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>1. Why is facebook required?

Because Facebook has a searchable, discoverable database of real names. Many people skip or haven't gotten to the "write down each others' contact information" step but still want to talk to each other. Actually there is a deliberate, important progression in a relationship from using Facebook Messenger to exchanging cell phone numbers.

>2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method?

Yes. Some people have international friends or care about proper handling of long messages, delivery confirmation, read receipts, etc. excluding SMS. Some people have friends with Androids, excluding iMessage. Some people have friends with Outlook.com or Yahoo email addresses, which excludes GChat/Hangouts. People are too scattered around Whatsapp/Telegram/WeChat for any of them to be worth anything. Everyone has Facebook. The cognitive overhead of "Which of 8 different services do I use to talk to this particular friend?" is fucking annoying and people avoid it by just using Facebook.

Many people in my (millennial) generation touch their emails as little as possible. Email is for bosses, professors, receipts, and annoying mailing lists. People I know are as likely to write a social email as they are to walk to their local Western Union office and ask to send a telegram.

>3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people you know?

Yes. Facebook is the only option inclusive of everyone, even those with the cheapest, broken phones that are out of free space.

But .. the argument that this includes everyone is provably wrong. The GP doesn't have FB. I don't. Any social circles including him or me have to live with the fact that yes - you might have to use something different to contact us.

If you have only 1 or 2 of those in your network, isn't the big 'one IM service to rule them all' idea dead? If you already are at a point where it's "FB for most, except for mail/whatever for X", is it a big step to "everyone chooses what to use again"? The overhead is already there, no?

All I can say is: This works fine for me. I have neither FB nor WhatsApp (I stopped using the former a long time ago and never joined the latter). People can reach me just fine and ~probably~ get a faster response from me anyway. I really don't understand this whole concept. "Overhead" to contact someone? Let's be real here: Either you care about contacting someone or you don't. If you don't, then I'd just not name them a 'Friend'. If you do, the mental exercise to open a different app (like - mail) shouldn't even be worth mentioning?

Parent asked whether anyone actually uses Facebook as their sole communication medium. I'm saying yes, because there's little reason to bother with anything else when everyone has Facebook (and can already find each other on it). And for the most part that's true, in my experience. I've met exactly two people who don't have Facebook; neither of them want to be contacted electronically at all. Never met someone in a peer group who wanted to IM but was morally opposed to Facebook in particular.

> Either you care about contacting someone or you don't.

Cuts both ways. If Facebook is someone's primary communication system and you refuse to use it, then you don't particularly care about contacting them either.

>"Overhead" to contact someone?

Most groups of friends I'm aware of have running group chats. In an effort to be inclusive of people with Androids, many switched from iMessage to Facebook. But if you refused to use Facebook and an event was planned that way, yes, someone would have to make the effort to reach out to you individually. Overhead. Even if they really like you despite your self-righteous inconveniencing of everyone else, it's not obvious whose responsibility it should be to bridge between Facebook and your smoke signals, and they're likely to forget sometimes.

> self-righteous inconveniencing of everyone else

> between Facebook and your smoke signals

Whoa there. I'd say that was both a bit over the top, no?

I'll end my participation in this thread with this: Obviously anyone/everyone can choose to use FB - I never tried to talk a single person out of using it. I consider it utterly useless for me, personally, and am so far unconvinced by any 'you have to use it or miss out' arguments and certainly don't buy the 'you are inconveniencing your peers' line of thought.

I have several friends, including non-tech people, who avoid Facebook. It's become an en vogue thing to ditch Facebook and I've seen more people doing it. I have to remember the preferred communication medium for each individual friend, because I have people that do text/iMessage only, Hangouts only, or Facebook only. I wish there was one non-email fast-chatting way of talking to everyone, like a unifying app for all these services, but that feels a little like this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/

In my personal experience, the biggest wedge is in planning events. With the caveat that this probably only applies strongly to people currently in their mid-twenties:

For a lot of social circles, facebook is the only service that almost everyone will regularly check and that lets you coordinate events. My friends who don't use facebook will regularly miss (or not get invited to) parties, book club, skiing trips, etc. This isn't because no one likes them or thinks to invite them, it's because they opted out of the platform.

The other big point of stickiness that I can think of is that facebook is many people's cloud. Years of photos are backed up there and only there. It's unfortunate that they've relinquished control of their files to a closed-platform third party, but that's the way it is.

