Email Is Now the Best Social Network
The words “social network” imply that such tools will connect you with the people in your life. These services no longer work.
At this point in the downward spiral of online life, Instagram is mostly filled with viral videos, none of my friends are active on Facebook, and Twitter—the site I once used to spark and maintain friendships—is a shell of what once… that was it (it’s not even called Twitter anymore). At the moment I have virtually no place to talk to all my friends at the same time.
Except by email. We’re in the era of Web 2.0 (or perhaps the era of Web 3.0, depending on how much you’ve invested in blockchain), and the best way to talk to a group of your friends online is with technology that dates back to the 1970s . If the purpose of social media is to connect you with the people in your life (and I would argue that it is), then email is the only social network left.
It didn’t have to be like this. Social media companies could have made different decisions. They could prioritize real connection over the endless craving for more dopamine. But they didn’t, and their platforms now do a poor job of doing what they were supposedly designed to do.
Meanwhile, email still works fine.
Messaging is a fragmented mess
I throw a party once a month. I send an email to a large group of people to let them know they can stop by. Sometimes a few people will reply to it and hit the Reply All button, causing a little chaos, and that’s okay; sometimes no one does, and that’s okay too. Every month, a few people I email to stop by and we have a great time. People who don’t visit me tell me they still enjoy receiving emails.
It’s hard to think of another tool that I could use to achieve this goal as effectively. There was a time, in the early 2010s, when I could use Facebook, but no one I knew under 60 would be active there. Hypothetically, I could start a Discord server, but that would mean creating an entire online community of friends from different parts of my life, which is something I don’t want to do. And even if I did, it would only work if everyone joined and checked my server regularly. I doubt this will happen.
The same goes for any other messaging service. Most of my friends use a combination of Apple Messages, Signal, Whatsapp, Messenger, and maybe other services I don’t even know about. There’s no easy way to message users of one service from another, which means there’s no easy way to contact everyone at once. There’s nothing that everyone uses, except maybe SMS, and SMS is a terrible way to communicate with large groups.
Email has none of these problems. I can send an email to a group of people, no matter what email provider they use, and it will work. It doesn’t matter if my friends are using Gmail, Outlook, Proton, or an email server running on a Rapsberry Pi – everything works the same, and I can be reasonably confident that people will actually receive and even read the message. If there is a better tool for this, I haven’t found it (and finding tools and software is literally my job).
Email Newsletters Are the New Blogs
Email isn’t just for party planning. I run a small email newsletter . To one degree or another, it is a summary of my articles from various publications, supplemented by some of my thoughts about life. And a photo of my cat. There’s nothing complicated about it, but I think it’s helpful to create and send it out.
There is nothing in my email newsletter that I don’t send to other social networks, including LinkedIn, Facebook, X and Mastodon. Sometimes I even have a short conversation on these platforms after posting something and I really enjoy it. But for some reason, the best conversations always happen in response to my email newsletters. Some of them are with friends I see regularly; some of them with people whom I have not seen or heard of for a long time; some with people I work with; some with complete strangers. These are all real conversations, involving the exchange of ideas and a bit of sharing of opinions – a little social interaction, which is something I can’t say about my interactions on any real social network.
I might not feel this way if I were an influencer with a huge account on one of the traditional social networks. Maybe if I had hundreds of thousands of followers, I would get a decent response to anything I posted. Although I’m not sure I really want it. I also believe that I don’t need to become some kind of pseudo-celebrity for my work to inspire a conversation or two.
With email I don’t have to do that. I’m sure there are people with different experiences, and I’m happy for them. Perhaps they’ll leave me a thoughtful comment under this article saying the same thing, but I hope they decide to send me a nice email instead.