB is a waste of time. Opportunity Cost.
Markoff 8y ago
why would you even share photos through horrible Facebook compression? i shared them with my family through Google photos before abandoning Google services, later sharing through WhatsApp (yes i know, horrible compression) and going to finally move to Signal since they started now to support sharing of photos/videos (though only in beta), until now you could share only one photo or video making it useless also the people i wanted to stay in touch are anyway on WhatsApp, signal or at worst can email them, so i don't see any added value in Facebook
tammer 8y ago
I’ve been banging this drum for a while, but to me it’s clear as day: the company that cracks this and makes the process described within easier and monetizable will be the next unicorn. People are starving for ownership of a one-to-many communication address (which email is designed for, but has not been well executed by email clients since email has been seen first as business/office tech).

269 points by bellinom 8y ago

- there are innate structures in relationship, and changing that (facebook blurs the naturally local/private lines) harms people - no beginning or end in the streaming era of web (unlike the slow static documents early model) - not knowing is ok, great even facebook is an amplifier of huamn relationship, but amplitude is not a measure of quality

sm4rk0 8y ago

Being in the same situation as the author (deleted FB account few months ago), I was just thinking how it would be nice to have a mailing list with friends&family in it but didn't know where to start, when this article hit top 30. I would appreciate if someone would list few Mailchimp's pros and cons and/or maybe few alternatives, from privacy/freedom perspective.

veddox 8y ago
Here's their privacy policy: https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/ https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/ Their service is good, but as far as I can see, they're willing to sell just about everybody's data to just about anybody.
bigbugbag 8y ago
Mailchimp is a marketing company, their main product is sending massive spam and they have serious privacy concerns (collecting data and doing what they want with it). Definitely not something to use for friends and family.

gnicholas 8y ago

> My email list is broadcast-only but any replies go directly to me. This sort of mass-email is weirdly impersonal because it tells the recipient that you want them to know what you're up to, but you don't want to write a message just to them. Also, it would be very awkward to opt-out ("hey dude, um please don't send me your mass-email updates anymore."), unlike company emails which there's no awkwardness around unsubscribing. I'm not saying this isn't better than FB, but it still has some downsides (some of which the author may be overlooking because they don't bother him).

bacon_waffle 8y ago
I have a few friends who send out periodic group emails like these, though IIRC only one uses mailing list software to do it. I really enjoy the mailings, and keep meaning to start sending them out myself. Receiving one of the mailings feels much more personal to me than I guess seeing a fb post would (I've been off it for several years), and seems more likely to prompt a personal reply from me. Not sure I understand the worry about awkwardness with opting out - surely it's just as easy to ignore an email as a post on "social media"?
sm4rk0 8y ago
"Broadcast-only" means subscribers can't post to it. But they still can reply to the list owner. It could be mixed with a blog, if you wanted to make it possible for subscribers (and others) to publicly interact. Also, I don't see a problem if a person finds my emails uninteresting and unsubscribes.
- gnicholas 8y ago
  > Also, I don't see a problem if a person finds my emails uninteresting and unsubscribes. Sure, but do all of your recipients know that? The point is that some people would be very uncomfortable doing this, even if you wouldn't subjectively be offended by it. And as the author notes, doing an opt-in system makes things complicated and potential excludes less tech-savvy folks.
  - sm4rk0 8y ago
    There are ways to solve this: 1. It could be written in message footer that I won't take unsubscribes personally. 2. That person could just create a filter for that mailing list to avoid unsubscribing. Also, less tech-savy folks could just ask for help and I'd subscribe them manually.
Gys 8y ago
> weirdly impersonal because it tells the recipient that you want them to know what you're up to, but you don't want to write a message just to them. Also, it would be very awkward to opt-out ("hey dude, um please don't send me your mass-email updates anymore.") You mean, like a post on FB ? Or Tweeting ? Readable for all ‘friends’ or ‘followers’ ? Who very likely are not really interested in your message ?

davesque 8y ago

For me, it's more like, "How I never replaced email with Facebook."

bigbugbag 8y ago
Same here. Though I had not foreseen that email would be replace by mobile number among the younger generations who often now do not even have email or do not use it or do not expect email to be used for actual people to people communication.

