It works
It's kinda sad that members of a club have to share their private details with some remote third party focused on surveillance, data collection and targeting ads in order communicate with other members or potential members. Not to mention the possibility of "age verification"
When used for public notice, the benefits, if any, of "social media" over the bulletin board at the student center are probably not worth the hassles
The Zuckerberg movie was called The Social Network. At the time we saw the likes of Facebook as networks intended to build 1-1 communications.
Since then, it’s become social Media. It’s now about centralized structures broadcasting messages to subscribers and followers. The only difference from the past is who the broadcasters can be, but it’s no longer about building networks between people.
For me, physical communication is quickly becoming a signal that someone actually put effort into things.
In that sense it was a smart decision of meta to buy it.
Most of my friends are on Instagram too but nobody really communicates there. The chance of missing something important is way too high.
There's a guy that runs multiple sports teams at a local recreation center, in multiple adult divisions (wide age/culture rage), and he has been using email to great effect for over a decade that I have known him. I get 2-3 weekly emails about teams that need a sub for a game and those spots continue to fill up quickly. He probably has the majority of regulars (in the hundreds) at that sports center on his various email list. It just works. They tried chat groups once and that was a disaster.
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
- ...
There's always someone mis-using it, and the same applies to every other platform. There's always someone hijacking forum threads, or asking questions in comments instead of starting a new topic. None of this is exclusive to email.
For hackerspaces, tech meetups, book clubs, cycling clubs, city cleanup volunteer groups…
It works fine.
Don’t let your bad experience ruin it for everyone. Especially with an administrative backend, email-based distribution and comms works great for smaller groups!
But because subject lines are more work and people who love sending email tend to love it because it is very low effort, the venn of email senders and those who write subject lines is small.
(¹yes, it seems like you can work around it by going to the URL de novo, … but IDK, doesn't seem worth it.)
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.
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.
The commons became the commons again, instead of being partially or completely trapped on Facebook,
and you’re upset?
Bulletin boards are awesome.
Physical assembly is awesome.
Never occurred to me that Americans wouldn't have a common group chat app everyone uses. Do Americans not all use iMessage, since pretty much everybody has an iPhone there?
Apple has famously made its strategy to use iMessage to enforce exclusivity. If you want to reach everyone, it's not iMessage. And Whatsapp in the US is worse, closer to 1/3.
WhatsApp does not solve any problems for the typical American user. Most Americans don't install WhatsApp unless they spend a lot of time overseas some place where it is required to do anything. Even international group chats seem to be more Discord-based in recent years.
I'm Irish and travel back and forth a lot. First, not everyone has iPhones, Android has 40% of the market.
Older generations use Facebook to manage their clubs. I'm increasingly seeing Whatsapp and occasionally Signal for younger and more tech-savvy social circles. Facebook is non-existent in sub 35 year olds. Its just taking longer to switch over (or away from) Facebook given how tech savvy older folks are here compared to Ireland.
* pretty early on the vast majority of phone plans started bundling unlimited text messaging, which IIRC was a big motivator for using messaging apps abroad
* because of the vast scale of the country, domestic coverage results in no roaming for the places Americans spend most of their time, unlike in Europe where there are multitudes of countries you'd be passing in a one to two hour flight. Roaming charges in the EU were only abolished in 2022, late enough that everybody has settled on apps as the best way to manage that now.
* many American plans extend unlimited messaging to Canada and Mexico, the two likeliest places that Americans would go to abroad
Or just iMessage with fallback to SMS for those not on iPhones. Unlike most of the rest of the world, iPhones dominate in the USA.
You can have two if necessary, one only for announcements and one for discussion.
I don't see how that would work as in many jurisdictions, email is an accepted legal way to communicate between a company and a customer. So when you don't year your email that's like not reading your snail mail in the 90s. It might go well for some time, until you miss that one message about a late payment or something...
Ignoring email works just fine, as evidenced by the fact that the majority of people I know don't check email unless it is for their work. Zero impact on their lives. It is the same with snail mail. I think I check my snail mail 6-8 times per year mostly so that the letter box doesn't physically overflow with junk.
Plus the notifications for chat groups are basically:
- show me everything
- don't notify me at all
No one cares about the actual choice, only that it is made.
If the actual choice requires me to install an app then I care quite a lot and will probably decline to join in.
I don't think that I am the only one who feels this way.
Unless they are chosing something super obscure and sketchy, most club members are going to be fine with the leader just saying, we're picking whatsapp, either join or dont.
- Doctors offices and official services use SMS.
- Some of my close family and friends use Signal (on my pressure).
- The distant boomers use Facebook Messenger
- With the younger people they use Snapchat.
- Almost everyone else in the country uses Whatsapp as that's the dominant messaging app.
- My friends who live in Berlin use Telegram
- Online communities for tinkering and foss projects require Discord.
God I miss the 2000s.
Exactly! Having to check 27 different places for messages (also add individual sites like linkedin, etc, where people message), it is completely ridiculous.
Just send me email. It's universal, standard, no corporation owns it (thus no corportation can shut me out unlike facebook or all the proprietary solutions).
Well, thanks for lobbying, that's got regulated away. One must be mad today to run a forum.