14 reactions on “Bye Facebook, Reprise”

1. Interestingly, my choices during this period are the opposite – I started to write and to be more where the people are, valuing the connection and conversations more than my feelings about the space where it happens. Moving away from FB now feels like moving from a toxic neighbourhood in the city, just because you can, instead of staying and doing something to make it less toxic for everyone else or helping others to create better spaces.

   Yes, voting with your feet is a way to make an impact. But, thinking about all the friends in physical places with toxic leadership, I wonder how much it is also a privilege.

   • I did that, with my Facebook account in the past two years, making a point to only post constructively. The issue with FB is that that won’t fix things, not like it might by becoming a constructive force in your city neighbourhood. If I am in a physical place with toxic leadership I probably can’t pick up and leave but can vote. If I am dealing with a toxic company the only way available is to not give them my business. I won’t be able to vote against Zuckerberg after all. FB is not a political entity, and has shown in the past 14 years to not be willing to learn to be a constructive place, right from the original “dumb f*cks” comment. Leaving Facebook is not privilege, anyone can do that. Leaving Facebook and expecting everyone to follow or to run their own blog would be. I have no such expectation. And yes I do have my own blog, but if I hadn’t there are still plenty of spaces out there that are free and currently not as toxic as FB is that offer similar options. Fact is, all of the people I interact with on FB, I also interact with in various other channels. I don’t need FB for it, I just thought I did for a long time. Rather, I’d turn it around, that it’s a sort-of privilege to be able to afford having fun in a toxic swamp, thinking it won’t be affecting you otherwise. As that seems to be ignoring the active damage the company is doing, while we’re having a friendly chat on one of their platforms. At worst it may become a sort-of codependency.

2. I guess most of our American friends are dealing with the question “what can I do when voting is not enough”…

   Most of the people I have on FB I don’t have in any other places (and with some of them, like family and close friends I tried that for years). I’ve seen how Dutch homeschooling community has moved from hardly working mailing lists to FB and how many other channels were tried and didn’t work for that despite the fact that many of the same people have concerns about the digital presence and surveillance. I see similar processes with permaculture and gardening people.

   I do not see FB as something “for fun”, it became one of the baseline communication infrastructures that work for the mainstream public and not only tech-savvy people. Yes it is far from free, but way better in terms of access to information than TV, newspapers or relying on email and phonecalls from friends. Only people who have their own indieweb tools or can afford lack of connectivity can leave big platforms like FB or Google.

   May be “privilege” is not the right word, but let’s say it is a choice that serves personal interests of not being part of toxic environment and does little for those in the community who can not afford that choice. It is similar to choosing for homeschooling our kids – we can afford it and shields our family from what we see as toxic in the system but does not do much to make education better for those who do not have that option.

   • I disagree with that comparison, Facebook is not like the schooling system, and not like a troubled neighbourhood. There are many tools out there, which are free, where you could communicate with others like you do on Facebook. There’s a cost in moving there, and activating others to join, but like there was nothing holding back people to come to Facebook from whatever YASN they were before (remember Hyves, it imploded in months from like 80% penetration), there’s nothing holding you back to go someplace else. It’s a company, a company with a crap proposition (which they make easy for you to ignore because they gloss over the crappy parts, and have the convenient parts alwasy facing you). Which is why a comparison with the schooling system is false imo. That is a public service system, that you can escape if you can afford to, but which you could work to change as well. Founding a school is among them. Facebook is a company, not a public service and thus fundamentally different from the counter examples you give. There is nothing you can do to change FB other than become a deciding shareholder. Your only choice is to not do business with them if you think they’re crap.

     • And yes that is uncomfortable and inconvenient. Which is a signal I think of having gone too far down the rabbithole.

       And yes, like you I see convincing others to come away with you is hard. I suspect mostly because it was viable to assume that if they don’t move I wouldn’t either. Going away is the one piece of information that lacks in the equation if all we do is suggest to go someplace else.

