Ask Lemmy

In my experience, I find it difficult to change what communication network I use to talk to each friend of mine. This has been especially difficult for networks that don't use a phone number to identify people. For a few relationships, we are beginning to shift to a new network (in part due to following advice and the fact that we're passionate about security), but most relationships get "stuck" on whatever network we first used to communicate.

So far, my solution has been to do a complete hard reset: I told people that I'm changing my phone number and that my contact information is available from my website (which is just a static page hosted for free using a public Git forge website) and that I'm not sharing my phone number with anyone who knows what my legal address is (since if they really need to get in contact with me, they can just show up or send me mail, and if they have any technological problem, I'd give them an old laptop I have and help them set it up and/or let them use my WiFi to bootstrap getting their own internet connection). After I did that, everyone who actually talks to me regularly set up their phones so that they can contact me using networks I actually pay attention to. I believe part of the reason this was effective is that I usually wouldn't communicate using SMS or the public switched telephone network even if someone tried to contact me using them and would instead wait to talk to people until we met in person at regularly scheduled events, and it's well known that depending on the public switched telephone network makes me uncomfortable. Also, I am much more communicative using the networks that I'm comfortable with, and when I point that out to people, they agree.

Hopefully the "hard reset" method works for switching between Internet-based networks rather than only from the public switched telephone network, but I haven't tried that yet.

In general, to transition people from using one network to another, I would describe how to contact you using a profile for an internet service you're comfortable using (for me it was a static website, but it could be anything that has high uptime and can be updated (like the "About" field for an Mbin profile or a LinkedIn profile)), and then give that profile provenance (like by linking to it from an "About" section or changing your display name to be a URL for your "contact me" profile), and then tell people that you're not going to send messages using networks that you don't like using. That means that people who actually want to contact you will still be able to figure out how to do so, even if it's been a long time since you stopped using the old communication network.

In the future, I'll avoid sharing any contact information directly, and instead I'll share the URL for my static website (which is essentially just my name (so it's unlikely anyone will forget about it)) and help anyone that's actually interested in talking to me set things up. This means I avoid advertising networks that I don't actually want to use, so even if a new relationship still gets "stuck" on a particular communication network, it will be one that I'm comfortable with using instead of one that I'm not comfortable with using, and people will know how to get in contact with me in case something changes.