> And since we’ve been sipping the Facebook friend juice for so long, it’s legitimately scary to quit. How will you know what events are going on? How will you know if something big happens in your friend’s life? How will you stay in touch with people?

> The simple answer is… all the ways we did for the last 100,000 years. Talking to people. Being an active consumer of information and knowledge about your friends’ lives instead of letting it passively wash over you.

That's a nice sentiment and one I absolutely agree with, but there's a big problem with it - how do we do this?

Before the Internet, the answer was obvious; talk to them. That's because friendships tended to be mostly local; you probably knew your friends' addresses and phone numbers.

When the Internet got popular, friendships were made on a global scale, and instant messaging became a thing. A lot of people grew up with AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, and MSN. It's important to note that these services weren't provided by companies whose soul reason for existing was to provide communication platforms. They were all secondary platforms provided by companies whose main business was elsewhere.

Now, all of these services are gone. In its place are apps like Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and Discord, which would be great, except that WhatsApp and Instagram are owned by the very company you're trying to escape from (Facebook) and Discord is a company whose soul product is their communication platform and thus have the mother of all motivations to make money from your data (even if they don't do that right now, thanks to unsustainable VC funding). Twitter is also a platform owned by a company which has the communication tool as its soul product, and to its credit hasn't made too much controversy in its long tenure, but even though it can be used for direct communication (and is used more for this purpose than Facebook), it's still primarily a "push" platform; for the most part, tweets come to you, as determined by algorithms.

Yes, there do still exist chat platforms provided by companies whose main product isn't their communication platforms: GTalk (or Hangouts) and Skype. Unfortunately these are both owned by companies who have been proven to behave in predatory fashions to their users: Google and Microsoft.

There are free and open-source programs that can be used. Jitsi allows instant messaging and video conferencing via XMPP, for example, Mastadon is a recent Twitter-like platform, and Signal allows for encrypted conversation. Each of these (and others) allow communication with users connected to other servers (and in most cases using other protocols), but even so the problem is that it's unlikely that your friends use programs that communicate over these protocols and are compatible. (The exception is GTalk, which uses XMPP.)

Then there are the numerous decentralised free/open-source methods. Mumble provides text-based and audio-based communication, numerous IRC servers provide text communication, etc. On a wide scale, the biggest issue with these are that you can't communicate with anybody unless they're connected to the same server as you. That might be desirable in the case where you have groups all interested in the same thing or otherwise tied by a common bond, but people can't be expected to join multiple servers just to keep in touch with their friends.

Of course, all of these can be used as primary methods of communication, particularly among small groups of friends, and maybe this is actually what the article is arguing for.

I personally would love if Mastadon became more popular, even though it's a "push"-style system like Twitter, because I think it has the best shot at doing so and it allows communication with potentially your entire circle of friends while simultaneously having differing servers with different policies. It's probably the closest thing to democratic messaging that we have.