You are years behind. It was in 2016 that, when traveling and wanting to exchange contacts with cool local people I met, I first began to get the response “My e-mail address? I don’t have email.” Already then many younger people were only on social media, and it was expected that you would exchange those contacts. And some countries never had the email moment at all, so even older people don’t use it.
Ditto for phones, if you mean the PSTN – as time goes on, fewer and fewer people have ever really used that. When people around the world are communicating via their smartphones with a phone-number-based protocol, it’s overwhelmingly WhatsApp, and guess who owns that?
How do they not have email when it's required to sign up for various sites, plus having android phones requires gmail, plus official documents, bank accounts, job applications etc. tend to ask for email; email is used for work as well...?
Notice how in the last several years, a lot of popular sites have allowed signing up with phone numbers, no email address required. Besides making the service more accessible to a generation that doesn’t use email, getting a person’s phone number is great for profiling them for advertising reasons.
In many countries, either WhatsApp or a PSTN number for receiving an SMS is used today for the things that you think are done with email. I have lived in two countries that have highly digitized government services, and they were provided over an official app where email wasn’t part of the signup flow.
Sure, maybe some people use email at work (but WhatsApp has eaten into even that in some regions), but then that address is so associated with work that they don’t use it for social contacts.
Everyone is free to define “need” and who their friends should be as strictly as they want, because, sure, some people could become total hermits. But it’s not going to strike most people as a reasonable definition.
You mention “FB and Instagram”, and I haven’t used either in a decade myself. But the OP did mention “Meta products” and you are ignoring the elephant in the room: WhatsApp. In many countries it has completely replaced the PSTN: you cannot contact a business (they won’t answer normal calls and may not post email addresses), cannot get the necessary info on how to check into the reception-less accommodation one booked, and one will find it hard to maintain contact with people one may well wish to maintain contact with.
That statement applies to the person who won't be your friend because you don't have an Instagram, not to the person who refuses to install an arbitrary app as a precondition to becoming friends.
Someone might be perfectly happy being your friend, and not understanding why you never come to their parties that they advertise via the group chat on whatever platform, or insta posts or whatever.
"If they cared enough they would message me directly on my obscure to normies messaging platform!" Yeah your best friend might. The greater social circle?
I get it, I'm trying to get everyone on signal or onto federated platforms, but I'm realizing that if I wanna talk to The People, I need to go to where The People are.
There was an old YouTube video of a young guy standing around somewhere in East Asia, placards in hand, recording himself showing messages on those placards about why you should quit social media, set to Marching The Hate Machines.
It had a placard in it saying something like "You don't have 100 friends. You have like 4. And that's OK."
The more I'm getting older, the truer this has become. There is something extremely zen-like about letting the past trail away like the wake of a ship, as Watts said.
In an ideal world, those people were dear to me, and me to them, and we would all stay in touch and be one big happy family, n'importe the distance. But it takes plenty out of me just to be there for those that matter most. And for them, putting up with my quirks is burdensome but not an unscalable wall. As it is for me with their quirks in reverse.
Ditto for phones, if you mean the PSTN – as time goes on, fewer and fewer people have ever really used that. When people around the world are communicating via their smartphones with a phone-number-based protocol, it’s overwhelmingly WhatsApp, and guess who owns that?