I have friends who uses Facebook Messenger… exclusively.

Sure, I can SMS them if I was having a one-on-one conversation, but if I wanted to initiate a group chat, I’d have to load up the dreaded F app (well, their messenger app, but still dreaded).
Of course, I refuse to do that, I so load up Facebook on Safari, force it to load in desktop mode (because FB won’t let you open FB messenger via a browser on mobile 😠), and open up messenger that way.

It’s not hard to understand that my interactions with these people have dropped to nearly zero.

I want to encourage these friends to move their conversations off the FB platform, but then I realise that there really aren’t many alternatives.
iMessage would be my preference, but I have Android friends…
There’s WhatsApp, but that’s owned by Facebook, so what’s the point? (Unfortunately this is the second preferred platform amongst my friends)
Line seems the best bet (only because I haven’t read any damaging reports), but even that’s a silo.

I didn’t realise it, but by owning my own blog and getting into the Indieweb, I now want to own all my content, including my messages and I’m sad that I can’t.
(I know there’s email, but can you imagine trying to convince a friend – who exclusively uses FB – to use email to organise a group dinner?)

Random thought: When I grow old and senile, I might mutter stuff like “wsite” or “vmail”, and no one would know what I’m talking about. That is unless they look through my computer and realise I’m muttering Textexpander trigger words for my website and email address.

Even now, for paper forms when it asks for my mobile number or email address, my fingers want to write the trigger phrase… 🤔

Listened "Belting During Morning Traffic" playlist - 04/09/2018
  • Defying Gravity (Glee Cast – Rachel/Lea Michele Solo Version) – Glee Cast
  • Like a Boy – Nick Pitera
  • My Songs Know What You Did In the Dark (Light Em Up) – Fall Out Boy
  • The Other Side – Hugh Jackman & Zac Efron
  • The Phoenix – Fall Out Boy

The recent discussion on adding more context to our “About Me” text has me updating mine with a text dump of my hobbies… Maybe a bit too much?

@hartlco I’ve noticed posts missing from my timeline. There’s about 6 hours missing (and I’m sure there’s missing posts and not just that nobody’s posted, because the official app is showing the missing posts). I’ve noticed that this happens when I don’t open Icro for a day or so.