     • I guess the main difference is that I do not see that in terms of change and accountability governments are much better than corporations. Not in theory or by definition, but in practice.

       Founding a school within the rules and laws defined by the state (= political parties in power) does not change the system any more than creating a group on FB. At least with FB you are free to leave and come back as you wish, which is not the case with Dutch educational system.

       But I guess we operate in different worlds. I wish I would be convinced that leaving FB is a path to a better world. But there is an internet consultation for a new homeschooling law right now and it will bring little good, sold to the public under the labels of “public service” and “right on education”. Homeschooling community uses FB to mobilise whatever instruments they have next to voting to make a difference. So, choosing between toxic of FB or toxic that families with kids experience just because their interests deviate from outdated and politically loaded “public interest”, I go for the lesser evil.

       • “But I guess we operate in different worlds” is precisely my reason, as FB is an active instrument in creating a situation that might make people feel that, because it deliberately and continuously decides what you see in their platform (which thus isn’t a platform anymore), including what you see if you go to the timeline of a friend. Of course public interest is politically loaded, I suppose it is the very definition of it. Thinking FB isn’t, is the crux imo. It very much is, although it will deny it at every turn, and that makes it toxic and malicious. In short, as someone said to me in some other channel “Facebook *appears* necessary to Facebook users because Facebook makes it very difficult to see the world outside Facebook, but there *is* such a world and anyone can live in it.” With FB and Whatsapp now deleted from my channels, I’ll see how that plays out.

         • Well, it is a bit naive to assume that for me and many others on FB it is the main lens to see and experience the world. There is a lot that wrong with it and a lot of people using it are aware of that. They usually have other reasons than being blinded by algorithms to stay there. Echo chambers exist not only on big platforms and recognising them is important regardless of where your data sits.

           Anyway, good luck with your indieweb journey. I hope to see more posts on using those tools for connections outside of the tech crowd and for working on good causes next to doing business. The world can do with inspiring examples and practical how-tos of making a difference without relying on corporate monsters – at least with this one we should be on the same page 🙂

3. That’s Whatsapp deleted too. Which completes removing myself from the Facebook company services. My preferred messaging apps are Signal and Threema, and I’ve been using them for years for 95% or so of my messages. I kept Whatsapp as a passive inbox, for some of my network, never initiating contact there, but at least being reachable through it. However over time I noticed a creeping growth of my Whatsapp interaction, something I’ve been trying to avoid for 2 years. Reading Om’s posting yesterday, and especially the conversation with Lilia in the comments today made me conclude that Whatsapp needs to go too. Because of the company that owns it.

4. That’s Whatsapp deleted too. Which completes removing myself from the Facebook company services. My preferred messaging apps are Signal and Threema, and I’ve been using them for years for 95% or so of my messages. I kept Whatsapp as a passive inbox, for some of my network, never initiating contact there, but at least being reachable through it. However over time I noticed a creeping growth of my Whatsapp interaction, something I’ve been trying to avoid for 2 years. Reading Om’s posting yesterday, and especially the conversation with Lilia in the comments today made me conclude that Whatsapp needs to go too. Because of the company that owns it.

5. Another week entirely dedicated to finishing up a client report. The first part I finished Monday, but then I was completely stuck in the second part, and I could not see a way out of the hole I dug for myself. Discussing it with my consortium partners for this project helped a lot, and brought to the fore that the clue to a solution lay in an observation I had already made in the draft report. Once unstuck, I finally could progress. It still took way too many hours, including this weekend, but at least the stress of being stuck was gone. Thanks to Elmine for accepting my weeks long exile in my home office. I even found the time this week to start with the next phase of the project, so that the delay on this part does not carry over into the next stage.
   This week I:

