15
votes
Facebook alternatives
We have 2 boys, one of which is 4 months old and my wife is looking for new ways to share updates with friends and family. She doesn't want pictures publicly available anymore but still wants to cast a wide net to many different people. I think she's open to a newsletter of some sort that would allow people to opt in or unsubscribe.
What's the best way to manage a newsletter like this? I want her effort to be the same as Facebook. She can add photos and text to a "post" all from her iPhone and then it gets emailed to everyone that we've added to a list.
Any ideas or suggestions?
I have a Whatsapp group to send pictures/video of my kid to family and friends. It's low effort, secure, the barrier to entry is basically zero as nearly everyone I know has Whatsapp at this point, apparently. People can leave the group or silence it or whatever as they wish. There's occasional chat, it's a nice group really.
Sure, I'd rather do the same thing on Signal but people use Whatsapp so meh. Whatsapp it is.
Bit confused by this because she could just not post the pictures publicly on Facebook if that's her only objection to it. Facebook does have pretty good, granular privacy controls. Plenty of other reasons not to want to use Facebook but not really this one.
I know barely anyone with what's app. I don't even have it. For whatever reason it never penetrated our circle.
We kind of consider anything put on Facebook as public.
@mat my previously reply felt brisk and rude. Sorry about that. Thanks for taking the time to respond. I really wish there was higher usage of some other messaging apps in my family and circle.
No worries, I didn't get that impression but thanks for clarifying.
It's tricky when people are only available on FB. I did get several relatives to install Whatsapp just to join the group with the kid pictures, because that was something they wanted enough to bother with, so you might have more leverage here than you think. Doesn't have to be Whatsapp, of course. If you have the option, push for Signal!
I'm pretty sure the Russian government doesn't care about pictures of your kid so Telegram is probably fine too.. :)
My brother/SIL use Tinybeans, which has an optional daily/weekly email newsletter and basic Facebooky interaction on posts.
Something like a shared Google Photos album could work as well? That might have the fewest barriers for the audience.
Of course, if you're already invested in the Apple ecosystem, you could alternatively make a shared album in Apple's photo app. I don't think you can share exclusively text, but you can add captions.
You also have a perfect use case for rss, but unfortunately it's probably not worth the friction.
Highly recommend give Telegram a try, i have some groups my main with my family and another for close friends, each i have bots which i give updates about my Plex updates or any new tweet we follow as group, and so on.
You can open a public or private channel and people can subscribe similar to a newsletter.
I've used telegram with some co workers overseas and use signal with my wife and a few friends. Unfortunately I don't want to introduce a new app to our families. I really wish apps like telegram or signal had higher uptake in my circles.
Thanks for taking the time to respond.
A Wordpress powered self-hosted blog might sound like an overkill but it will allow you to publish news letters to those who subscribe and also let you share your thoughts in form of blog posts.
How about a mailing list?
If you're willing to set up self-hosted software, you could use something like listmonk to make mailing lists with signup forms and email templates.
There's a live demo you can use to get a feel for the ui and features.
If you don't want do deal with self-hosting, you could just make a list for the contacts you want to send updates to in whatever you use for your existing email (here's how to do it in gmail) and have her send emails to that group.
Consider GNU Mailman. You can get shared hosting with installation through cpanel. It allows users to self-unsubscribe. https://list.org/
Ghost has built-in membership and newsletter features. I host mine on DigitalOcean for $6/month, but they also have an enterprise version available here: https://ghost.org/pricing/
You can make posts available to members only.