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.
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.
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!
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 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...
@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 … put 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.
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