   Worked full time and then some on the mentioned client report.
   Did some bookkeeping, preparing the May invoicing
   Had a meeting with our MT
   Discussed an ongoing client project concerning a data publication platform
   Had two meetings for another client on digital transformation
   Planned interviews for the next stage of the EU High Value data study I’m involved in
   Had the winter tires on the car changed, finally. We returend from a skiing trip in the French Alps days before the first Corona patient was detected in the Netherlands, and soon after the lockdown happened. This was the first opportunity. The tires won’t have suffered much, I’m already doing 2 months with one tank of petrol.
   Received a Philips PicoPix Max beamer. I ordered it last October, or rather two, as part of an IndieGogo funding campaign. Originally planned for delivery by the end of the year, it was delayed until after Chinese New Year. By then the factories were closed due to the pandemic, so production really only started late March again. One received, and first impressions are good. The second one seems to have been lost by DHL…
   I dumped Facebook and Whatsapp

   How working on the report felt these past weeks

6. As Jacky Alciné says, an amazing exit from Instagram (a Facebook company) by Greg Storey:

   Also see last month’s post by Om Malik leaving WhatsApp and IG, and my own second ditching of FB at the same time (the first ditching was 2 yrs earlier).

7. Wednesday it was 18 years ago that I first posted in this space. The pace of writing has varied over the years, obviously intensively at the start, and in the past 3 years I have been blogging much more frequently again (with a correlated drop off in my Facebook activity to 0), more than at the start even.
   This year is of course different, with most of the people I know globally living much more hyper local lives due to pandemic lockdowns. This past year of blogging turned out more introspective as a consequence. In the past few years I took the anniversary of this blog to reflect on how to raise awareness for grasping your own agency and autonomy online, and reading last year‘s it’s so full of activity from our current perspective, organising events, going places. None of that was possible really this year. I returned home from the French Alps late February and since then haven’t seen much more than my work space at home, and the changing of the seasons in the park around the corner, punctuated only with a half dozen brief visits to Amsterdam and two or three to Utrecht in the past 8 months. A habit of travel has morphed into having the world expedited to our doorstep, in cardboard packaging in the back of delivery vans.
   Likewise my ongoing efforts and thinking concerning networked agency, distributed digital transformation and ethics as a practice has had a more inward looking character.
   Early in the year we completed the shift of my company’s internal systems to self-hosted Nextcloud and Rocket.chat. When the pandemic started we added our own Jitsi server for video conferencing, although in practice with larger groups we use Zoom mostly, next to the systems our clients rolled out (MS Teams mostly). Similarly I will soon have completed the move of the Dutch Creative Commons chapter, where I’m a board member, to Nextcloud as well. That way the tools we use align better with our stated mission and values.
   I spent considerable time renovating my PKM system, and the tools supporting it, with Obsidian the biggest change in tooling underneath that system since a decade or so. It means I am now finally getting away from using Evernote. Although I haven’t figured out yet what to do, if anything, with what I stored in Evernote in the 10 years I’ve been using it daily.
