Recently, I participated in a brief thread on Mastodon about how to maintain relations with people that have been built around a social network, specifically through Facebook. This is not different for Instagram, X/Twitter, TikTok or whatever you prefer.
I explained that this is simply not possible because, in my experience, people use multiple socials based on their age, technical experience, personal taste, and even the presence of other peers in any of the existing social systems.
This post explains in long form what I think about socials and, in brief, why you should not base your relationship life on any of them, including any serious business, of course.
Large social networks are an expensive game
In the last 30 or more years, a series of social networks appeared on the Internet with different characteristics, and all of them are (or have been until their closure) typically usable for free (as beer). Of course, they are pretty expensive toys, requiring a lot of servers, data centres, worldwide networks, software and human resources. As said briefly with a joke, if they are not selling you anything, you are the product.
The game is clear: they are profiling your personal data and preferences to create selective advertisement campaigns (included in the social network feed) if you are not paying a premium charge. That could happen even if you pay for a subscription, of course, but it is less disturbing, at least. Moreover, those networks also have been subject to data leaking from time to time, because of security issues or intentionally, and probably you would not appreciate that your personal data, telephone number, and the photo of your children/cats, or the photo of you drunk and naked in a party ten years ago walk publicly on the net.
If this is something you are not available to accept, avoid any not-so-free social network, plain and clean. Of course, any of your peers (family, friends, colleagues, any other) could have a different opinion about that. Any of them could choose one of the many social networks out there, and those networks leverage specifically the FOMO syndrome to collect and increase users/customers. If any of your friends are on Facebook or Instagram, you could be captured in the network easily because of that mass syndrome. The only way to escape is simply not playing that game.
The distributed small social networks can be a solution
A viable alternative is participating in modern independent networks of small community-based services, such as Mastodon for microblogging or Matrix for one-to-one communications and groups. Of course, they need to be sustained for cost coverage, and any instance can always disappear at any time because the admin(s) move to other interests or costs exceed what the admin(s) are available to pay at the end of the day. They are probably not long-term solutions, but one can always move from one instance to another when things turn down. Simply, do not rely too much on them. And probably they will not solve the problem of the leaking of photos of you naked and drunk in a party of ten years ago: shit happens even on those systems.
If your major interest is ensuring privacy and security, all the protocols and software of those distributed networks are purely FOSS, and you can always create your own instance. Of course, again, this is not something free of cost; you always have to consider computing resources (both cores and storage) and your time. This is not viable for people who lack the required skills and knowledge, but potentially, it is the only indisputable solution.
Unfortunately, after creating your own Mastodon/Matrix instance or moving to a nice maintained instance by a trustworthy party, you still have to convince your peers to participate in such a network, and that is the tricky part. The hard truth is that most people do not care about abdicating their freedom and participating in a social network as a customer. That is until the whole thing becomes a PITA because of censorship rules, excess of advertisements, moderation, and lack of active peers. That happened in the past for X/Twitter and will happen again for other social networks. It is a matter of critical mass: if the network is not large enough, you can miss a lot of your peers, and you can do exactly nothing to solve this problem.
That is the same problem you find in IM systems. For historical reasons, most of your peers have probably registered a Whatsapp account, much less a Telegram one. There are even fewer with a Discord account (not that better) or something less invasive and respectful of privacy, such as a Signal or Matrix account. The only valid reason is that WhatsApp started in 2009, Telegram in 2013, and Signal in 2014 and all of them, in one way or another, tried to maintain a user's lock-in or managed to solve scalability and add features since then.
One should ask why they all avoided systematically extending the existing XMPP protocol soon instead of re-inventing the wheel. I'm a bad guy and think that standardizing does not solve the problem of sustainability for such systems. They need to lock in the users to survive.
Think if you had to use a non-standard SMTP protocol to send emails in the 90s. That would have been an epic failure for the Internet tech community and users. Curiously, this is not true on the current shattered Internet, and this is the reason for the current social nightmare.
It's not too late: let such non-distributed and proprietary networks die as soon as possible; simply close your accounts or freeze them and move to something more standard, distributed and human-sized. Don't care about missing out on someone; they will come sooner or later if they share the same ideas, so why care? And if they do NOT share the same ideas, why care?
Come on, let's free ourselves of any social dependency on closed and proprietary networks.
And possibly, if you absolutely have to go around naked and drunk in the next party, at least avoid that people make photos of you and publish them.