> My friends who don't use facebook will regularly miss (or not get invited to) parties, book club, skiing trips, etc. This isn't because no one likes them or thinks to invite them...

Clearly it is, unless you make a conscious decision for every gathering to only include people via Facebook. Does no one ever stop and think "Hey, Jake is pretty cool but he doesn't use Facebook. Maybe someone should call him?" I'd guess that no one thinks like this, and that his omission comes from simply not thinking to invite people who aren't on Facebook.

I'd love it if you could explain that I'm wrong and that you are making this conscious decision to exclude them. The justification for this would be even more interesting.

This doesn't happen when you're throwing a get-together of 5-10 close friends.

It's more frequent for me with parties of 100+ invites.

The way I accidentally don't invite people is

1. I setup Facebook event.

2. I scroll through a list of my friends on Facebook.

3. As I scroll through I invite any friends I think would have a good time at the party and are in town.

4. Never realize I didn't to invite Jake.

5. During or day after party I wonder why Jake didn't come. Then remember that he doesn't have Facebook

I don't think most people sit down and try to remember every person they know. Then create a list of people to invite and then use Facebook to invite them. I think they go through Facebook and invite the ones they recognize similar to the way I do it. It's also hard to keep track of who is, and isn't using Facebook at any given time.

I am wildly speculating here but maybe all the friends are in the Facebook. All of them. Now they also know that if they leave FB, they are cut of from information about cool parties, because as it seems, nobody cares about people not in FB. So they are all kind of locked in.

The situation of course is already familiar in the business world and many companies try to mitigate this kind of risks by supporting open source for example, or open standards.

A bit of contrary anecdata:

I'm throwing a party on Sunday. I don't throw parties very often. The last time I did was a little over a year ago. I created a Facebook event for parties as I usually do, and about half the people I invited didn't even see the invite (Facebook helpfully tells you who has and hasn't seen such things). So I had to chase down these people through other means (texting, hangouts, and yes, FB messenger). Last year when I did this, pretty much everyone saw the invite.

I'm not sure what changed. Perhaps it's notification fatigue, perhaps some quit or curtailed their use of Facebook. But it kind of sucks from my perspective, as there is no clear better alternative. I do not know the email addresses of all my friends, and people aren't necessarily responsive to email either.

Demographic here is late 20s-late 30s, in the Bay Area.

I'm the wrong person to answer this because I am not a social butterfly (though I'm not antisocial either by any stretch) so being up and up on everything my friends are doing is not important and consequently I only have about 40 friends in total on FB. Half of which, I could probably get rid of right now and not care.

1. People use it for event planning. I don't get texts asking where I am anymore or what i'm doing. Events are organized... Personally, I despise this because I love impromptu meetups, but that's just not how my friends do things anymore it seems.

2. For all non-business communication the answer is yes. Professional contact is still E-mail driven (or Slack/IRC for dev-friends). That said, LinkedIn is starting to pickup some of the professional communication in my circles.

3. I've been okay with the trade-offs, but that decision fits my social profile. I have to make an active effort now to get invited to things though which kind of sucks, but I suppose that's OK too since it allows me to be more selective about what I go to.

1. Messenger was the thing that ultimately locked me in (and most friends I suppose). It's just great software that everyone uses. Sure if I could get everyone to install telegram I totally would. But it's not happening. The way you phrased the question shows your not a big IMer.

2. Messenger + some Snapchat basically. I have only one friend that didn't make the switch to Facebook and keeps on using old IM software that used to be popular. Our friendship (wasn't a huge one) kind of died cause of it.

3. I don't think most people care. It's the way things are. Most also seem to be fairly aware of what's being exposed publicly and curate their behavior accordingly.

I have to note I basically only have friends online. I'm 22, I kind of consider myself an early adopter. Just 4-5 years ago it was pretty weird to most, nowadays its slowly entering the mainstream. Younger people seem especially adept.

I dunno.

My main circle of friends, clustered in our late-40s for the most part, use a variety of different online media. Facebook and email are primary, though I wouldn't say either is ahead of the other at this point. Texting is of course very common. Facebook Messenger has been our primary chat for the last couple years.

We're also on Twitter and Instagram, at least big chunks of us are. One connected subgroup of us with a common interest have been on a private google groups for a long while, and a private yahoo group for years before that. We set up slack for the group this week.

In other words, we're using whatever seems handiest at the moment for whatever it is we're doing. It's not a particularly tech-savvy group of people, though nearly all of my main circle is quite well-educated.

