How would your "normal" mail client filter out the messages that are for this app? People have lots of different mail clients which they might not be able (or willing) to configure. Or would you expect a dedicated address.
I recently opened an account on Diaspora using the sechat.org pod. It has been a fun experience so far. The network effects mean that moving your friends over to it will be another matter. But it has been fun to use.
also, it's email. yes, it's highly insufficient
The problem with Facebook's usefulness isn't that I find it useful, it's that everyone else in my circle finds it useful. This means that any event, major life change like marital engagements and announcements of expectancy or child birth, and general updates of wellbeing from my elderly family are all communicated via Facebook. For example, a friend of mine from high school recently had a child. I had not logged into Facebook for over a year, and suddenly found myself embarrassed for my lack of keeping up with her when I ran into her at the grocery store while she was chasing down a toddler who had escaped down an aisle. I did not have the slightest clue as to her family status, because I stopped logging into Facebook to receive those updates and she stopped going out to parties and bars where we normally would run into each other (to avoid drinking and cigarette smoking), and it just appeared like we drifted apart.
Even now, some friends of mine are planning a trip together, and it's entirely done within a closed group on Facebook. There is no way for me to participate in this trip without maintaining some status on Facebook, else my significant other will have to just relay all that information, which is tiring, and prone to the "telephone" effect.
And that's life. Perhaps you weren't that close enough anyway to find about the child. And that's life too.
The notion of "being connected" with all the people you knew is is similar then the "I need to be happy, if not something is wrong with me" and got introduced with modern social media (particularly Facebook).
It's like opting out of electricity - pretty theoretical. So we regulate it so it doesn't f. us over too badly. This is what needs to happen here.
We don't need Gmail. We could have Freedom Boxes to host and send our mail instead (and filter whatever spam gets out our infected Windows machines). Right now we can't because of the spam filtering policies of most big players, but if everyone have a Freedom Box that's no longer an issue.
Likewise we don't need Facebook, though since I don't use it unless coerced to I don't know what a replacement should look like.
We don't need Twitter.
We don't need YouTube. Or at least we won't need it when our broadband finally get freaking symmetric as it always should have —not happening any time soon despite making absolute sense on the fibre. Then we could just upload our videos from our Freedom Box with a peer-to-peer protocol.
We don't need Dropbox. Distributed backup is a thing, and keeping those backups secure is easy —except for the master passphrase, but you can at least write it down if you're afraid of forgetting it.
Search engines… well, we don't know how to decentralise them yet. The rest is a solved problem: we only to get the logistics and usability straight –a rather daunting task unfortunately.
There is not, and has never been, an inalienable right to use somebody else's property (aka Facebook's network) to communicate. You are not entitled to coerce Facebook into building their product to work the way you want. On the contrary, it's Facebook's right, as the owner and creator of their platform and network, to handle all of the network traffic that you are voluntarily sending them however they want.
There are more communication methods available today than ever before. If a person you are trying to contact has stubbornly refused to use all of them except Facebook, that is not Facebook's problem, and it doesn't make them obligated to you in any way whatsoever.
If you don't like it then send an email, send a text message, call them, write them a letter, visit them, hire a courier, fax them, use another social network, etc.
> "If you don't like it then use X or Y"
If you are not aware that a service you're using is spying on you how are you supposed to know you don't like it in the first place? The cynical answer is that you can just expect them all to spy on you by default. Well if that's the case then we are getting back to the debate about privacy being an inalienable right.
