Category Archives: My Thoughts

Mar 27 2020
4 Comments
My Thoughts

Another long day in a strange world where not much is going right.

The residents of my house have been a hopefully safe distance away from other human beings for 14 and a half days at this point, and we’ve been in the house for nearly all of it. We’re due for more supplies and a walk soon. Please wish us luck with all of that.
 
I did get to wave hello to a friendly face through a window (the first familiar person outside of my household that I’ve seen in two weeks) that dropped by and delivered what could be the last new hard copy comic books I ever see from the major comics publishers. I do hope that everything goes well for my intrepid comic book delivery person and their store, as it’s never easy to own a comic book shop, but right now, it is extremely hard.

Two people I’ve met and been a friendly acquaintance of, at various points in my life, have tested positive for COVID-19 so far. One of those people feels OK so far. The other has been pretty sick, and has been radio silent for just over 24 hours. I’m worried about both of them, but I’m pretty freaked out about the situation with the latter of the two, and am hoping they’re just getting a LOT of rest.

Two more undoubtedly have or had the virus, but can’t get tests where they are (2 different countries). One seems to be on the mend, but the other thought that they were also on the mend, and then got sick again, so even if you think you have this and start to feel better, please give it way more time than you think you’ll need, if it’s at all humanly possible.

It hasn’t all been rough news like this in my circles. I know that so many of us are absolutely craving some tiny bit of good news right now, but unfortunately, for the moment, especially as it’s still so new and so touch and go, I have to sit on the success stories I know about, and hope that they remain success stories.

I know that I’ve already asked you for luck once in this short piece, but in all of these other cases, along with my household’s, whatever you do for people when you’re hoping their stories will turn out OK, whether it’s prayer, crossing fingers, lighting a candle, or other stuff…I am not personally a believer, but if you could do your thing anyway, I’d still appreciate the sentiment. I’d give you names, as I know that can be a thing in these practices, but I’d like to protect their privacy, as these are sensitive matters. If “Scott’s friends” will get them through the door here, feel free to use that. I’m sure there are a lot of people asking you for this, and plenty more that you’re voluntarily doing it for without having to be asked, but I still have to ask because I, like any of you with a brain and a heart, want my people to be OK. You don’t have to tell me if you do it. Just know that I appreciate it, and that I hope your stories turn out OK, as well.

More of this as things unfold, and I’m able.
Mar 22 2020
5 Comments
My Thoughts

Just under 62 days

That is, unfortunately, how long I was able to stay away from Facebook.

Unfortunately, the nature of this worldwide crisis we’re in means that being in touch with people and being able to at least try to support them through all of this takes priority over how I feel about the least trustworthy company on Earth. At least for now. If I find that my being on there does more harm than good to myself, my household or the people I came back to support, I’ll leave again.

Goddamn it all.

Mar 12 2020
15 Comments
My Thoughts

How y’all doin’?

I’m askin’ for reals. I’ve heard from probably less than 20% of what I’d consider to be “my people” in the past month or two. Let me know in the comments, or drop me a line.

This fuckin’ world, eh?

Here’s some stuff that’s been happening, aside from, well, a goddamned pandemic:

Phantogram, Moses Sumney and Jonny Polonsky have all put out solid albums in the last few weeks…

On the home front, we finally found a reliable electrician, and have adequate lighting in our home for the first time in four and a half years.

I was supposed to take a trip to New Jersey in early April, but who the fuck knows on that?

At some point, I will stop talking about this, but the account I deleted in January, breaking from the company’s old habits (maybe it’s the data protection laws, or maybe I’m just an undesirable), is completely deleted now. I can’t even do a password recovery. If we used to talk exclusively on there, I’d have to make a new account and send you a friend request to do it again, so maybe get ahold of me here instead if you come across this, you dig?

That’s kind of it at the moment.

 

 

Feb 24 2020
8 Comments
Music News, My Thoughts

Some life updates…

I am alive.

It’s been a little over a month since I did that thing I did.

