In my first blog post discussing my intention to leave Facebook, I talked about wanting to take as many of my Facebook friends with me as possible. The first step was the creation of my address book to make sure I don’t lose any contacts. (Which I’ve worked on almost none since the initial release. I’ll get back to it eventually.) As my second step in the process, I’ve opened the Exit Door group on Facebook as a staging area and point of collaboration for people like me – who want to take their time leaving Facebook.

More than any other topic, the group has been discussing (and exploring) Jimmy Wale’s new social media platform projected WT: Social. Several of the members have accounts on the new system and are discussing their experiences. We also share dirt on Facebook’s bad behavior, methods for replacing the role of Facebook in our lives, and memes about how ridiculous it all is. It’s still a small group. As of this post, there are only 10 of us in there. But the Exit Door is open now, so we’ll see who comes through.

The post Leaving Facebook Step 2: Opening Exit Door appeared first on zasKoda.

On August 6th, nearly a month ago now, I posted the following message to my Facebook friends to announce my plans:

I will be leaving Facebook. It won’t be right away and I will leave a trail so others can find and/or follow me. I’m certainly hoping to take some of you with me. Unlike last time, this time I intend to leave permanently. There will be a series of posts over many weeks as I migrate away, and this is the first one. The next will contain action items should you wish to stay in touch.

On August 23rd, I announced the first step in that process: an open source address book designed to allow my friends to share a variety of contact information with me in a way where I the data is not shared with a third party such as Facebook. I also set an intention to start producing content for my own blog again.

This post is an attempt to capture and share why I started down this long path to leave Facebook. It’s a complex topic and I might reflect on it differently in the future. Lately, my short answer is that “I’m a decentralist” and Facebook is, of course, highly centralized. However, that doesn’t explain why I would choose to leave Facebook over any other centralized service I use on a regular basis. There are two things that make Facebook the service I feel I need to leave. First, I believe Facebook is one of the more dangerous centralized services. Second, Facebook has been one of my worst addictions. Addictions to drugs or alcohol will slowly kill you. Many people who struggle with alcohol or drug addiction also have a co-occurring mental health condition such as anxiety or depression, so look for rehab facilities at recoverydelivered.com. Facebook is a little different in that, instead of just being bad for you, it is looking to exploit you and manipulate you. It was designed that way.We now know that the political consulting firm named Cambridge Analytica used the Facebook machine to drastically impact the 2016 American Presidential election. The details of this propaganda campaign are the central topic of the documentar The Great Hack; I highly recommend watching it. The fact that Facebook asked Cambridge Analytica to destroy the data they ended up using for their campaign doesn’t go very far in making me feel like Facebook is responsible enough to hold so much of our personal information.We didn’t need the Cambridge Analytica incident to know Facebook is a problem. When the service is free, you’re not the customer – you’re the product. We’ve accepted that advertisers are trying to manipulate us into buying a product of some kind. This seems innocent enough. However, that kind of advertising model creates an incentive for Facebook to design their experience to keep you viewing more and more adverts, thus the platform has evolved to hook us rather than satisfy us. And I have been hooked.

After moving from Boulder to Seattle, I found myself spending a lot of time “socializing” on Facebook and not engaging the new city. I was using Facebook as a social crutch and I needed to stop. So somewhere around 2014/15 I decided to take a year off. It was wonderful and also painful. Without Facebook, I had more time – time that I invested into other important parts of building a life here in Seattle. However, without Facebook I wasn’t getting the same updates on the lives of friends and family I cared about. I was missing pictures, events, and critical opinions on popular memes. When the 2016 election was approaching, I decided to come back from my Facebook vacation and re-engage. The time off gave me a lot to reflect on.

A lot of good stuff happens on Facebook. We wouldn’t use it if it didn’t have some kind of value to us. However, I find that I am often going to Facebook to connect but only engaging with people I barely know about topics that frustrate and upset me. I find it harder and harder to keep track of authentic posts made by my friends. When I visit their personal pages, I see lots of relevant posts about their lives that I never saw in my feed. The fundamental value of keeping up with friends and family isn’t as prevalent as it once was. Yet I still keep checking Facebook, hoping for something that’s going to make me feel some kind of way – and I don’t think that’s a good thing.

So I have resolved to leave, but not in a rush. I know that I have to. Facebook lacks the ethical foundation to warrant surrendering so much of my personal power. However, I’m going to take my time and try to maintain – perhaps even strengthen – my connection with Facebook connections that I care about. And I’m going to document and share the story along the way right here on this blog.

I’m also hoping to start making more decision to support the kind of Internet I believe in – the Internet and open Web we all were dreaming of before taking some wrong turn along the way. If I can leave Facebook, who knows what I’m capable of.

The post Leaving Facebook: Why appeared first on zasKoda.

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.

The post Leaving Facebook Step 1: Address Book appeared first on zasKoda.