I don't use social media to stay in contact with family; I use various messaging/call technologies.
I know where they live and have their phone number
SMS and telephone and IRL.
I haven't used Facebook for over ten years. I was using Instagram for a while but the algorithm makes using it utterly pointless.
Do you really need to be on top of everyone all the time? Give your relationships room to breathe. Allow yourself to have engaging conversations with people to catch up and get to know them and the things that matter most to them. Allow yourself the liberty of not knowing the most ridiculous crap that they choose to share with the world.
Edit: Oh! I have a friend who I turned on to GroupMe a long time ago. He and his family still use it regularly. So, if you're looking for something, give that a look.
Texting?? I also use this technological innovation called living with your parents.
I don’t use any social media. I give my phone number to family members. They can call/text if they want to reach me.
Signal
You feel like you can't disconnect from these things, but you can. Group text plus family learn quickly that you're outside of social media. They learn to deliberately send photos or call and if your spouse is more social, they become the conduit for "news" and it's filtered down to you when important
Simple. My sister keeps in touch with the family via Facebook and I keep in touch with her by phone. 😁
I dont
I use this alien technology called a phone.
I call them
None, I like it that way. I also don"t pick up the phone when they call.
I have a few friends though, we Signal.
Signal for whole family chat; phone and SMS variously; discord for some
Signal groups, works great
Signal
Not social media, just Signal. I was able to convince them to use Signal even just for our own family group chats.
I just text and email, also actual mail.
Why would I stay in touch with family? Those people suck.
Telegram group chats. It's perfect.
Giant group texts. One has over 30 people, mostly used for baby/marriage announcements. Then a bunch of other group texts for different social groups (stoners, siblings, camping, etc).
They can suck my balls on WhatsApp
a phone number
If my family isn't on Steam Chat, then we don't speak.
I don't use social media to stay connected with family. I lift up the phone, go visit, or if we need to communicate online, I have an XMPP server for the family with end to end encryption. Can share pictures, text, and can even do video calls if need be, send files, and so on.
Don't see the need to involve any kind of social media.
Bold of you to assume that I have family that I want to keep in touch with. Entire family tree is twisted and gnarled, and full of white-trash sociopaths and narcissists.
For the one remaining person I might keep in touch with, it’s a text message at holidays.
i pick up my phone and call em....
honestly it's sort of useless for that function. The only thing my family posts is dumb crap. I still basically have to see them or talk to them to actually catch up. As a means of keeping up with people I have found FB as practically useless.
Phone, SMS, Signal/whatsapp (which technically belongs to facebook)
Why would I use a social media to do so
Lol, if I had family in my social media I would have to stop using social media.
My mother and my kiddo live with me. I don't really have any other family.
They can text me.
Groups in Signal and Threema. For my grandmother, WhatsApp (she doesn't want to use more than one app and her friends are on that one) or calling (because her grasp of that app isn't quite complete.)
WhatsApp. I'd prefer something not owned by Meta, but tech supporting my parents already costs me enough time without adding extra apps to the mix and all their other contacts use it.
That's the funny part - I don't!
Lemmy is my only online presence. I use.......
My phone.
I've convinced them all to use matrix with me. For some reason they still use Skype with each other.
Also it sounds like you still use facebook? In which case doesn't that make you the boomer of this comment section? I don't see why you would use a public social platform to communicate with your family - that's what messaging services are for. Also what's wrong with SMS? It's literally just another messaging service, built into phones by default.
also also if SMS is for boomers.
and people's parents are likely to be boomers.
does it not make sense that people will use SMS to communicate with their parents?
something something something I win.
Only hearing from family when they deem it important enough to pick up a phone and call or text me directly is one of the benefits of not having social media presence with non any anonymous accounts for me.
Signal, texting, emails. I've never been on Facebook, and never will be. I prefer to not be spied upon by evil billionaires.
They can hire a private eye and try to find me that way.
Signal group chats
I don't. Sometimes they send me group texts and I send back unsubscribe.
Texting. My parents and sister in law keep me in the loop of what's going on with everyone else. I've never had a Facebook and they all know how to get in touch with me if they want to. Half of them won't even talk to the other half due to drama people started on Facebook anyway and that was years before all the Trump shit started. Social media is the worst thing that ever happened to society.
The phone bra.
We text, we chat, we decolonize.
They can contact me using those neat little messages that you can send with PayPal transactions
Mainly WhatsApp. Would love to use Signal but a lot of our family members won't be switching to anything else.
I don’t. I’m estranged from my family for several reasons including that I’m trans, gay, in a different city, and a pain in the ass to get ahold of.
When we talk it’s via text
My younger brother. He's on social media platforms. He's my link to the rest of the clan.
Telegram mostly. We have multiple Telegram groups for family
I don't!
My wife does it for me, lol.
I have a group text with my immediate family so we can coordinate semi-regular get-togethers, and I do the same with my own kids, but that's it.
(There's no way I'd be able to get my parents to learn how use anything more complicated anyhow, and just getting everyone in my own household to use a shared calendar was a whole thing. Simpler is better.)
My wife, however, likes staying informed, if not always in touch, and so dutifully does all the obligatory proud parent posting on facebook. She lets me know if anything important comes up from one of the relatives on there.
Distant family stays distant, which is how I like it, because most of them are pretty right wing anyway and the less I have to engage with their gibberish the better. Otherwise I only visit facebook occasionally to browse a shitposting page for a podcast I listen to. It's better this way.
Email and the occasional Skype video call. One of my family has a digital album thing we upload to.
I don't. :)
We had a whatsapp group for a solid decade and then finally migrated it to signal last year.
I don't get the point of using facebook to stay in touch with groups of people. For individuals maybe, but if you want to talk to more than one person, it's pretty useless.
I don't really keep in contact with my family. They can call if they want, and I do the same, but otherwise, we don't interact much. I'm definitely glad I stopped using Facebook, personally. I'm not interested in seeing them fall prey to conspiracy after conspiracy and then demand I participate.
With Covid and the wake of Covid with a return to various aspects of austerity in the US… well most connections I would have had on something like facebook are now trivial or obliterated. There has been a progressive narrowing among most (not all) of the social circles I perceive including family connections.
I really can’t stand Instagram though so I was already fairly isolated before and I am sure plenty of other people have had opposite experiences.
Email
I don’t. I’m estranged from most of my family because I refuse to use Facebook.
Well I just deleted everybody I didn't really interact with until I realized that everybody that mattered was already in my address book.
So I use phone calls and SMS mostly.
Signal and texting. It's not that hard
LINE? Signal? Text?
Element/Matrix
The ones I do stay in contact with either call or text me. With the rest of them I only hear rumors and I assume they do aswell.
Signal for a very few, and everybody else I don't keep up with.
Telephone
Signal for a few friends, Telegram for everyone else.
Threema or text messages. Sometimes calls.
whatsapp for family, because that's where family is.
nobody uses facebook to connect with family, they use facebook to connect with people from high school they haven't seen in 15 years and don't care enough about to actually keep in touch.
My spouse, who uses facebook
Internet. Mostly internet chat and calls.
Unfortunately it's WhatsApp. No matter how much I convince them to get rid of it (because I wanna get rid of it), they choose not to.
Contacts
Delta Chat is encypted packets sent over email. Easy for whole family. Send, text, pics, files, push-to-talk messages, Jitsi videocall integration
Has an alternate UI too, DeltaLab.
Feature rich and easy setup/usage.
