Asklemmy

Lol, if I had family in my social media I would have to stop using social media.

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.

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.

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.)

Mainly WhatsApp. Would love to use Signal but a lot of our family members won't be switching to anything else.

My mother and my kiddo live with me. I don't really have any other family.

Phone, SMS, Signal/whatsapp (which technically belongs to facebook)

Why would I use a social media to do so

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.

I don't. Sometimes they send me group texts and I send back unsubscribe.

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 contact me using those neat little messages that you can send with PayPal transactions

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.

Signal group chats

They can hire a private eye and try to find me that way.

That's the neat part. I don't.

My younger brother. He's on social media platforms. He's my link to the rest of the clan.

Lemmy. Or the phone, email, actual physical letters/post cards written by hand (people really appreciate these).

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.

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.

The phone bra.

We text, we chat, we decolonize.

Telegram mostly. We have multiple Telegram groups for family

Email and the occasional Skype video call. One of my family has a digital album thing we upload to.

Whatsapp and calls. I tried to get them to migrate to Signal but they won't.

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

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.

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.

Email

LINE? Signal? Text?

Signal and texting. It's not that hard

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.

Element/Matrix

I don’t. I’m estranged from most of my family because I refuse to use Facebook.