Reducing your Facebook diet

Facebook is like those Krispy Kreme doughnuts that people bring into the office — instantly gratifying, addictive but nobody even tries to pretend they’re healthy. My first post on the subject explains why. So should you try to cut down?

Since the controversy I’ve talked to a dozen or more individuals, mostly in person (thankfully we still do that). I am surprised by how many are genuinely concerned. Less surprising, but understandable, is the dreaded fear of missing out (FOMO). Assuming it really is a “thing”, this Lifehacker article might help (warning: contains pop psychology).

One topic that came up a few times is that it’s not just Facebook. People have pointed out that companies such as Google also collect enormous amounts of data on us, our connections and whereabouts and yes, it’s definitely worth checking what you share with every one of them. The difference is that Facebook has repeatedly breached our trust already, and shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.

In an ideal world, a company responsible for such an egregious and chronic breach of trust as Facebook would be subject to severe regulatory sanctions, or failing that they’d simply lose most of their users. Sadly, as noted in my last post, Facebook now enjoys an unrivalled monopoly position so it’s Hobson’s choice for most of us.

Enough of the philosophy then. I’ll assume some people are happy to continue as they are, while others have already abandoned ship. For those in the middle, here are some thoughts on how to reduce the dependency on your social media overlords.

Staying in touch with your friends and family

Probably the best solution is talking to them.

What, talk to a thousand people? Nope, just the close friends and relatives who actually matter. Show them you care. You could also reach out to people who are maybe less close friends (yet) but might like to hear from you.

Most of us are in the fortunate position of knowing far more people than we have time to keep in touch with anyway, so it’s a shift in balance towards quality of interaction and relationship. Acquaintances are fine too, but that’s why we have address books — and LinkedIn.

Even with close friends it’s nice to share things electronically. Email works surprisingly well for that, but there are also messaging apps. Signal stands out as the clear leader — it’s secure, safe, and you can get up and running in a just a couple of minutes. I talked to some people who find Snapchat is great for family chats. You might not have heard of Line but if you have friends from Japan, Thailand and other Asian countries, you’ll get a warm welcome there.

Personally I am deleting WhatsApp because it’s owned by Facebook. It may be less harmful, but it’s also easier to remove as fewer people are using it now. Telegram is an excellent alternative, second only to Signal.

Killing time, reading stuff

There’s no harm in “wasting” time, we all need to relax and goof off.

Twitter fits the bill — yes, it’s another social network, but at least you won’t have all your eggs in one basket — or you could try reddit or Digg, or Medium (you’re reading it now).

For reading traditional news sites and blogs, you can set up a reader such as Feedly or Inoreader. Let these services know which sites you want to follow and they’ll aggregate all the articles into a single news feed for you.

Sharing photos

Forget Instagram, this too is owned by Facebook. You can use sites such as Flickr for this. For one thing, the quality is much higher. I use mine for completely public photos, but there private sharing options too.

For drunken photos taken at parties, the best option would be to just keep them on your phone. Or delete. I guess people use Snapchat for that kind of thing these days, but if you really want to keep a photo record of your daily life events hanging around you could save them on Dropbox or Google Drive and share them with your close friends.

Also there’s a very convincing case here for Ello.

Sharing opinions

For things relevant in a professional capacity, LinkedIn is an obvious choice. It’s starting to look a bit like Facebook but it’s intended for serious content; photos of your cat swimming in custard might be frowned upon (actually cats and custard is probably not the best image on any social network).

Occasionally you might like to just throw random thoughts out onto the ’net in the hope that somebody gives a damn. Now might be a time to dust off your old Twitter account as it’s improved a bit; the increase to 280 characters is especially nice — still bite-sized nuggets, but bigger bites making it feel less constrained.

For other opinions, I think Medium might be a good bet. Already mentioned above, it’s great for both reading and writing — anything that won’t fit into one or two tweets.

Organising events

Facebook might seem perfect for this, but I’ve experienced two issues: not everyone signed up, so I needed another way to keep track and reach all the guests; worse, it gave a false sense of security that people had seen the invite, but friends reported to me that they hadn’t seen the invite in amongst all the other noise on Facebook.

Try using Doodle for your next event; it solves both of the above problems. Plus a killer feature is that you can give people a selection of dates to choose from and pick the most popular option. Best of all, you don’t need to force anyone to sign up — just provide them with the unique event link, which you can send on email, Signal or whatever (hint: there’s a desktop version of Signal). This way, you are guaranteed 100% reach.

Selling stuff

You probably know about Ebay and Gumtree already. For a quick and easy sale I also recommend Shpock (full disclosure: I work for the company that owns Shpock and they are awesome).

Playing games

I must admit I’m not a gamer so not really qualified to answer this, but surely there are ways to play games online without Facebook? Maybe this would be a good start.

Sharing all your friends’ data with third parties so they can be bombarded with creepy, negative political campaigns

Please, just don’t do that.

Using any alternative requires changing habits, which is hard if you instinctively reach for the same icon at certain times of the day.

So move or remove it! In order from least to most drastic:

• Remove the app shortcut from your home screen so it’s harder to reach and you don’t see the tempting “unread notifications count”
• Better yet, remove the app from all mobile devices; compulsion to look at the phone is powerful and it’ll be interesting to find out what you do with those impulses instead (there’s still the desktop version)
• Take a week- or month-long holiday from Facebook; disable your account temporarily. Even a temporary abstinence will allow room for alternatives to come back into your life.

Using Facebook less isn’t enough — in another story I’ll give some tips for reducing your profile footprint and locking down the privacy settings. Meanwhile, hopefully I’ve provided you with food for thought at least. Talking of food, I’m afraid when it comes to doughnuts and I, it’s a lost cause…