A 2020 Goal

I decided in late October that I want to be off Facebook by the new year. I think the company is awful for a lot of reasons. At that time, the most recent reasons were Zuck saying Facebook wouldn’t prohibit political ads with outright lies in them. They also took down some pro-vaccine ads while letting anti-vax conspiracies through. Cool. Cool cool cool.

For the last several years I have primarily used Facebook for the private groups and to share some of my blog posts. At this point there is only one private group that I will really miss. Hopefully I can help convince them to move to another platform like a private Discourse forum, though. As for blog posts, well, I think most people who want to read my stuff know where to find me.

I am starting to archive my Facebook posts on my site and delete the originals, so my Facebook timeline will dwindle. In the next week or so I will have a signup form for people who want to get weekly/monthly digest emails of my posts, photos, and whatnot. I will still occasionally need a Facebook developer account for work. I haven’t decided if I’ll use my current account for that or create a new one. Either way, I don’t intend for the account to have friends or interact.

I believe the web worked pretty well before Facebook and can continue without it. There are many good innovations social sites like Facebook have introduced, but I believe those can be implemented on the open web, giving people more control of their identity and content. That’s why I love the indieweb community.