How to Ditch Facebook Without Losing Your Friends (Or Family, Customers or Communities)
Today we startHow to leave Facebook without losing your friends‘ – an annotated slideshow and essay explaining how Facebook engages its users, how interoperability can liberate them and how it would feel to use an ‘interoperable Facebook’ of the future as envisioned by the US access law.
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Millions of Facebook users claim to hate the service – his moderation, both autocratic and lax, his surveillance, its unfair treatment of the contractors who patrol it and the publishers who fill it with content – but they keep using it.
Both Facebook and Its critics have an explanation for this apparent paradox: people use Facebook even though they don’t like it, because that’s how it is mandatory. To some critics, this is proof that Facebook has perfected an “addiction technology.” using techniques such as “dopamine loops”. Facebook is quite taken with this criticism, since it fits seamlessly into Facebook’s advertising campaign: “We are so good at manipulating our users that we can help you sell them anything.”
We believe there’s another explanation: Angry Facebook users continue to use the service because they don’t want to leave their friends, family, communities, and customers behind. Facebook’s own executives share this belief, according to internal memos in which those executives plan to increase “switching costs” for disloyal users leaving the service.
Economists call everything you have to give up when you change products or services “switching costs”. Abandoning your printer can cost you all the ink you bought in bulk. Changing the operating system for mobile phones can cost you the apps and media you paid for.
The switching cost of leaving Facebook is losing touch with the people who are left behind. Because Facebook encloses its messaging and communities in a “walled garden” that only users who are logged into Facebook can access, leaving Facebook means you leave behind the people you care about (hypothetically, you could all organize so that they go, but then you run into a “collective action problem”—another term used by economists to describe the high cost of getting everyone to agree to a single course of action).
This is where interoperability comes into play. Laws like the US ACCESS Act and the European Digital Markets Act (DMA) aim to force the biggest tech companies to allow smaller competitors to connect so their users can exchange messages with the individuals and communities that use them. Reconnected to Facebook – without using Facebook.
How to Ditch Facebook Without Losing Your Friends explains the reasoning behind these suggestions – and provides a walkthrough of using a federated, interoperable Facebook, from setting up your account to protecting your privacy and controlling your own community’s moderation policies and override the restrictions and permissions that Facebook has unilaterally imposed on its users.
You can access the presentation as a full video, as a highlight film, as a PDF, or as a web page. We hope that this user’s guide to an imaginary product will stimulate your own imagination and give you the impetus to demand – or make – something better than our current top-heavy, monopoly-dominated Internet.