The original note, as written at the time
We do not need the full social media package all the time. Some of us prefer dedicated small-range social media like WhatsApp. However, when we need to go fully public, in the case of dating or business, an allowance can be made to link one’s WhatsApp to Facebook without having to open a Facebook or other account.
Ongoing development
We do not need the full social media package all the time. Some prefer small, dedicated media like WhatsApp. But when we need to go fully public — dating, business — an allowance should be made to link one’s WhatsApp to Facebook without having to open a Facebook account.
The demand is precise: use the network you already have, reach the audience you occasionally need, and do not maintain a second identity.
What stops it is not technical. It is that the larger platform’s growth depends on the smaller one’s users becoming its users, so linking is offered only as a migration path — you may bring your contacts, and then you are on Facebook.
The version that would actually serve people is the opposite: a publishing relay. Your account remains the small one; the large platform receives posts from it and shows them, with replies relayed back. No profile, no feed, no obligation to log in.
That is a different business model and it is worth asking why nobody offers it. The answer is that a relay user is a user the platform cannot advertise to, which is the whole point and also the whole obstacle.
Regulation could force it, and the argument is the same one used for number portability: the social graph is the customer’s, not the platform’s.
Until then, the workaround people use is a second account they neglect, and a neglected account is worse than none, because it looks like absence.
Let people publish without joining. That is the whole request.