User23 8y ago

Why stop there? https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

maxxxxx 8y ago
It's nice to be in such a privileged position. Unfortunately not an option for most of us.
- Arbalest 8y ago
  A secretary certainly sounds expensive. Even if you had a remote Secretary as a Service who prints directly to your home printer as an implicit inbox (which you can't hear printing, because that would be too much like getting a notification), it would still cost too much.
BeetleB 8y ago
Ha! I came here to post that one of his problems (Lesson 2) with Facebook used to be my angst with email. Although I had email at an earlier age, most of my friends who moved away did not - and phone calls were too expensive. So we kept touch for a few years via letters until everyone got email. Initially, the fact that we could email each other instead of writing letters was awesome. But after about 2 years, all I got were 1-2 liners, and no one wrote thoughtful emails any more. And it got much worse once IM became popular. Recently, a friend who thinks likewise moved to another continent. Although we do occasionally email, we mostly communicate every few months via letters. Hope it remains that way.
phs318u 8y ago
> `...I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.' --- Umberto Eco I can so relate to this.

wrs 8y ago

I'm not sure what Mailchimp is doing in this scenario. Couldn't you just…you know…send an email? Using BCC, of course.

extra88 8y ago
* Mail email hosts are not cool with sending messages to large quantities of recipients because it looks like spamming, sending via a host that exists for sending mass email solves that. * The Mailchimp platform provided some automation for the author when first asking people to opt-in. Presumably each message also includes an Unsubscribe link at the bottom which is less awkward to use than replying to the author, asking that they stop sending the email. * TFA mentions Mailchimp's templates, it's not easy to create readable formatting of lengthy emails in standard email clients. * It eliminates the possibility of screwing up and addressing the email to recipients using a line other than BCC.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  Mailchimp basically is a spam company, except its "legitimate spam" because you signed up for a website once and forgot to opt out of spam letters. I could block every single email from mailchimp and I doubt I would miss anything that wasn't spam.
bigbugbag 8y ago
Mailchimp is something I would stay from as it is a massive spam marketing company with privacy issues. Not something I want to use to stay in touch with friends and family.

echevil 8y ago

For any social network to work you’d need most of your connections to get onboard the same thing, whether it’s Facebook or anything else. It’s easy for some people to start emailing their friends but it’s hard to imagine that the general public start doing the same thing, and without that, the alternative won’t go very far. In fact I’d find it much more annoying than Facebook if I start receiving such emails from friends.

vertexFarm 8y ago
Luckily I've solved both problems by removing all the friends from the equation. No annoying emails, no dystopic social media platforms! Just me and a bottle or five. What's the downside?
- abrichr 8y ago
  In case you're serious, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/loneliness https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/loneliness: >Not surprisingly, feelings of isolation can have a serious detrimental effect on one's mental and physical health. Loneliness can be a contributing factor to heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, arthritis, among other critical diseases. Lonely people are also twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease. At the root, isolation compromises immunity, increases the production of stress hormones, is harmful to sleep, and impacts cognitive abilities. All of this feeds chronic inflammation, which lowers immunity to the degree that lonely people even suffer more from the common cold. Loneliness can be a chronic stress condition that ages the body and causes great damage to overall well-being.
rubidium 8y ago
Here’s the fundamental thing. We don’t need digital social networks. Email, just like mail, is sufficent.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  Pretty much. There is simply no reason why I need to know what all my friends are doing and how they are feeling every single day. I just wish we had a good alternative for event organizing because that imo is the greatest value in facebook.

twalling 8y ago

You can accomplish with something like TinyLetter (https://tinyletter.com/ https://tinyletter.com/) or Revue (https://www.getrevue.co https://www.getrevue.co). Not sure why he went the slightly more difficult route of using a service like MailChimp. (which also happens to own TinyLetter)

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imlina 8y ago

I thought this was going to be a tech blog on how he hooked up his email address to Messenger

sigfubar 8y ago

I’ve deleted my Facebook account a few months ago after almost a decade of using it exclusively to sign up for random things. Clicking on the big blue button seemed easier than entering my e-mail and selecting a password, so I kept doing it until the privacy implications of this practice convinced me to abandon it. However, I won’t be starting a mailing list any time soon. Perhaps others lead vastly more interesting lives than I do, but I don’t feel any need to launch a personal mailing list about my life any more than I felt the need to share a stream of minutiae on Facebook. Moments that are genuinely dear to me - such as those relating to my family life - are none of anyone else’s business anyway. 3,000+ contacts over 20 years? My goodness, that’s a lot of people. I’m an immigrant 2x removed from his home country, from where I left too early in life to have developed relationships that could continue in the online age. I came to my current country too late to have gone to school here, so I don’t have the implied social network which usually comes with that particular experience. 99% of people I’ve interacted with happen to have been colleagues of mine at one time or another, or folks I’ve met while sitting on either side of the job interview table. While I have enjoyed some very productive work arrangements in the past, none of these people have kept in touch with me after myself or them have moved on to another company. All this is to say: I would be astonished if anyone wanted to read about the details of my life. These aren’t useful - or indeed enjoyable - to anyone but me and my family, which is where the details shall remain.

buzzert 8y ago

> My email list is broadcast-only but any replies go directly to me. If I were to do this, I actually think it would be cool if those in the mailing list could choose whether they want to reply to the whole list or to just me (as easy as removing the list from the CC line). That way, there can be a semi-public discourse with your friends, if you still want something like the "comment thread" from facebook.

gowld 8y ago
Have you ever worked at a company with reply-all spam?

