“Leaving Facebook”

With Zuck having recently abandoned what semblance of responsibility was still being maintained, I’m hearing a lot of folks saying “I’m Leaving Facebook!” Google searches on the subject are up. So what does that really look like?

Is it really a thing?

I mean, maybe…

But, just like when you were 8, the idea of running away from home is a lot simpler than actually doing it. “Away” is one thing – but where are you running to?

A Facebook Replacement

I saw an article that said “lots of people are leaving Facebook for BlueSky”. And I laughed.

Let’s start with “there’s no way that works.” I’m on BlueSky, and I like it – for the thing it actually does. Which is in almost no way related to what Facebook does.

Bluesky does what Twitter does. But better, and with more options to silence the hate. It started out as a Twitter project. It’s structured to minimize the possibility that an amoral, self-serving lunatic can buy it and burn it just so he can leverage it as a tool to buy a comfy chair in the Oval Office. It’s a fantastic replacement for Twitter.

And that’s where this little quest begins.

Most people have multiple social media accounts – and no clue why other than “because someone said I should” or “it seemed interesting.” Which is like subscribing to newspapers, magazines, and book-of-the-month club because “you like to read”.

Important Lesson #1: Different platforms do different things

Social Media has been around for a long time. Depending on how you look at it, the first social media engine might have been PLATO in 1960s and 70s, which had fora, IMs and chat rooms. Bulletin Boards (BBSs) proliferated in the 80s. GeoCities and Six Degrees in the 90s. In the early 2000s we got Friendster and LinkedIn and MySpace, and then Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. Instagram, SnapChat, and Tinder wouldn’t come along til the twenty-teens.

They’re all “social media” and they don’t all do the same thing.

Twitter, for example, was designed as a “virtual town square”. Comments and conversations could be had but what it excelled at was “announcements”. Journalists and government offices flocked to it, and it became a terrific source for news and current events. But with its totally-public model and lack of threaded conversations, it’s a terrible way to keep in touch with your family and friends.

And when Elon burned it to the ground and people started leaving, they had several really good options. which was, in itself, a problem. How to choose?

Social media is only valuable if the other people you’re being social with are there too. If half the news agencies choose Mastodon and the other half choose Threads, where do you go for your news? Two years later, the dust is beginning to settle and it looks like BlueSky is going to be “where the people are”. But less than 90 days ago, Zapier posted this list of “best alternatives to Twitter“:

• Mastodon for organic interactions
• Bluesky for a Twitter clone
• Threads for Facebook and Instagram users
• LinkedIn for businesses or career-building
• Reddit for nurturing your interests
• Discord for finding your community
• Substack for newsletter fans
• Pillowfort for longer-form content

Lesson #2: To find the right replacement, you have to know what you’re shopping for

Take Instagram, for example, which is part of the “Meta” family along with Facebook. If you have an Instagram account – why? What do you use it for?

• To look at the pretty pictures
  • try Pinterest
• To share cute pictures
  • try Snapchat
• To follow my favorite celebrities
  • Check their profiles or web sites to see what other platforms they use – and, maybe, whether you can see their updates without an account
• To follow my favorite authors / new book releases
  • Checkout Booktok on tikTok. At least, til Elon buys it.

Every “use case” has a different “best answer”. In order to find the thing that will work best for you, you first have to identify what you’re looking for, and “an Instagram replacement” isn’t enough.

Lesson #3: Replacing Facebook will be hard

Most of us are on Facebook because that’s where the other people are. People we don’t see every day, in our distributed world, but don’t want to lose track of. We could email them – but we don’t, and we don’t always have something to say specifically to them, and they probably don’t want to see our most recent kid pictures every month. So Facebook works great – when we have something to say, we can say it – and they can comment and engage or not. Likewise, when they have stuff happening we hear about it, and can congratulate them, ask questions, or admire the pictures of their vacation.

So in order to find a good replacement for Facebook, we need two things: that post/thread-level ability to carry on conversations, and a place to do it where the other people are.

But if you search for “best Facebook replacements”, you’ll quickly discover that the list doesn’t have many places the do quite the same thing. Frequent search result winners include:

Not very promising is it?

If you want an engine “like Facebook” then MeWe is probably your best bet. They went public in 2022, so there’s always the possibility that going full-on for-profit capitalist may result in either a paid model or a degradation in their security and no-ad ethos. Likewise Minds is looking cool but I have real issues with anything that’s built on top of a cryptocurrency. (Sorry y’all but Crypto is still a pyramid scheme, and I’m always going to advise you to consider money put there to be money spent.)

Lesson #3a: And it won’t work unless everyone else does the same thing you do.

