I haven't used Facebook in nearly 8 years, however to say there are alternatives is specious. For example, I have recently learned I missed my first high school reunion because it was only posted on Facebook. Unfortunately, there isn't another service out there that I could subscribe to that would ensure I receive such communication.
Alternatives don’t have to be services, you can directly contact people who do use the service or who live with the people you want to know about.
And your opting out of the network makes it a little less valuable, since now no one has access to updates about yourself. If you can convince a few more people to lower their exposure or to move to something like friendica then the network becomes even less valuable and helps to lower Facebook’s power.
I would much rather fight the problem this way than trust legislators to come up with a fair way to regulate it. Same with sugar, I would rather invest in educational campaigns to convince people how bad sugars and sodas are for their body than have the government ban all sugar or decide how much can be in a product. The lobbies will usually end up writing the final laws anyway, and who knows what their incentives are.
Pretty absurd that your alumni communication is through facebook and only facebook, and they don't maintain actual contact info. Email is still the standard for my hs and uni alumni spam and I reckon it always will be, since it's pretty impossible to find people on facebook with common names unless you have mutual friends.
Think about it this way: Why would you want to go to an event where the organizers were too lazy to even invite you? I’d say you lucked out and whatever else you were doing at the time was likely more valuable.
I’ve been off of Facebook for a decade and still have a robust, satisfying social life. My real friends know how to contact me and I never feel left out of the actual important stuff going on. I think of Facebook’s existence as a blessing: it allows me to easily filter out all those low-effort “events” run by people who don’t really care if I come.
Email will notify you of events that are only publicized on Facebook? :thinking_face:
I mean, to be fair, even Facebook won't necessarily tell you about an event unless the event creator pays them money to promote it. It's actually not a great platform for small-scale publicity, and _only_ publicizing an event on Facebook is clearly a mistake for a number of reasons. But despite its many virtues, email doesn't actually address GP's case at all.
A contact list would, like what likely existed for every previous reunion in GPs high school since before 2010. My schools periodically reach out to update your contact info for their alumni roster. I bet GP never gave the school their contact info after graduation rather than this being a facebook only situation (unless it was just organized by a handful of alums and not tied with the school itself).
There isn't a passive tool that would solve this other than getting people's email or mailing address, and that's absolutely fine since if you wanted to go to these reunions and be invested in these events, you can send an email to the school and get yourself on this contact list.
That relies on a number of speculations, most importantly that GP was incorrect about the event having only been published on Facebook. I've seen enough small organizations work that way that I wouldn't be so hasty to second-guess GP's description.
Email wouldn't allow you to effortlessly aggregate the email addresses of everyone, and then to communicate the message out. There's a really large overhead there that doesn't really exist with Facebook.
