4 ms·

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 peo

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.
  - abrichr 8y ago
    >I just wish we had a good alternative for event organizing There are many alternatives, see: https://blog.thefetch.com/2013/05/28/10-cool-sites-for-event-organization/ https://blog.thefetch.com/2013/05/28/10-cool-sites-for-event...
    - samatman 8y ago
      Sadly, the very fact that there are many alternatives means that none of them are good. The goodness of an event planning platform comes from everyone using it. Metcalfe’s law in action. I say this as a non-Facebooker, fyi. Events kept me on the platform well after the rest of it became net-negative. I do maintain my social graph and as a result use Messenger sometimes. If someone really wants to talk I go elsewhere for the conversation.
      - bigbugbag 8y ago
        Does not necessarily means they're not good though. If those several alternatives are federated through activitypub and part of the fediverse, as Mobilizon will be when released, then strength is in the number of alternatives. Then again Metcalfe's law has a flipside relative to the cost of exclusion from the network to those included and society, and this costs grows bigger as the dominant network grows bigger. Among the effects of such exclusion is the existence of parallel networks such as the alternatives mentioned here, and what makes them very good is that they cater to some of those excluded from the dominant network. Dark side of Metcalfe's law in action. Had facebook not been an antisocial closed network preying on its users but open and federated as the internet has been deisgned then things would have been different, right now the problem seems to be that facebook captured a majority of internet users in some geographical areas and does everything possible to keep them captive.
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  It may be sufficient, but sufficient isn't the same as ideal. What people have come to expect of social media, of forums, etc. does not translate particularly well to email. Yes, it can be done, but it's not going to be how people, _ordinary_ people, expect. The world has had 10 years to get used to the Facebook and Twitter workflow, they're not going back just because we think email is sufficient.
  - astrobe_ 8y ago
    Also people have been been trained to misuse email. My coworkers, who are all in IT, can't quote correctly. I am bewildered by the level of ignorance of what email has to offered shown by some comments here. How to stop receiving messages? Well, just make a filter if you don't want to hurt the sender's feelings. I blame it on the webmail wave that offered to the newbie Internet users of the nineties poor interfaces to email. People used it and said: "email sucks". No, that's just webmail that sucked. And stills sucks compared to native clients (except for Outlook that equally sucks in a different way). When you take a good look at email it is the ideal medium for social micro-networks: - no registration, no opt-in. All you need to start a conversation is an email address. - no vendor lock-in: thousands of email clients exist, on all platforms. - with a decent client, you manage your messages the way you want, not the way some company wants. Let's put it differently: how to create a social micro-network in three easy steps: 1. Get the email addresses of the people you want to talk with 2. Send them an email when you want to say something 3. (optional) write a blog post about how to use group email well and put it in your signature. Also, although I dislike it for it is often misused and abused, HTML-mail covers 99% of fancy formatting needs. > What people have come to expect of social media, of forums, etc. does not translate particularly well to email. Agreed. Email is for communication. Social media are for fun, distraction and procrastination. Social media are MMORPGs.
    - kkarakk 8y ago
      and they're not going to untrain themselves because you want them to. you're just going to get tagged as the email spammer

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.
- abrichr 8y ago
  >I just wish we had a good alternative for event organizing There are many alternatives, see: https://blog.thefetch.com/2013/05/28/10-cool-sites-for-event-organization/ https://blog.thefetch.com/2013/05/28/10-cool-sites-for-event...
  - samatman 8y ago
    Sadly, the very fact that there are many alternatives means that none of them are good. The goodness of an event planning platform comes from everyone using it. Metcalfe’s law in action. I say this as a non-Facebooker, fyi. Events kept me on the platform well after the rest of it became net-negative. I do maintain my social graph and as a result use Messenger sometimes. If someone really wants to talk I go elsewhere for the conversation.
    - bigbugbag 8y ago
      Does not necessarily means they're not good though. If those several alternatives are federated through activitypub and part of the fediverse, as Mobilizon will be when released, then strength is in the number of alternatives. Then again Metcalfe's law has a flipside relative to the cost of exclusion from the network to those included and society, and this costs grows bigger as the dominant network grows bigger. Among the effects of such exclusion is the existence of parallel networks such as the alternatives mentioned here, and what makes them very good is that they cater to some of those excluded from the dominant network. Dark side of Metcalfe's law in action. Had facebook not been an antisocial closed network preying on its users but open and federated as the internet has been deisgned then things would have been different, right now the problem seems to be that facebook captured a majority of internet users in some geographical areas and does everything possible to keep them captive.
zapzupnz 8y ago
It may be sufficient, but sufficient isn't the same as ideal. What people have come to expect of social media, of forums, etc. does not translate particularly well to email. Yes, it can be done, but it's not going to be how people, _ordinary_ people, expect. The world has had 10 years to get used to the Facebook and Twitter workflow, they're not going back just because we think email is sufficient.
- astrobe_ 8y ago
  Also people have been been trained to misuse email. My coworkers, who are all in IT, can't quote correctly. I am bewildered by the level of ignorance of what email has to offered shown by some comments here. How to stop receiving messages? Well, just make a filter if you don't want to hurt the sender's feelings. I blame it on the webmail wave that offered to the newbie Internet users of the nineties poor interfaces to email. People used it and said: "email sucks". No, that's just webmail that sucked. And stills sucks compared to native clients (except for Outlook that equally sucks in a different way). When you take a good look at email it is the ideal medium for social micro-networks: - no registration, no opt-in. All you need to start a conversation is an email address. - no vendor lock-in: thousands of email clients exist, on all platforms. - with a decent client, you manage your messages the way you want, not the way some company wants. Let's put it differently: how to create a social micro-network in three easy steps: 1. Get the email addresses of the people you want to talk with 2. Send them an email when you want to say something 3. (optional) write a blog post about how to use group email well and put it in your signature. Also, although I dislike it for it is often misused and abused, HTML-mail covers 99% of fancy formatting needs. > What people have come to expect of social media, of forums, etc. does not translate particularly well to email. Agreed. Email is for communication. Social media are for fun, distraction and procrastination. Social media are MMORPGs.
  - kkarakk 8y ago
    and they're not going to untrain themselves because you want them to. you're just going to get tagged as the email spammer