The real anti-Facebook is good old email

I'm not sure I buy the idea of email as a private alternative to Facebook. To keep your message content private, wouldn't all parties need to be hosting their own servers or using encryption?

There's also the problem of knowing who you're contacting and when. Hiding that would probably take some kind of anonymous remailer program.

Normal people would probably just have a free email account from companies like gmail or yahoo and not use any encryption. Wouldn't services like TinyLetter then be transferring the data from Facebook to other email hosting companies? This takes care of some privacy issues but still doesn't seem to solve all of problems for private communication.

My real Facebook is the bar. US Social Networking since White Horse Tavern – Rhode Island – Founded 1673

It doesn't sound like it's meant for private social media, it's an alternative to the ultra-public social media that's gotten popular in the last few years. It's about broadcasting yourself, not contacting a small subset of people (hence why you can only publish to the entire set of subscribers). If you need secrecy, then a system billing itself with the term 'newsletters' is probably not for you.

The real benefit, as the article points out, is that the empty room problem is solved. Everyone already has an email address, it's your online identity, and email addresses aren't tied to one provider like a facebook account or a twitter account. If gmail dies, TinyLetter still lives. If TinyLetter dies, there's nothing stopping someone from creating an alternative version that imports old newsletters to reconstruct everything.

The real anti-Facebook is Sublevel. But I can forgive Wired for not knowing about it.

This is a great advert for TinyLetter, would love to know if they approached Wired to get this published and how that process went down.