Robotext
Of all the things that I do to account for my calm & permanent disengagement from the horrifying vagaries of social media, the one thing everyone is most interested in is the robotexter.
In order to broadcast new events, post life updates, and send reminders of cool stuff I’m doing, I run a small robotexter that a couple hundred Chicagoans are on.
In 2014, I bought a phone number on Twilio and wrote a PHP script that would run through a plain text file with a series of phone numbers, and send them all the same mp3 as a robocaller. That eventually changed to a robotexter, where I would send a line of text to people. And now I’m on Bottle, which my friend Will runs. Bottle allows me to attach images, schedule texts, target subgroups of people, and get push notification replies through an iPhone app. It is basically an alternate SMS-based messenger that is focused on one-to-many broadcasts. Think of this as mailing list software, but for texting.
Software like this is not hard. It can do one thing well. The goal is smallness, which businesses historically do not pursue. I don’t need to pay much money to use a thing like this, either to Twilio or Bottle; and I don’t need to use it often.
But when I use it, I use it. I link long-form updates on my life, write up recipes, talk about existence, and gather the people. People are fascinated by it, and think it’s something they should do.
More people should do something like this. More people can. There’s nothing stopping you from writing a couple of scheduled robotexts and having a nice dinner party for your close people. There’s nothing stopping you from using the BCC field on your email client from time to time. There’s nothing stopping anyone from using plain text to put others in the same room.
If you’re reaching out to close people who trust you, you won’t even need software like the one I’m using. This can be as simple as maintaining an address book and emailing people. It can be as simple as a group text. The group text can even have community norms – only post under X or Y circumstance, stay low traffic, encourage muting, reply directly & off-thread – in order to keep things focused.
I’m thinking about putting together a more comprehensive guide for this. It will be focused on novices who hate the following:
- Anything technical
- Configuring a server (lol mastodon)
- Annoying their friends & family
- Throwing events where nobody shows up
- Tedious 1:1 blasts
- Anything that Google has touched in the past 25 years
Given Facebook & Twitter’s dual roles in fractal societal collapse, there has never been a better time. Let me know if you might be interested in this.