Let’s say you and I both move to MeWe. Will all 431 of my friends be there too? All of yours? All of our mutuals? A “network” is made up of “nodes” – in this case, people. Rehoming your network only works if you bring enough nodes for it to keep working like it has in the past. So, in order to do this part right, we might want to look to where the greatest proportion of people are, and start there.

And that brings us to SnapChat. So maybe that will be a good Insta replacement? it has less than half the population of Instagram, but if folks start leaving Meta that could shift quickly, and our next-most-similar tool, Pinterest, has only 1/5 the users so if Snap Chat does the thing you want, it might be a good bet.

But as for a Facebook replacement…

MeWe doesn’t even make the list, with its paltry 20 million users (Oct 2024) – only 6% the population of Facebook. But then, let’s “face” it – with more than 1/3 of the world’s population on Facebook, there just isn’t any place that our network, or even a good sized chunk of it, “already is”.

Lesson #4: Before you go

You probably have a lot of pictures, maybe even some posts and comments that you don’t want to lose. So – before you go (or sooner, since one never knows what’s coming next), you’ll want to export your data so you have a copy.

Facebook allows you to download your data, or to transfer it to some types of cloud storage such as google drive or drop box. But if you’ve been there a while, your media may exceed your available storage, so the most-reliable-on-the-first-try option is usually to download a copy. For this, you’re going to want to log in on a computer, not your phone. So start by making sure you can log in on a computer.

Updating your login

If you’re logged in to the mobile app and don’t use the web site – go to your app first!

1. Update your contact details.
   • If Facebook wants to send you a text or email confirmation, be sure it’s going someplace that you can get it.
   • Have a phone number and an email listed. If one fails, you’ll want the other to exist.
2. Make sure you know your password.
   • Once your second factor is set, try logging in on your computer’s browser.
   • If you have the wrong password, you may have to reset it in order to log in. That will log your mobile app out!
3. Once logged in, click your face in the top right corner to get to the menu and choose Settings and Privacy, then Settings. Scroll down to the “Your Information” section.
   • Facebook will redirect you to Meta’s “accounts center”
   • What you click will change your result.
     • If you click ‘access your information’ you’ll be taken to a page that lets you review all kinds of things about your account – but does not have any obvious download links.
     • If you click “download” or “transfer” you’ll be taken here (link works as of 16 Jan), where you can actually get your data.

Heads up – text data is formatted in a way that only geeks and devs really get. But you can open it in a word processor or notepad app and search it, if you’re looking for something specific – and then just copy and clean up that recipe you were looking for. When in doubt – download it and keep it til you’re sure you don’t want or need it.

So…what do I do next?

The only reason I joined Facebook – after years of stalling – was to stay connected to people. And the people are still there. While that’s true, I’ll keep my account. There’s no point in cutting off my nose – or connections – to spite my face(book). I’ll continue to mostly-ignore my feed and look at only things posted by people I know, and Facebook will not change much for me.

But enough people will be concerned, and enough degradation in content will occur, that it will increasingly suck for folks who actually use it. Which means apps like Minds and MeWe are already looking for how to become the next “It” platform. And someone entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who has always thought Zuck was nothing more than a lucky idiot is already pitching their platform to a venture capitalist.

It took two years for BlueSky to emerge as the potential “winner” of the Twitter-replacement race. In the interim, I created accounts on other spaces – Mastodon, Clubhouse, BlueSky – just in case they became ‘the one’. I connected with friends who were there. I exported my twitter follow and followed lists so I can leverage user names and data to try to find them again on other platforms when the time comes. And over the coming year, if BlueSky solidifies as “the Twitter replacement” I will delete some of those also-ran accounts and take my Twitter activity to BSky.

I’ve always known Zuck was a frat-boy sociopath. The last 30 days hasn’t changed anything I knew about him or about Facebook. I don’t have a need to rush off madly in all directions to make a show of publicly rejecting him. What I have, instead, is a front-row seat to his potential decline. And I’m gonna sit here eating my popcorn and watching it burn. while staying connected to my friends who are still here, while I watch the horizon to see who pulls ahead in the Facebook-replacement race. I’ll create a few accounts I won’t use, and when any friend shows me a handle for that platform, I’ll be sure to connect to them.

The world is changing, and the next few years are going to be full of stuff like this. If I leap up out of my chair for every single event, I’ll be in constant disarray, and constantly exhausted while achieving nothing. So instead of throwing all my papers in the air and stressing about what I need to run away from, I’m going to keep my focus on being clear about what I’m running to, and run only when I’m headed for a clear destination.