   This spring I left Facebook and Whatsapp completely (I’ve never used Instagram), not wanting to have anything to do anymore with the Facebook company. I departed from my original FB account 3 years ago, which led to me blogging much more again, but created a new account after a while to maintain a link to some. That new account slowly but steadily crept back into the ‘dull’ moments of the day, and when the pandemic increased the noise and hysterics levels aided by FB’s algorithmic amplification outrage machine, I decided enough was enough. A 2.5 year process! It more or less shows how high the, mostly misplaced, sense of cost of leaving can be. And it was also surprising how some take such a step as an act of personal rejection.
   I also see my Twitter usage reducing, in favour of interacting more on my personal Mastodon instance, through e-mail (yay for e-mail) and LinkedIn (where your interaction is tied to your professional reputation so much less of a ragefest). Even though I never dip into the actual Twitter stream, as I only check Twitter using Tweetdeck to keep track of specific topics, groups and interests. This summer I from close-up saw how the trolls came for a colleague that moved to a position in national media. Even if the trolling and vitriol was perhaps mild by e.g. US standards, it made me realise again how there was an ocean of toxic interaction just a single click away from where I usually am on Twitter.
   On the IndieWeb side of things, I of course did not get to organise new IndieWebCamps like last year in Amsterdam and Utrecht. I’ve thought about doing some online events, but my energy flowed elsewhere. I’ve looked more inwardly here as well. I’ve been bringing my presentation slides ‘home’, closing my Slideshare account, and removing my company from Scribd as well. This is a still ongoing process. The solution is now clear and functional, but moving over the few hundred documents is something that will take a bit of time. I don’t want to move over the bulk of 14 years of shared slide decks, but want to curate the collection down to those that are relevant still, and those that were published in my blog posts at the time.
   I am tinkering with a version of this site that isn’t ‘stream’ (blogposts in reverse chronological order), and isn’t predominantly ‘garden’ (wiki-style pseudo-static content), but a mix of it. I’ve been treating different types of content here differently for some time already. A lot never is shown on the front page. Some posts are never distributed through RSS, while some others are only distributed through RSS and unlisted on the site (my week notes for instance). Now I am working on removing what is so clearly a weblog interface from the front page. The content will still be there of course, the RSS feeds will keep feeding, all the URLs will keep working, but the front of this site I think should morph into something that is much more a mix of daily changes and highlighted fixtures. Reflecting my current spectrum of interests more broadly, and providing a sense of exploration, as well as the daily observations and occurrences.
   Making such a change to the site is also to introduce a bit of friction, of a need to spend time to be able to get to know the perspectives I share here if you newly arrive here. I think that there should be increased friction with increased social distance. You’ll know me better if you spend time here. The Twitter trolling example above is a case of unwanted assymmetry in my eyes: it’s incredibly easy for total strangers to lob emotion-grenades at someone, low cost for them, potentially high-impact for the receiver. Getting within ‘striking distance’ of someone should carry a cost and risk for the other party as well. A mutuality, to phrase it more constructively.
   Here’s to another year of blogging and such mutuality. My feed reader brings me daily input from so many of you, around the world, and I’m looking forward to many more distributed conversations based on that. Thank you for reading!

