 4 years ago, I deleted my Facebook account. At first, I thought, “How can I do this? All the important people in my life won’t know what’s going on with me.” That fear was unfounded. As it turns out, all the important people still know what’s going on. You see, once they find out I’m not on Facebook, they get a hold of me through some other means. Typically, that means phone, email, or text message. And a few have joined the Fediverse. 61 comments
@atomicpoet same here. Event feature I sometimes miss, but nothing about their feed. Facebook (& Instagram) turned into a feed of ads for me. Deleting Facebook actually improved my life in one substantial way. It got rid of all the ex-girlfriends and high school bullies that wanted to be my “friend”. And when I awkwardly bump into old acquaintances, and they ask me to be Facebook friends, I just tell them, “I’m not on Facebook!” Their reply is usually, “Good for you!” And neither of us have to pretend to be friends when we’re actually not. Another benefit of not having a Facebook account is that dinners with extended family are so much better. I don’t know about any cousin’s conspiracy theory beliefs. Neither do I know about interpersonal drama between aunts. There is joy in obliviousness. It’s great to think about the best of people instead of knowing about their worst. When you delete your Facebook account, you truly discover how much of your day was just filled with noise and bullshit. I mean, I think people who use Facebook already know. But once you get rid of it, it’s shocking how different your day is once you no longer scroll through that meaningless claptrap. Yes, there’s the occasional good thing on Facebook. But to be real, all the negativity and fluff doesn’t make up for the good. No longer checking Facebook feels good.  Here’s another great thing about not having a Facebook account: Nobody assumes they know anything about me. If they want to catch up, they have to actually call or meet—hear my voice. Yes, that means a higher barrier to entry, but it means that people who are interested in me need to be invested in our relationship. Funny how that works, right? Occasionally, I get people who are absolutely insistent about connecting with me online. So I say to them, “These are the means to get a hold of me.” 95% of people are completely fine with email. And if people absolutely want to follow me on social media, I tell them about the Fediverse. By the way, I’m completely convinced that 80% of all social networking can be done through email and calendaring. Personal updates? Yep. Photo sharing? Yep. Events? Yep. Email’s shortcoming is that it’s not so good for public-facing media. But that’s where ActivityPub picks up the slack. If you use email, then you’re using the Internet technology with the greatest network effect on the planet. Not even Meta can compete with email. Better yet, just like the Fediverse, email is federated. Anyone who says that social media won’t work if it’s decentralized and requires multiple servers is lying: they use email. And email is why it was so easy for me to delete my Facebook account. I’ve actually had this thought for awhile. If people could subscribe to your Mastodon feed via email, then you’ve greatly increased the network effect of the Fediverse. Yes, I know that you can do this via RSS but why not email too? Not everyone uses RSS but everyone uses email. If frequency of Mastodon messages is a problem, just send a daily email digest once a day. If we only include modern technologies, then the Fediverse only has 12 million users. But I also think that email, NNTP, finger, etc. should be considered part of the Fediverse. If we consider *everything* federated as part of the Fediverse, then the Fediverse has billions of users. In fact, it’s weird to think that anyone would not be part of the Fediverse.  @atomicpoet because as with all #MultiVendor / #MultiProvider & #OpenStandards, #ActivityPub and thus the #Fediverse, everyone can build Backends and Frontends and not rely on the whim of a commercialized #API...  As much as people say they need Big Social, that’s actually not true. If you have email, you have an easy migration path away from Big Social. From there, it really is just a matter of filling in the blanks. Need a blog? WordPress. Need a microblog? Mastodon. Need a photo gallery? Pixelfed. So on and so forth. In fact, if you want to bring people over to WordPress, Mastodon, and Pixelfed, use email to spread the word! @atomicpoet I mean, there are a feckton of options for all the #GAFAM's services and products. And sites like https://alternativto.net and @european_alternatives make it easy to find options... What most people need to know is that they social network without Big Social every day. I’ve already mentioned email—which is a social network. But also any kind of address book with calendaring is social networking. Document collaboration too. IRC and SMS as well. Once people become aware of this, the notion of a Fediverse isn’t that big of a leap.  @atomicpoet Even Signal groups, or iMessage groups have take over the role of secure private social networks for some clusters of family and friends... @atomicpoet Realistically, email is a euphemism for Gmail. Arguably Google isn't Big Social though given how bad they are at it  @atomicpoet I have deactivated my Facebook and only use it for Messenger now. I miss some family updates, but also have been free of the anti-trans sentiments of some of my former FB friends. Even getting rid of Instagram has been so lovely. I don’t miss either platform. @atomicpoet the last psychiatrist was talking about how the media presents you with a narrative about how to practice moderation on your social media habits, taking it as a foregone conclusion that you NEED to be wired in at least some fraction of the time. In this political mess I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to reclaim the power of the local and of word of mouth. There's been a kind of death of the local that makes it very hard for movements to plan without those plans getting coopted. @atomicpoet A lot of people I know are on Facebook. Is there a Fediverse equivalent? I don't know what features Facebook has, so I can't compare. I hope it's something a lot better than Mastodon. As that is very shallow and shouty, and poor for communities. @atomicpoet But then Cambridge Analytica won’t be able to use targeted ads to cajole me into supporting fascist politicians ☹️  @atomicpoet there are numerous ways to turn an RSS feed into an email (Mailchimp offers one and a quick search of rss to email turned up a lot of options. I’m fairly sure there has to be some decent open source tools out there that can accept an RSS feed in and output an email. The challenges including all the usual stuff about outbound email (so not simple to get mail delivered and not seem as spam but solvable) but also hopefully having the result render in a way that is easy to read   @atomicpoet  @atomicpoet very tempted to just go back to our old email group. Had the best interaction on that list and all our friends stayed in touch. Now I have to figure out eight different social media or messaging apps and who the hell is on what, and the best way to contact them. I had to set up a discord to talk to my kids cause that's the only thing they pay attention to. It's just nuts. @atomicpoet I worry that this decentralization may be at constant threat of becoming a monoculture due to the way big players like google and microsoft have influence on hosting your own email by being opaque and rejecting mail arbitrarily just because it came from outside of their walled garden. far too much spam that lands in my inbox is from gmail addresses and google doesnt lift a finger   I've wondered how effective SMTP but with ActivityStreams payloads instead of 7 bit ASCII or MIME might be. ActivityPub also has a neat mutual authentication method to authenticate messages between sender & receiver that might be possible to port.  @atomicpoet I got into some community organising work a few years ago (in the academic space)… and the first lesson we were taught was “there’s nothing as effective as e-mail for connecting with someone … or away the Facebook groups etc, make sure you get your emails out”. Generally it panned out to be very true. A factor I didn’t realise until the friction hit me directly is that big social fragments social media but everyone has an email. @atomicpoet @tchambers I don't think these describe the primary use cases for modern social media, and definitely nowhere near 80% of the hours that people put into platforms. @atomicpoet I deleted mine 4-5 years ago now, but I do kind of find that Reddit and other apps can have the same effect. Reddit is especially super toxic when you only look at the popular posts. It’s all horrible news and crazy videos of violence. @atomicpoet I spent my time in Covid learning the worst of some of my extended family. It hasn't exactly been fun. @atomicpoet@mastodon.social I turned that thing vice versa. no one in my family knows of my extremely opposite political views or that I'm not straight and since almost all of my relatives are very devoted Orthodox Christians, it saves me some nerves @atomicpoet When I finally got rid of Facebook a few years back, I realized that if there was something really important and someone didn’t have my contact, they could leverage their social network (digital and IRL) to get a hold of me. If they weren’t willing to do that, was it that important they get a hold of me? Not being available in an instant is actually really nice. @atomicpoet I deactivated FB a couple of months ago. Didn’t delete because of messenger. I miss marketplace some but not enough to go back. Deleting may still happen.  @atomicpoet I'm on the cusp of cancelling all my proprietary social networks *except* Facebook, where there's a handful of important community-focused groups that I can't leave. But I will be leaving the countless other unimportant FB pages and groups I follow. @atomicpoet Same for me when I switched from FB to Twitter. Now same as I ditched Twitter for mstdn.social. I'm still working on rebuilding my community here. It's a struggle, but it's necessary and a little fun even.  @atomicpoet I left Facebook about ten years ago and the number of things I have missed have been quite high, but parents know to get in touch other ways when significant events are coming up. @atomicpoet it’s harder when the only source of information is locked within FB’s prison. A lot of comms by my children’s public school is posted in a group there. (It shouldn’t be locked in). Several niche groups around interest areas use it (they shouldn’t). I don’t post/react/share there, nor read the main stream, my name is falsified and my avatar is a QR code which scans as “Facebook is evil”. But it’s a necessary evil until a critical mass makes their community open. Those I know who use Facebook a lot either tend to get depressed & angry from it or actively considering even believing conspiracy theories. #Facebook use, from observation, nosedived in #UK. Probably due it's pivotal role in fracturing & pushing apart UK society along the artificially constructed Brexit divide. There used to be nuance in people's attitudes to international / national discussions. FB really instrumental in burning all that to the ground in a family by family fire @atomicpoet that’s cool. I left FB for quite a while But it didn’t work out as well for me as it did for you. They didn’t text or email- I just didn’t hear from them so 🤷 I went back to just keep in touch. @atomicpoet same here, 100% @atomicpoet That's lucky. When I deleted my Facebook a decade ago nobody bothered to stay in touch. |
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@atomicpoet Same here. 👍🙏🚀