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Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

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191–200 of 204 posts

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#191
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canadian here. I have a WhatsApp account and the app on my phone with zero contacts in it. Nobody here uses it. But every time I leave the country I need it for some service or business or who knows what. It seems like the rest of the world all agreed to use this app and Canada (and I think the US) just said “naw thanks…” and have no common app or method.

What are people using in Canada? SMS?

If Canada is similar to the US, a mixture of SMS, Discord, and iMessage. The kids use Snapchat, your aunt uses Facebook messenger or iMessage, and occasionally someone might be into Telegram although mostly scammers. Teams or Slack for official workplace or college chat groups. GroupMe was popular for college groups when I was an undergraduate though that’s long since gone by the wayside.

Most importantly, if you show up as a “green bubble” person you will be lightly teased about it, including on a date.

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#192

Back in 2005-ish era, I helped reboot a college club (I was the coach/advisor). We started out using forum software to co-ordinate what we were doing but eventually (2008-ish) switched to Facebook as the president of the club pointed out "Alex, everyone is already on Facebook and the notifications from us are in the middle of the notifications for when the next party is" etc. Fast forward to today and the club is reb…

I always hated how everything moved off independent forums and onto facebook. Zuckerberg was right about with his early idiots comment.

It's a friction thing. Managing a messaging perform takes effort and technical understanding. Facebook groups won by default ten years ago.

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#193

Back in 2005-ish era, I helped reboot a college club (I was the coach/advisor). We started out using forum software to co-ordinate what we were doing but eventually (2008-ish) switched to Facebook as the president of the club pointed out "Alex, everyone is already on Facebook and the notifications from us are in the middle of the notifications for when the next party is" etc. Fast forward to today and the club is reb…

Bulletin boards! They are such a great thing.

When I started doing promotion of public events sponsored by a small nonprofit in rural Virginia (USA), I was handed several pieces of paper with notes like post office, banks, dry cleaners, lumber yard. Over time, I've built a spreadsheet of places to share event and other community information. There's churches, HOAs, social media groups, IRL locations, media outlets, and so on. I am constantly referring people to the list to use (share information and seek information0 and edit. I knew very few people would make edits but I expected a couple of folks to use it for outreach.

About a month ago, I started thinking that my small neck of the woods could use something other than FB to share info. I'd love for electronic discussion groups to fill the void. Of course there are downsides, starting with slow adoption. But I feel like it's a lift anyone can manage given that it's based in email.

Of course, what will be shared is stupid stuff and not what I want (public opinion on state and local policies) and particularly information relevant to people with low incomes.

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#194
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> God I miss the 2000s. Exactly! Having to check 27 different places for messages (also add individual sites like linkedin, etc, where people message), it is completely ridiculous. Just send me email. It's universal, standard, no corporation owns it (thus no corportation can shut me out unlike facebook or all the proprietary solutions).

Pidgin had it so good. Have you tried Beeper? https://www.beeper.com/

Intriguing, thanks, will need to check it out.

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#195

Back in 2005-ish era, I helped reboot a college club (I was the coach/advisor). We started out using forum software to co-ordinate what we were doing but eventually (2008-ish) switched to Facebook as the president of the club pointed out "Alex, everyone is already on Facebook and the notifications from us are in the middle of the notifications for when the next party is" etc. Fast forward to today and the club is reb…

Discord, it's Discord.

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#196
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I move into a neighbourhood of new houses in 2007. One of the guys there worked IT at a university and set up a mailing list of the neighbourhood. It was used successfully for all sorts of coordination, neighbourhood watch, internal news, etc. There's always someone mis-using it, and the same applies to every other platform. There's always someone hijacking forum threads, or asking questions in comments instead of st…

Hijacking threads was a problem on our neighborhood mailing list (the most egregious example being hijacking a welcome thread to complain about trash pickup). The solution was pretty easy: auto-lock threads after a week of inactivity. We found that on-topic discussion settled after about that long. People are then forced to start new threads. If there is something new on an old thread, it can be administratively resu…

How do you do that with email?

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what the Bluesky “AT Protocol” is meant to solve, though I fear it might be a bit too late.

Except AT Protocol can't do the very thing that made Facebook the commons: privacy. There's a proposal to add privacy to the protocol (private posts, private groups), but I don't think anyone has solved the real root problem with trying to implement privacy in a federated system (as opposed to P2P), which is the bad administrator problem. The proposal I saw still relied on trustworthy app administrators to respect a…

Privacy works fine in Fediverse. The admins of both servers can read your messages, but you should expect that. Fediverse is email with gratuitous JSON and HTTP.

ATProto is trying to implement privacy on top of global public pub/sub which just obviously doesn't work.

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#198
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have Messager app fatigue at this point (where I live). - Doctors offices and official services use SMS. - Some of my close family and friends use Signal (on my pressure). - The distant boomers use Facebook Messenger - With the younger people they use Snapchat. - Almost everyone else in the country uses Whatsapp as that's the dominant messaging app. - My friends who live in Berlin use Telegram - Online communities…

> God I miss the 2000s. Exactly! Having to check 27 different places for messages (also add individual sites like linkedin, etc, where people message), it is completely ridiculous. Just send me email. It's universal, standard, no corporation owns it (thus no corportation can shut me out unlike facebook or all the proprietary solutions).

Is your email not so full of slightly interesting FOMO junk that you don't find the energy to sift through?

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#199

Back in 2005-ish era, I helped reboot a college club (I was the coach/advisor). We started out using forum software to co-ordinate what we were doing but eventually (2008-ish) switched to Facebook as the president of the club pointed out "Alex, everyone is already on Facebook and the notifications from us are in the middle of the notifications for when the next party is" etc. Fast forward to today and the club is reb…

> Part of me hopes that we got back to the late 1990s dedicated websites/forums. That seems to be the Discord model but let's see. Well, thanks for lobbying, that's got regulated away. One must be mad today to run a forum.

Believe it or not, police do not show up and take you to jail because someone on your forum is a terrorist. They may show up and ask you questions.

Re: Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media

#200
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

South African here. Just about all notifications have moved to WhatsApp. Most school classes have a group for the parents, extended family group, immediate family group, residents association group, high school classmates group, gym class group, home town group ... the list goes on. Sounds like a lot but most groups tend to have few messages.

Canadian here. I have a WhatsApp account and the app on my phone with zero contacts in it. Nobody here uses it. But every time I leave the country I need it for some service or business or who knows what. It seems like the rest of the world all agreed to use this app and Canada (and I think the US) just said “naw thanks…” and have no common app or method.

My theory is that there is a latent hysteresis effect of past SMS and data pricing on mobile accounts that matches up with places that adopted WhatsApp and ones that didn't.
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