CapitalistCartr 8y ago

My wife's family keep a group message chat going indefinitely; it seems to work for them.

gowld 8y ago
That only works if everyone in the group likes each other well enough, and the boundary of the group is agreed by consensus -- not most families :-)

simplecomplex 8y ago

My family does monthly email updates mainly because not everyone is on Facebook. No noise. Just what's new with everyone, once in a while. There's no ads, no posts about what they had for lunch, no reposts about their political opinions, etc. We don't even use mailing lists. We usually just reply to the last one, and I have a contact group with everyone in the family.

gowld 8y ago
Who is "everyone" in your family? According to ancestry.com that's an absurdly large group.
- simplecomplex 8y ago
  Me, siblings, parents, grandparents, aunt, uncle, and a cousin.

phs318u 8y ago

Not sure how best to express this thought but it seems to my geriatric mind that some kind of p2p-ified (server+client in one) variation on NNTP could provide a "social network" with similar qualities to email but (unlike email), is something I pull from rather than gets pushed to me. Discoverability might be an issue though. Is any of this making any sense?

aeontech 8y ago
Well, there's Scuttlebutt: http://scuttlebutt.nz http://scuttlebutt.nz Previous HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877603

ilovecaching 8y ago

For me, Facebook is still the only way to keep up with my closest friends and family. I live 3k+ miles away from were I grew up, and it's Facebook's asynchronous form of communication that allows me to spend minimal effort to keep abreast of what's going on there. Another thing that Facebook offers is the ability to get to know who I'm dealing with when I friend a new colleague or someone I just started hanging out with. It's a great way to spark conversation "oh hey, I see you made cocktails last night, I love run rummers!". Or, "I see you liked Datsik, want to go to a concert with me?". That's essentially how I met my wife.

cyberferret 8y ago

Forget going email - I am thinking of going back to snail mail. I received a written card invitation in the mail yesterday from a good friend [0] inviting our family to a dinner, and it felt indescribably nice to get it and read it. Something nice about holding it in your hands and reading it, then placing it on my desk somewhere so I could see it and be reminded of the good feelings every time I glanced at it. [0] - https://twitter.com/dsabar/status/1085727043956830209 https://twitter.com/dsabar/status/1085727043956830209

navs 8y ago
I write letters to a friend in the U.S. from NZ at least once every 2 months. If you don't have stamps and envelopes handy it can be annoying at times but there's something about spending an hour reading, re-reading and then writing a personal letter by hand. Also, once you write something, there's no backspace. You either re-write the page completely or leave a mess.

scottlocklin 8y ago

I've got a better idea. Write people you actually give a shit about an actual email or ... god forbid a letter or holiday card instead of mass broadcasting what you had for lunch today. Worked for me!

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brandonmenc 8y ago

My family (parents, sister, some cousins) "replaced" Facebook with iCloud. Shared photo albums with comments and iMessage covers pretty much everything.

bigbugbag 8y ago
This bears some same issue facebook has: 1: Some of the people who matters may not have an apple device/account now or may not have one in the future 4: With Apple services, you're not free to switch platforms and your data is not on your own computer

thisisweirdok 8y ago

I run a forum for my family. Don't have to worry about shit. People can use it as much as they want. Invite their friends, etc.

charleshan 8y ago

Here's how I replaced Twitter with email. https://www.tinyfollow.com https://www.tinyfollow.com e.g. Weekly digest of the tweets by Paul Graham: https://i.imgur.com/kd8SCKv.png https://i.imgur.com/kd8SCKv.png

EduardoBautista 8y ago
Wow, this is something I did not know I wanted. After having left Twitter a while I find myself missing some of the tweets from the more interesting people I followed. I mainly stopped using Twitter because of the ads, slowly ruining third party clients (Tweetbot was what I used), and the tracking. Thanks for sharing this!
- bigbugbag 8y ago
  Why not use rss-bridge[1] to make a rss feed for you twitter needs ? There are several public instances that allow you to do exactly that. [1]:https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge
  - kewpiedoll99 8y ago
    This is something I definitely wanted and didn't know about. Thanks!

