alt Hacker NewsJust 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.
Replies
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?
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 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.
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
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.
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.