In this specific case, like my kids soccer or swimming team, I would need to convince 15 childrens parents, so 30 people (or more) to switch.

On top of that, the soccer club has more teams, and since soccer practice is scheduled by the club, the club itself would need to switch their ways of working, and that’s where it gets tough.

Facebook, for better or for worse, offers a free platform with a built in blog, instant messenger, calendar, reminders, and an easy way to send messages to all relevant people.

Signal only solves one or two of those problems, meaning they would have to find alternatives for the rest, and I for one don’t miss the time when everybody used some variant of a shared calendar (ie Google calendar) to schedule, and you’d be subscribe to 10+ calendars with notifications going off left and right.

Nor do I miss every club having its own poorly maintained Wordpress site, with ensuing loss of credentials because the admin used “hunter2” as their password.

These people are not tech nerds, they’re enthusiasts for whatever sport they’re teaching our kids, and we should make their jobs as easy as possible.

I’m having more trouble dropping Facebook messenger.

Pretty much everything “real life social” is organized through that. While I haven’t posted anything on Facebook for years, news from my local community, kids after school activities, birthday parties, etc are all organized through that.

It’s funny how things work out.

I’ve spent years checking social media multiple times per day, and due to current (and not so current) events, I initially just deleted twitter. I tried mastodon, but it was a complete echo chamber. Twitter on the other hand was 25% bots and 50% porn, so I just deleted it. Turns out I didn’t miss it.

I recently did the same with Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat. Guess what, not missing those either.

Facebook messenger is tough to get rid of though. I have kids that attend after school activities, and there aren’t really any easy fixes. I doubt I can successfully persuade 100+ people to migrate to signal just because of my political crusade.

It’s not being helped by the fact that ~75% of the people here use iPhones, so most communication not going through messenger goes through iMessage. Last I checked I knew a total of 4 people on signal, despite having 50+ people i regularly communicate with over messenger or iMessage.