miles_matthias 8y ago

I would use Google groups for this instead of a true newsletter product, but I totally agree with this approach. It's similar thinking to the philosophy behind ctolunches.com. An earlier thread had me think about productizing this actually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18585534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18585534 My thought: For a social network, I see it being a cross between a Google Group and a newsletter. * List my profile somewhere with a sign up box to "subscribe to updates and conversation from Miles and his network." * Every 3-6 weeks, I receive an email from the platform asking me what's been up with me, and I simply reply, which then gets sent to people who subscribed from updates from me. * Calendar integration -- when I add an event to my calendar, I have the option of including it in my next update to my email network to let them know I'm doing it. (ex: I'm speaking next month at some conference) * Community participation -- if anyone who subscribes to my email updates/network wants to email my network (ex: do you know anyone who...), I get an email saying my subscriber Bob wants to ask my network a connection, would you like to include it in your next email update to your network? If I respond yes, then it is also listed in my next email update to my network. Something like that would be awesome.

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Alex3917 8y ago
We built some of this functionality for FWD:Everyone, but haven't yet gotten it to a point where it's polished enough to release. One of the issues we ran into is that Gmail translates unicode characters into images, which are then difficult to resize to get them to properly match the surrounding typography. We also didn't build this as a fully automated service, but rather as something that generates MJML that you then have to compile and embed within an HTML email. But it does let you embed all the replies to an email in a new outgoing email, which you can conceptually see here in this marketing email we sent out: https://www.alexkrupp.com/fwdeveryone_email_blast.html https://www.alexkrupp.com/fwdeveryone_email_blast.html

NoPicklez 8y ago

Lesson 2: Email is more intimate and leads to better conversations. Lesson 3: You control the narrative completely in email which provides a much better opportunity for story-telling. Facebook Messenger? Facebook isn't just a place to post publicly on your wall. Arguably the reason why Facebook messenger exists on the platform is provide intimacy.

bigbugbag 8y ago
Anything that exists on facebook is there to profit facebook not the user. if facebook messenger exists, it is not to provide intimacy but for some reasons aligned with facebook interests such as getting the people online on facebook longer to peek further in their life and social links to feed the investor storytime narrative that facebook will collect more data to eventually be able to target people efficiently enough at some point in the future so that investor will make a big ROI. Then again email vs instant messaging is an old debate and email does provide much better conversation and intimacy due to its asynchronous nature.
- NoPicklez 8y ago
  That's not what I or the user was referring to. The user and I are referring to the difference in posting and discussing as a public post rather than talking through Messenger or email which is a more intimate service because its not broadcast publicly. Not the information and data privacy behind what Facebook might do or not do with that information behind the scenes.

wyattpeak 8y ago

There's one aspect of Facebook which seems to always be ignored by these "deleting Facebook" posts and it confuses me. I've never really scrolled through the frontpage, I don't look at people's posts and photos, happy to message them through text or WhatsApp, but I absolutely need the events. Without them, I'd lose so much touch with all but my closest friends. People tend to respond to this concern with "if they don't invite you individually they aren't that great a friend" but that's my point - they're not, but they're people I like and I like to see them a few times a year at birthdays and other celebrations, and I'd feel my life diminished if I didn't have them. But there are dozens, I don't have time to catch up with them for coffee, and I don't honestly love the pressure of one-on-one time with people who aren't very close to me, anyway. People who advocate deleting Facebook, do you not have/want such relationships? Or do you not care for catching up in that way? Or do you have some solution? Because for me it's the absolute core feature of Facebook.

gnicholas 8y ago
I have been on Facebook for a decade and can count on one hand the number of events I cared about that I was invited to on FB. Maybe this is because I'm "old" (late 30s). Or maybe some friend groups simply do not use FB in this way. Most events I'm invited to are via email, evite, or text.
- Semaphor 8y ago
  I'm younger (early 30ies), I've never even heard of evite, I've probably gotten one e-mail invite in my life and haven't gotten a text invite pretty much since FB became open for everyone. A few invites arrive via snailmail, but the vast majority of invites are on FB. And that's not even mentioning public events, what do you do, look through all clubs and bar websites individually when you want to go out?
  - gnicholas 8y ago
    Never heard of Evite, that's incredible! I didn't realize that 5 years could make that big a difference. As for clubs and bars, I have a 4-year old so not hitting those much. But even before that, I never "liked" businesses on FB anyway, for privacy/tracking reasons.