8. It’s the end of December. This means it is time for my annual year in review posting, the ‘Tadaa!’ list.
   Ten years ago I started writing end-of-year blogposts listing the things that happened that year that gave me a feeling of accomplishment, that make me say ‘Tadaa!’, so this is the eleventh edition (See the 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010 editions). I tend to move on immediately to the next thing as soon as something is finished, and that often means I forget to celebrate or even acknowledge things during the year. Sometimes I forget things completely (a few years ago I completely forgot I organised a national level conference at the end of a project). My sense of awareness has improved in the past few years, especially since I posted week notes for the past few years. This year was different as well as the pandemic and resulting lock-downs meant a more introspective year than usual. Still it remains a good way to reflect on the past 12 months and list the things that gave me a sense of accomplishment. So, here’s this year’s Tadaa!-list, in no particular order:

   We started the year, as per our tradition, celebrating New Year with dear friends that live in Switzerland. Of course this year we can’t travel to Switzerland, and miss seeing our friends. I’m glad we did go last year. We quarantined ourselves from before Christmas, so we can visit E’s parents around NYE. We haven’t seen them since late August.
   Jamming into the new year 2020 in the Swiss Alps
   Around the start of the first pandemic wave in March I spent a considerable amount of time pushing for still pending signatures on projects and for prompt payments on outstanding invoices. It meant my company entered the lockdown with some confidence. No projects were postponed by clients, no invoices went unpaid. It provided the team with reassurance. We did not need to apply for any economic support measures, leaving them for companies in more need.
   I’ve been working remotely for 16 years, and all of us were accustomed to working in a distributed way, but we had just opened our own office last year in Utrecht. The office served as a safe working spot for one or two people living nearby really needing to get out of the house. We distributed some office chairs to the homes of our team members early on, as we didn’t want them to sit on kitchen table chairs for week, months, a year on end. In the end, due to the many video calls, we saw more of each other and more of us at the same time, not less this year.
   In a distanced line at the bakery, when it was still novel. Showing new cycling skills to grandma on video.
   Our team became much more of an actual team this year, caused by being more visible to each other. We built and depended much more on each other. Each of us struggled mentally at times, working from within the same four walls each day, but the support of the others was there to get through it. In March we let go of our just previously set company goals for 2020, and made team stability our major aim.
   Acknowledging the new reality, as well as our mental response, the team’s reflex was to step on it. With great results. Simply getting on with it resulted in our best year yet, with an 18% increase in turnover compared to 2019, despite having a policy of not setting financial goals, and also letting go of the original 2020 goals we set. There’s a lesson in that. Because we did well, we could extend E’s contract with a year in June, newly hired P in September after the completion of her internship and Master thesis with us, and offered S a fixed contract in October. We brought our colleague J on board as a shareholder and fellow entrepreneur (making him the only one we fired from the company, in January)
   Ethics,not as an abstraction, but as a practice, became a much more central element in our work concerning data, data governance, and responsible data use. I helped facilitate a great workshop with colleagues in the Amsterdam Arena early in the year, we injected ethical discussions in most of our ongoing projects, and created a data-ethics card game as a end-of-year present to clients.
   I don’t ski, E’ does only a little, but we decided to join a group of friends for their skiing trip in the French Alps in February. Enjoying the snow, simply hanging out with friends, playing with Y building snowmen, under a sunny sky was great. It also turned out to be the only trip we made this year, so the memories of that fun week have served us well.
   In the snow in the French Alps, in the Ajax Amsterdam Arena for data ethics
   In May, in the midst of the first lock-down, I turned 50. E had arranged a week of spread out activities, centered around the theme ‘play’. Part of it was an evening of playing Trivial Pursuit with dear friends online, including a question card deck about my own past 50 years. Another part was a treasure hunt with another dear friend through the neighbourhood. All fun yet within social distancing and other guidelines.
   Video conference Trivial Pursuit. We had the board, every participant their own card deck to ask questions from.
   When the pandemic hit, the NGO I chair was in a much different place than my company: various projects got postponed indefinitely, others never materialised. On top of that the director decided to leave and take up a position long on her wishlist, and a key project manager left as well. It left us scrambling during the summer to ensure the organisation’s future, financial stability, find a new director and replace key people all at once. The NGO’s team and the board pulled it off together. Our board is normally very hands-off, but now we jumped into the day-to-day operations. I’m really glad our joint efforts had an impact. We found a new director and two new project leads within weeks, and all could start almost immediately. The renewed team then pulled hard on ensuring stability. This month we approved the 2021 budget, and the NGO is once more financially ok, the team is actually larger than 6 months ago, and we’re on the look-out for one more staff member. The economic support measures were essential to get through the first few months, but the organisation now no longer needs them.
   At the Kröller-Müller museum
   E and I have known for years we can travel very well together. Now we know we can be very well at home together too. Both of us miss not having much or any time for ourselves, especially when Y is at home during school closures, both of us miss being able to go places for inspiration. Both of us struggled at times. We’re tired and didn’t have any real off-time for 9 months. Nevertheless we managed and complemented eachother well I think. We went for walks and visited a museum or two when conditions allowed, we took care of our home and garden to help ensure our wellbeing.
   Enjoying our downstairs terrace at the water. Many walks through our neighbourhood.
   I finally dumped Facebook completely, including Whatsapp. I had left Facebook three years ago, and then created a new more low-profile account. During the first months of the pandemic I realised that both the rationalisation I had for still being on FB (some connections I had only there), and the increasing level of pandemic-inspired conspiracy-stories (don’t ever call them theories!) and related toxicity made my ongoing presence there unbearable. So I left. Because FB as a company isn’t doing anything meaningful to fix the mess of their own creation, I decided I don’t want anything to do with the company as a whole either. So WhatsApp got uninstalled as well. I don’t miss the never ending doomscrolling on manipulated timelines. I sought out more distributed conversations instead (see further down).
   Desinfection is the new sexy. Socially distanced cycling traffic light waiting zone

