I don’t like Facebook, but my mother and my father-in law both have facebooks. I tried some different social medias but I can’t make my mom go because the social medias are from other countries and stuff. Are there any American social medias where my mom would feel comfortable putting her face on?
I usually don’t put my face on social medias, sometimes I’ll put a photo of a guy who kind of looks like me, and choose a photo that’s taken from really far away, and people who don’t know me that well will think it’s me. My mom likes to put a headshot and then pixilated photos of the American flag and quotes from celebrity women she likes. That’s kind of a facebook thing. Are there any social medias like that?
Merry Christmas to all the Christians. I’m not Christian, so I get to be here. See you after church. I get to enjoy myself, and you’re in uncomfortable clothing, hahaha.
You unfortunately are coming at the problem from the wrong direction.
The only social network they will want to use is the one with all their friends on it; and for the older generations, that’s basically just Facebook.
In order to get them to move you’d need to get their friends to move, and in order to get their friends to move, you’ll need to get their friends to also move. It’s called the network effect and it’s why it’s incredibly hard for any non-established social networks to gain much of a market share.
Your best bet (which is by no means a guarantee) is to wait for the latest Facebook scandal to be in the news, and chat to them about it whilst they’re watching it on TV. Plus add a bit more fuel by doing the ol’ “oh this reminds me of something else I was reading a couple of months ago…” And have some other recent scandals in your back pocket to fire out. Bonus points if you can already establish yourself on something like Friendica, which will allow you to say “yeah I quit Facebook a while ago, the company running it just seems skeevy, I’ve been using friendica instead for a bit now” or something like that
Then you have to hope that registers enough as a talking point amongst them and their friends that it sticks. But you have an uphill struggle ahead with no certainty of success.
It’s not the friends. It’s the distant family that you never see but still want to know about births, deaths, etc. It’s the neighborhood groups that tell you when your package gets delivered to the wrong house. Its the city groups that tell you why the railroad crossing is closed and which house has the best Halloween decorations.
Damn, so you’re telling me I have to rebuild Facebook, basically.
Its more people who leave do it because they no longer need the social media or are fine with cutting themself off from it and being fine with missing out on content from there. Hard to convince other people to do the same, but you can leave methods to contact you like trying to push them to use Signal to stay in touch.
But, having them drop something they like and were never sketched out by sharing personal photos and info on a publicly accessible social media site is unlikely.
Well I’d lean on the shoulder of giants in terms of the actual service and not do it completely from scratch given we’ve got Facebook-likes in the fediverse, you could suggest to them. But basically yes from a network perspective unfortunately
Although you have given me an idea for an angle that the fediverse is perfect for: set up an instance for your local area
That allows you to also do the “screw untrustworthy big tech, keep things local with people you know” kind of angle.
Also obviously a fair bit of work, and you still have to ultimately convince people to use it, but worth highlighting regardless.