troquerre 8y ago

I made a chrome extension that blocks my Facebook news feed but still allows me to use messenger and see notifications. I'd estimate that I use FB ~90% less now. News feed was the biggest distraction — their algorithm is incredibly optimized to suck you into the rabbit hole. My chrome extension in case anyone is interested: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/marathon/nkhecjgkfpkkcejhbmfjghcokmhbmoed?authuser=1 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/marathon/nkhecjgkf...

richjdsmith 8y ago
I did the same just by using a couple of element targets from withing uBlock origin. Here they are for anyone interested: www.facebook.com###u_jsonp_3_0 > div www.facebook.com###feed_stream_5a55a64611d#####0189168 > div www.facebook.com###stream_pagelet www.facebook.com###notificationsCountValue The second one, you will likely have to figure out yourself - it looks like each feed stream has a unique id.
timbit42 8y ago
Another good FB plug-in is FBPurity. You can disable all kinds of things including the newsfeed.

torgian 8y ago

I could care less about Facebook, but it’s the only way (easy way) for me to stay in touch with old squad mates, and international friends.

timbit42 8y ago
You could? How much less could you care about Facebook?

a3n 8y ago

I once took a picture, and offered to email it to my younger co-worker. (I'm old.) He paused, and said "Email? I don't remember the last time I used email. Why don't you text it to me?" There are people who just don't use email, and not because they're not tech savvy.

crumpets 8y ago
Given that it’s required to sign up for online billing and most online services, I think your younger coworker either doesn’t understand how to set it up on his/her phone or was just straight up lying because the email address was embarrassing or some other reason to hide it.
- a3n 8y ago
  So you set it up, sign up for whatever, and never use it again except to sign up for something.
- nsgi 8y ago
  I rarely check my personal email because of the volume of spam and other noise I receive, so if a friend tried to contact me that way I probably wouldn't get it. I don't set up email notifications on my phone for that reason.
grecy 8y ago
Yep. I'm 36 and just hung out with a 26 year old. When I said email is the best way to contact me he said "Wow, going old school". When I asked him, he said "Whats App" all the way, never uses anything else!

a3n 8y ago

I send an email every few days to a small handful of friends and family. They're all on Facebook, I'm not. I put them all in the To: list. Some of them reply all, some only to me. It's all good. No software was written, no permission was asked. This doesn't replace Facebook. It doesn't have to. Facebook is nuclear overkill for this little part of my life.

stevenicr 8y ago

Many of the downsides to this from the comments I've seen so far seem to be fixable with a new UI/UX for email clients. Like if thunderbird had a "my lists" view - which put extended family in one area, close friends in another, work associates in another.. and the viewing of messages inlined pics nicely and did an infinite scroll kind of thing, basically creating a timeline/feed... If someone could get ssl and pgp or similar in the mix, this could stick. Just maybe. Actually I am sure there are lots of family groups that have things to send to each other that they don't want thousands of other people to access, and friends groups as well - so this could be federated snapchat kind of fb replacement with some UI tweaks, an app and a web portal. NOw I wonder if email, can be secured and connected to mastadon, riot.im and similar to expand the options for viewing, as well as replying.

rooleongai 8y ago

社交媒体带来的碎片化阅读真的已经影响到了我们的生活，我现在开始有意识的避开即时社交平台，重要的事情会通过邮件解决

zapzupnz 8y ago
In case anybody's wondering, Google Translate says: The fragmented reading brought by social media has really affected our lives. I am now consciously avoiding the instant social platform, and important things will be solved by mail.

z3t4 8y ago

I make photo-albums in plain HTML, use basic HTTP authentication, then send out the links via e-mail.

mark_l_watson 8y ago

He has an interesting idea in using a free MailChimp account. I would have thought of just having a local email list but it seems very ‘tidy’ to use MailChimp instead. I have set up MailChimp for a customer but never used it for myself. I just put on my TODO list to start 2 lists: one for family and friends and one for interesting tech. I will never totally leave FB because I use it to pimp my books and open source projects, but I think spending more that 10 minutes a week engaging with FB is a waste of time. Opportunity Cost.

Markoff 8y ago

why would you even share photos through horrible Facebook compression? i shared them with my family through Google photos before abandoning Google services, later sharing through WhatsApp (yes i know, horrible compression) and going to finally move to Signal since they started now to support sharing of photos/videos (though only in beta), until now you could share only one photo or video making it useless also the people i wanted to stay in touch are anyway on WhatsApp, signal or at worst can email them, so i don't see any added value in Facebook

tammer 8y ago

I’ve been banging this drum for a while, but to me it’s clear as day: the company that cracks this and makes the process described within easier and monetizable will be the next unicorn. People are starving for ownership of a one-to-many communication address (which email is designed for, but has not been well executed by email clients since email has been seen first as business/office tech).