> Are many people you know actually going exclusively to facebook as their sole communication method

Yes. Absolutely. People communicate via Facebook Messenger instead of SMS or the likes of WhatsApp. They organise social events using Facebook. Announce weddings and divorces, births of children, new jobs. Everything via Facebook. You're clearly not a Facebook user (or not a regular user) otherwise you would know the extent to which people are using it.

And most people really don't care about Facebook privacy issues to any significant degree. It's more convenient to use Facebook and have compromised privacy than not to use Facebook for many.

Anecdata:

I don't use FB, but it turns out that people can form pretty strong bonds over incidental things. At least those bonds appear to be strong to the people on the outside, and that's all that really matters when you're talking about social stuff.

At this point in my life, the costs are negligible, but ten years ago those same cost would have been closer to 'devestaating'.

>At least those bonds appear to be strong to the people on the outside, and that's all that really matters when you're talking about survellience stuff.

FTFY

My point is that while I'm perfectly eager to act in a way that affords a delusion that I'm somehow frustrating the surveillance state, the costs are still real and too much for many/most people.

I'm often the person making that argument, so only seems fair I take a crack at this.

    > 1. Why is facebook required? (to get right to the
    > point) I know MANY of my friends use facebook but I
    > still find it quite easy to keep in touch with them
    > over email/gchat/texting/in person.

There's a few factors, but let's start with "low interaction friendship". When I log in to Facebook, there's a post from a guy who lives in a different country to me, who I met on a bus 8 years ago, posting about his crusade to stop his vet offering homeopathy(!). I see an update once every two or three days from this guy, but we're not really close enough to send each other regular emails or messages. But last time we were in the same city, I sent him a message, and we had dinner, drinks, and went to a show. I listened to his latest album a few years back, and as a result, we had him play at our wedding. I have a lot of low-interaction friends like this, and they enrich my life incredibly. I would not have the mental energy or time to maintain lots of friendships like this by email.

I have a reasonably large extended family. We could start up a mailing list, but we're not all related to the same people. When I see them in person, I have been "keeping in touch" because I've been seeing their family photos, seeing daily updates from them, and interacting with them. Again, I don't have the time or energy to do this actively.

We have a party organized this weekend. There are 40 people on the invite list. A Facebook event has meant that we've invited a whole load of people who we might not have invited to a more intimate event, but also that we got suggestions for a bunch of people to invite - we went through our friends list, and often thought "haven't seen Joe in ages! I'd forgotten he was in town, let's invite him". Facebook has kept track of who's coming for us, and will gently nag our guests to reply either way. We don't have cellphone numbers of email addresses for many of these people.

Conversely, a couple we don't know very well has invited us to an event in a fortnight. We're not that close to them, but we can see on Facebook that a whole bunch of our mutual friends who we do really really like are going. As a result, we'll probably go.

Many of these things are possible without Facebook, they're just much much harder, and we probably wouldn't bother.

    > 2. Are many people you know actually going exclusively
    > to facebook as their sole communication method? This
    > hasn't meshed with my experience, but I'm in a very
    > limited population strata. As a followup, do these
    > people find any difficulties when connecting with
    > non-facebookers, since I know plenty of those?

Yes. Facebook Messenger is the primary way I communicate socially with people. If I happen to have everyone's cellphone, I'll use WhatsApp, as it has a few more useful features, and not everyone has Messenger installed, but generally FB Messenger is how I communicate with people, as it's a constant, even when they move country, change numbers, change email, whatever. I ran in to some old high school friends at a university alumni event recently, who I hadn't seen in decades. I added one of them on Facebook, and he created a Messenger group with some other people we went to high school with, and we organized lunch. I could have gotten his email, and we could have done it that way, but I don't think he had contact details for some of the other people he invited, other than Facebook.

I have three ex colleagues who I'd love to be more in touch with, who aren't on Facebook. I try and see them when I am in the same city as them, but I often forget they're around, and because I'm not up to date with what's going on in their lives, we often have less to talk about.

    > 3. Is it a conscious calculation for you/most people
    > you know? e.g. is there even a thought of "Am I happy
    > with the tradeoffs at hand to use this" or is it just
    > the accepted dogma at this point.

Not as far as I know. People who aren't on Facebook are the big exception, and they tend to be the slightly kookier people.

The trade-offs seem hard to articulate. I don't feel like my social graph is particularly private. There are plenty of things that I do like to keep private, but Facebook knowing who my friends and family are isn't really one of them.

Anyway, hope this wall of text helps a little.