Limiting the Web in My Life blog.simonwoods.online
I'm starting to think these are the exact thoughts the core of the Micro.blog community were having since and before the Kickstarter stage. I'm late but I got there eventually. 😂
@simonwoods Indeed. Though one thing that I struggle with (and many on m.b. seem not to?) is that Facebook enables connections with the people near me. In a way that absent some major changes, m.b. will probably never be able to (I don't think marketing for theater/dance/music/performance art is on Manton's road map).
From another angle, Vicki Boykis has a good post about the privilege of being able to become "anti-connected":
Women are still expected to participate in wishing people happy birthdays, keeping tabs on who had babies and who went on vacation, liking photos, leaving comments, posting articles, and generally providing the social glue Facebook is still where all the social groups I’m part of (including mom groups, parent groups, Russian groups, etc.) have and talk about their events. To be absent from these conversations is to turn into the “other” in a much different way than men can opt out.
I'm not criticizing your decisions (they sound like good ones). Just thinking about what proponents of the "good" web miss.
@Bruce This is an important point. The social infrastructure for parents around my daughters' classes at school exists purely on Facebook platforms right now.
For the eldest, it's a Facebook group. For the youngest, a WhatsApp chat.
I can't quit those platforms without a social cost to my family.
That problem needs solving.
@adders For the moment, I mitigate it by using containers in desktop Firefox and the Friendly app on iOS to quarantine Facebook as much as possible.
@adders My guess is that you might have the expertise to fix your local problem more than anyone else effected by it. Is there any better solution for them? If there is, I bet you could argue the benefit in making the change better than anyone else in that community. If FB truly is the only good solution, well then that's another matter.
@Ron I don’t think it's a truly local problem, though. It seems to be a consistent pattern - amongst UK parents, at least - that parent groups are organised on FB products.
Without simple, easy to use and widely-available independent products, people are going to be forced into the Facebook ecosystem, or become socially isolated from their peer group.
@adders @Ron @Bruce This is a big issue full of difficult knots of nuance. So for now, I'll say one way I think about this from the idea of first principles:
What is the problem? I do not believe the most pressing issue is that people use Facebook, or even that they only use Facebook for groups or whatever. Rather, that people get lured into the manipulated feed and alter their viewpoints about the world as a result of that activity.
I believe this is the starting point and everything else stems from that problem. When I look at people who are attempting to make alternatives to Facebook, I try to work out if they are also looking at the problems in differeny ways since the monolithic nature of the platform requires a number of different solutions from different types of people.
There is so much more I could say right now but I am instead going to spend a lot of my newly engineered focused time on better researching these issues, working on TIL (related: the motivation for which is to help contribute to using a potential escape route from silos); and then probably blogging about these issues from a place where I am better informed and likely to hold valuable experience due to the increasing pace of changes in my family life.
@Bruce Funnily enough, I wasn't necessarily thinking about Facebook when it comes to my own life; actually, there's a chance I'll make a Facebook account some time in the near future, what with my aforementioned changing family life.
For my personal choices, even though I'm confident you and I are largely in agreement with regard to privelege and the apparent lack of thought from the independent web, the fact remains that these problems are rarely ever solved if people do not focus on themselves first. We simply must look after ourselves and never let the stresses of the larger groups in our lives derail those priorities. I do not think keeping yourself in a highly damaged state puts you in any sort of position to help counter-balance the negative forces of our shared societal cultures.