   Renovated my personal knowledge management (PKM) system. Making notes differently means a very different pace of learning. I wrote some 800 notions, conceptual notes representing the core of my internalised concepts of 20+ years of work. That can now serve as the base of further learning. Addtionally 100 notes geared to more fact-oriented things, which will grow from being connected to my feed reading inputs, and now that my first focus on establishing the main body of concepts is over. And several hundred immediate work related notes, helping me to get things done. Kept a day log since late April, which was helpful to see the work I did also on days the fragmentation of tasks would otherwise obscure it. All in all, my PKM didn’t change fundamentally, but I reduced the friction of sustaining it a lot. It has already paid off in various ways, and I’ll get better at wielding it in the coming months to help me create, write and work better.
   I had two periods where I struggled this year. Towards the summer, when I was struggling in getting the narrative for a report together, and in the volume of fragmented and overly diverse material I had couldn’t find my way out. And a worse period last month, where for a few weeks I felt increasingly awful. From the relentless efforts without time off, the endless video calls, and no longer being able to easily go outside as the days got greyer and wetter. In both instances I am glad I reached out to others about it, and that act alone already improved much. For the coming months I will try and keep my calendar relatively empty.
   I started my days at 6am in the spring, and kept it up after the summer until now. That first hour of the day, before Y wakes up, I use to read and write a bit. A small sliver of my own time.
   A long September weekend hiking in the hills of Limburg, southern Netherlands
   Took a very deep dive into meteorological data and earth observation / environmental data in the EU, as part of the work to write upcoming European legislation on mandatory open data releases in areas of high socio-economic value. It was a long, and at times hard, process, but I’m pleased with the results in both the thematic areas I was responsible for. If even the low end recommendations are adopted it will mean progress unheard of in about 2 decades of discussion in the meteorological field. If it moves above that low end, it will also mean a very logical but still the biggest open data step for the entire INSPIRE program.
   Enjoyed our home a lot, appreciating it even more than before. So glad we’re in the house we’re in. Allowing us to have different in- and outside spaces to use, to avoid feeling caged in. Growing and picking berries, seeing apples grow. Having our own office space to withdraw in. Y having space to leave her toys around, without it getting in the way. Little details help too, like the smooth feeling door handles we bought when we moved in. Now that I’ve grabbed many more door handles at home this year, I’m oddly thankful for them each time.
   A visit to the Amersfoort Kade Museum, and to the Frisian Museum in Leeuwarden
   Still happy I treated myself to a Nova2 e-ink reader, allowing me to read more non-fiction in a way that fits my routines, and have a seamless way of processing the notes I take from that reading.
   Enjoyed the distributed conversations and connections through my blog, now 18 yrs old. Conversations that cross over different topics, through different modes of communication, and different aspects of life. Thank you all who frequented my inboxes this year.
   Finally, it feels good that professionally there is enough lined up already for the better part of next year. It gives quiet confidence, and creates space to deal with the logistical and mental challenges the ongoing pandemic will still pose.
   Internet retail turned from a convenience to a necessity this year. For groceries, and for DIY material, games, pencils etc to entertain Y. I bought several pieces of art as Christmas gifts, and they arrived within days from across the EU. I could support independent stores I like from behind my desk.
   I’ve worked 1646 hours this year according to my timekeeping spreadsheet, which was 100 less than last year. For the first time it is on average near to my nominal 4-day work week, when counted over 52 weeks. However, in reality it was significantly more, definitely. This as when you’re at home you tend to only count the hours you’re ‘really’ working. Normally if you’re at the office or with a client, you count from arrival to departure as work time. I’ve told our team they should allow for that difference by using a multiplication factor of 1,3-1,5, but I did not really take that advice myself.
   It was a year in which our lives took place in a much smaller space. Being connected, having the world at our digital disposal was good and needed. We’re healthy, doing ok, and professionally secure. That’s a lot already to be thankful about. Onwards to 2021!

   Take care, stay well, reach out. Happy 2021!

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