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.

The sticky bit I have is facebook marketplace - it's wiped out the other classified marketplaces in my area.

I'm not making any serious money off the old stuff I sell, but the alternative to selling it (or even giving away low-value stuff that's still functional) on facebook is basically just throwing it out / destructively recycling it.

>It's really not as hard as it seems

Only on HN could someone post a take like this without getting laughed at. Outside our very geeky HN bubble, hardly anyone (let's say in Europe, but all my friends in the US use it as well) uses anything other than WhatsApp. There's literally zero reason for the average user to switch.

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?

The FOMO everyone here is responding with is wild.

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.

> Just 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.

I'm in WhatsApp groups with friends who live abroad, SMS is not an option. We could use another chat app, but then I'd have to convince every friend from every group to use something else. WhatsApp is what every friend I have agrees on.

I belong to several hobby groups that exist only on Facebook or Reddit (or Discord, but I dislike it for several reasons). I'd like to ditch both Facebook and Reddit, but that would mean leaving those hobby groups, and given the joy they bring me, I'm not willing to pull the plug yet.

So you see, it's really not that easy.

i missed a flight once (it was a small private cessna while on vacation). turns out they had tried calling me on WhatsApp, which i don’t use.

The only way to know the correct meshtastic configs for Taiwan is to join the meshtastic Taiwan Facebook group.

Or attend an event in person. They advertise their in person events on the meshtastic Facebook group.

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

Ha, I fell for that the first time, not getting me twice. That was my wake up call for how insular the HN bubble is and how utterly convinced people here are that they represent or understand normies.

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.