The natural monopoly of networks is what brought us all to social networks, and I suspect it is why they will fail. Niche networks run by a small team (which is what social networks were when we were the early adopters) seem like they can trivially sustain themselves.

The explosion of podcasting is exactly this, but for nontechnical people.

On the desktop version of the website, click on the "Friends" "Feed" (and there might have been a sort by date as well you had to then click on).

* Can send out updates quickly, e.g. changing rooms when you discover your secretary forgot to book the usual one that week 5 minutes before the club meeting.

* Folks can see/post updates without going in to the student center in person. This is particularly helpful if there's any club members who live further away and/or down come by the student center regularly and/or aren't highly engaged enough to go check a board.

* An archive of messages can be valuable. I have dug though club archives to find the name of a guest speaker from several years prior. Physical records make this difficult, especially in a college club where leadership changes frequently and papers get lost.

Of course... email can do all of that. The lesson is to be judicious with technology, not abandon it entirely.

In fact the suggestion is not to abandon the bulletin board in the student center

As usual, there will be HN replies that adhere to "all-or-nothing", "black and white", etc. thinking, e.g., believing there is an "either-or" choice between use of a computer system and another method

However it's possible to use a bulletin board in the student center and a computer system. This is not an either-or choice, there is no requirement to choose one or the other

For example, getting contact details from the bulletin board then using a smartphone to make a phone call or send a text message, using a laptop to send an email, etc.

Further, there is no suggestion in the comment that one or the other, bulletin board in student center or computer system, is without benefits

In fact, the comment suggests the bulletin board is useful: "It works"

The question raised by the comment is whether the benefits of sending data to a remote third party, namely a "social media" company, outweigh the costs ("hassles")

This is obviously more narrow than "using a computer system". We can use computer systems without involving "social media" companies

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.

Nothing deserves to an "always-on-chatterbox" unless the end-user truly chooses it because that is what they want or need.

This is part of the larger problem. How many "always-on-chatterboxes" competing for one's attention before it becomes close-to-impossible to concentrate on anything that requires some actual thinking.

Part of it is just how emails work, part of it is how each clients work, part of it is people not knowing/caring.

  You'll have:

  - the guy that don't use the group email address as recipient, but personal email address 
  - the guy that change the subject which starts a new thread/discussion
  - the guy that include all previous emails in their answer
  - the guy with a signature that takes two screens to scroll
  - the guy with an awful text font/color
  - the guy that CC their whole address book, including the group email address, for personal stuff
  - ...

Yes, email is the absolute best for opimal reach. All the proprietary platforms are inherently fragmented and gatekeeped by their corporations. Trying to find a common denominator is hard. Email is standard, not owned by anyone and thus universal.

Email is a push technology. And the receiver has to manage their inbox for the sender’s enthusiasm.

2-3 weekly emails

A web page could update in real time. It would be more work for the sender. And less work for everyone else.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse

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 post's privacy settings. And that's a huge flaw.

Friendica and Diaspora both have the same problem, and to my knowledge don't have a good solution for it. They both just sort of hand wave it away.

I'm waiting to see if someone comes up with a good solution for the unsafe admin problem, but so far I haven't seen one.

As for connecting to people, you drag and drop the connect button into a folder name which you want their posts to show in. For example, You can create custom folders for friends, family, coworkers etc. After that, you drag the connect button into that folder. And each folder creates a custom feed from only those people for you.

I am open to brainstorming more ideas.

This switch does appear to have put off a lot of smart, thinking people as the newsfeed degenerated into a torrent of dopamine-spiking diarrhea. But those people don't tend to be the ones that click on ads.

[1] https://time.com/collections/the-cloud/3950525/facebook-news... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/15/facebook-... [3] https://www.supersummary.com/the-chaos-machine/summary/ - the whole "Chaos Machine" book is excellent

2013-2014 the algorithm got more foused on non-friend posts aswell as making the prioritzation less about "likes" from friends and instead some opaque engagement metrics. Groups had to "promote" post to get their prior reach to subscribers.

Also videos started to be posted around that time?

I want to fire off a quick quip and have a conversation.

Reddit is probably the only place where this works any more, but you have to be prompted by the right thread and early.

So people throw up their hands and go, "why bother?"

At most, you can call them professional contacts whom you hope to get some value out of in the future, and in that sense I’d agree — social media makes it possible to keep in touch with people whom you have a transactional relationship with.