I’ve had a personal blog for a rather long time, but I don’t post here anymore. More than any other place, I post to Facebook. I have recently decided that I want to stop using Facebook. This post isn’t about why I’m leaving; I may write about that in the future. Rather, this post is about how. Having taken a 1-year break from the book a few years ago, I know that there are many things I will miss. Instead of making it a hard cut, I’ve decided to take a series of small steps over as much time as needed until I reach the last step and stop using Facebook completely.
When we stopped talking about “blogging” and started talking about “social networks” the only real innovation was that Myspace and then Facebook and others exposed your contact list to your contacts. That’s it, that’s all, that’s the catalyst for the social media revolution – sharing contacts.
My first step in leaving Facebook is collecting all of my friend’s contact information. I couldn’t send most of them a letter if I wanted to. I haven’t maintained a proper address book for a long time; now my contact information is spread across a wide variety of apps where my data is owned by some third party that provides me the service.
I couldn’t find a piece of open source software that did what I wanted, so I wrote my own address book software and shared it on Github. At the time of this blog post, I’ve only had a couple of weeks to work on it. There are enough bugs that wouldn’t recommend anyone other than a Laravel developer to try to use it.
Currently, the app allows your friends to create a contact card with an email address. Once verified by email, your friend can share their contact details with you such as their address, email, birthday, websites, and social media accounts. They will also be able to see your contact details. Future features will provide tagging so than you can group your contacts and restrict what contact details you share with which groups. This will allow you to share your home address with you friends and your business address with your colleagues. On top of this platform I also hope to build a google map integration so you can see all of you contacts on a map at once, a list of upcoming birthdays, the ability to merge accounts should you accidentally create two, proper admin tools to modify shared data, and some other stuff I’m not thinking of.
Most excitingly, I want to make this app federated. If one of my friends decides to run a copy of this app, I will be able to have my copy of the app sync their contact card with fresh data served by their copy of the app’s api. Boom, really simple federation.
Apparently, step 2 of leaving Facebook is coming back to this poor forgotten blog and writing some posts. Or perhaps that’s just part of step 1. Either way, I expect to continue to blog about the process of removing Facebook from my online experience. Truth be told, I’d like to take as many of you with me as I can.
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