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Comment by tepitoperrito | Hacker News Reader

Look at monica crm https://github.com/monicahq/monica. I've yet to offer to start hosting it for people, but that could be a neat conversation piece for changing the tides there.

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I think the GP’s point was that social relationships are increasingly becoming irrelevant to people. Having a personal relationship CRM seems cool, but this shift in society is happening not for lack of good social tools.

In my view this shift is happening because of social media. The social media short cut to having friends turned out to not really work, and now people are trying to figure out how to have friends again. It's the same with dating.

Yeah, it seems like people are doubling down on a losing strategy. The real solution is usually involves going outside your front door and meet people. The same is true with dating.

And meeting people unlike yourself in at least some ways - social media is designed to help you find identical clones of yourself.

I don't think most people actually get to know like minded individuals on social media. They just flock together on specific topics and don't associate where they disagree. When you meet people in the real world, chances are you are unlike in some ways by default. People just don't express their differences in superficial context. You don't find the differences unless you ask and listen. At least that's been my experience meeting people.

Doesn't social media replace meat-space friendships?

Is there a species of 'Tinder'... for finding friends?

> The same is true with dating

Over the last 25 years, all but one of the people I've dated, have been people I met online, including the mother of my son. Most of them have been people who I'd never have crossed paths with if it wasn't for meeting them online.

Under no circumstance do I want to go back to the horror of relying on meeting people offline, without being able to quickly filter out people I'm not compatible with first.

It's the aggressive filtering that has caused online dating to fail

But why didn't it work?

Is it because it's impossible to maintain meaningful relationships over the internet? My experience in the online forum and gaming communities implies otherwise -- some of my most meaningful friendships started (and continue) in those communities.

I suspect, instead, that it didn't work because Facebook murdered it. They abused dark patterns, injected ads, suggested content, radicalized grandmothers, and hacked engagement to the point where relationships didn't just stagnate, they withered and died because they were hidden and forgotten.

I have a lot of chats and friends in Telegram, and it's very easy to maintain those chats over time because I have a chronological feed of interactions right in the app. Facebook hid and diluted an entire medium, their original focus, "posts from friends" in favor of content they thought you might engage with more. Facebook chat exists, sure, but app invite spam diluted that to hell just the same, so it doesn't have the same chronological list of meaningful conversations that I have in Telegram. And notification spam diluted the meaning of any new developments on Facebook -- comment replies, messages, whatever.

And now, Facebook pushes videos, "TV", reels, stories, and god only knows what else instead of just letting me see posts from my friends and family. I think it's fair to say that online social relationships can work... they just don't work in a hostile environment. It's kind of like maintaining your friendships only in the middle of Times Square, surrounded by ads, tourists, and costumed performers trying to scam you out of $20 for a picture. Not impossible, but eventually you'll get tired of it.

“I think the GP’s point was that social relationships are increasingly becoming irrelevant to people”

I have a hard time believing this is generally true.

I wonder where the split is, and for what demographics this is/isn't true for. It's been true for at least a few years for my (small) circle and I.

I also wonder if this is a (temporary) side effect of larger societal issues. It certainly feels like all of my old relationships are trending towards hyperpolitical interactions (even ones where we agree on most topics) and/or transactional/performative obligations. In the city I live in now, I've yet to meet anyone that feels like a decent enough human being to even want to be friends with. Maybe the problem is me, or widespread cynicism, or people concerned with bigger issues than just friendships. I don't know, but I don't really see any reason to put effort into making and tending friendships (especially IRL friendships) anymore. I'd much rather have relationships where I can come and go as I want or have time (online groups, meetups, hobbies, being friendly to strangers, etc) without worrying about all the added context of "are we friends?" and everything that entails.

My wife and I are in our mid-30’s and have a young child. Both of those transitions have led to the depreciation of some old friendships and the blossoming of new ones. Life is too full to be social to the same extent as when we were younger, but the friendships we have now (though fewer) are stronger in some important ways and more diverse in age, ethnic background, etc and so on.

I would say add that we tend to hang with people that engage in active hobbies and probably consume somewhat less media than average. But maybe I’m just reasoning backwards there…

Aside: if you happen to live in Minneapolis - I’d be happy to buy you a coffee sometime.

The risk of focusing on more transient relationships is that in the long run you won't reap the benefits of compounding interest, which is arguably where all the best stuff in life comes from: https://nav.al/long-term

An interesting concept, but towards the end they chop the very foundation right out from under their argument with a brief rant about socialists with guns and knives wanting pie.

Someone who is antisocial, and just in it for their own profit would say exactly that, and that's exactly the type of person you don't want long-term relationships with.

I was looking into using this recently, but the project seems to be somewhat stalled. It’s gone from regular monthly releases, up to February this year, to nothing for months, not a good sign for something I’m considering adopting to maintain an important part of my life.

Between this and some syncing issues that didn’t yet have fixes, I dropped it before putting in the effort to get fully on board and I still need to find a replacement.

Stalled or relatively stable? If the software changed out from under you every single day with daily updates, would that make it more worthy of considering adopting for long-term use? Or would you still think it was not a good sign because you hadn't gotten an update in the last few hours? If they did hourly releases, would you still look askance at it because it had been 6 minutes since the last release?

People's ideas of update cadence are interesting. I find it really odd that people want to have to run frequent updates and want to use unstable software for the important things nowadays. For important things, I prefer stuff that'll still run and work the same in 20 years.

I think having a regular scheduled monthly update to a PHP web application with a web based UI as well as using WebDAV features intended to synchronise with an array of third party (often proprietary) software that you probably have exposed on the internet… isn’t that weird. You want to make sure you keep up with security updates and have a chance to regularly incorporate contributions from an active community of users.

A contributing factor to the “stalled” impression was that the original team/developers had publicly announced a new product March 2022… the exact same month that regular updates stopped.

I've been using monica for more than a year now, super helpful in keeping track of birthdays and important events.

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