I hear from far fewer people on a given day than I was hearing from before I did it, and I don’t know a lot of what’s going on in your lives. Plenty of you are keeping the faith, though, and I appreciate it. Shoot me a line, leave a comment here, or whatever. “I’m always home. I’m uncool!”

I’ve done my best, given my general state of being, to reach out, too. There’s room for improvement, but I’m very human and my sleep was a mess for weeks. I’ll continue working on it.

I’m also torn between my desire to nuke multiple accounts on really terrible websites, and my concerns about further isolating myself at a time when people need each other.

Back here on the other side of the screen, it’s tough for a middle-aged man with my interests to make local friends without either volunteering somewhere or being an alcoholic. Where volunteer work is concerned, the spirit is willing, but I’m tired and physically unreliable. I’m retired from the other thing. Alternate suggestions are welcome.

I’ve started the next round of doctors for the various things that are wrong with me. My goal (barring new catastrophes) is to figure out what can be fixed, what’s likely to get worse, and what’s going to stay about the same relatively soon. Wish me luck on all that.

I figured out, during this process, that Monday appointments are a really bad idea for me. It’s a combination of the stress of not knowing if I’ll be awake for said appointment, and wanting to get started on my week when other people do, especially since my productivity is often limited during business hours.

Little by little, I’m trying to clear the cobwebs from a year’s worth of post-concussion syndrome. At least, I hope it’s post-concussion syndrome, and some more of it will wear off, and not permanent brain damage, where life’s just gonna be like this or worse from here on out. There are good days and bad days.

I’m still experiencing some writer’s block, which has been ongoing since I pulled the plug on the motherfucker. It’s impacting this website and my other one, but I’m trying to push through it. How obvious is it that I’m straining to write this?

I’ve been a little behind on current music (I’ve got a backlog of at least Kesha, Marc Almond, and Ozzy; best wishes to Ozzy, by the way…), but Richard Marx, that beautiful bastard, put out an album that I’d describe as a best-case scenario for a Richard Marx album released in 2020. I’m going to guess that if you’re not already a fan, this isn’t for you, but who knows?

There are also new songs from Sparks (full album out May 15th)…

…and Choir Boy (full album out May 7th).

I haven’t gotten out a lot lately. Definitely feeling the urge, but there’s a time and place for it.

With that said, I highly recommend going to see Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn while it’s still in theatres, or at home when it isn’t. I think it’s the best live-action DC super-hero movie I’ve seen since Keaton was Batman (though I haven’t seen Aquaman or Green Lantern yet).

I’m pretty sure that the world’s still on fire, figuratively and literally, and getting worse by the second. There’s some good stuff too, though.

Does anyone have any questions?

Feb 10 2020
Music News, My Thoughts

“Scott, you weren’t even alive for the 1960s. What the fuck?”

Yeah, for the hell of it, I did the ’60s, too.

I enjoyed making this one more than I thought I would, given how overplayed to hell and back most of this stuff is. I still think my ’70s playlist is the best one, and will remain that way, but this felt similar to my process for the ’70s one. Around 1966, stuff got weird in a hurry, but it did so in a way that made sense, similar to how disco impacted the ’70s.

For those who might be wondering, doing the 1950s is a really distant possibility (I’m looking at it right now). I don’t know if I’m going to do the 1990s, though. I looked at the lists the other day, and found that my interest in what was on the pop charts started to really tank around 1993, then wore down to a trickle by the end of the decade. I’m also still really sick of the worst of the 1990s music, as it wasn’t that long ago that it was popular, and as I got severely overexposed at the end of the decade by working in a mall that was home to a “best of the ’80s and ’90s” radio station.

2000s to present, hell naw. I looked already, and the number of 2000s pop hits I’d want anything to do with is a third of the ’90s list (which is shorter than the ’70s list, and about the same size as the ’60s list). The 2010s list would be half of the 2000s list. I really liked 2012 in mainstream pop for some reason, but not a lot else. Despite the fact that I do keep up as best I can, there have only been 3 songs in the past 4 years that made Billboard’s year-end lists that have really resonated with me.

Anyway, enjoy, let me know what you think, and with all of these playlists, feel free to tell people about them.

02/15/20 Update:

Yes, for better or worse, I went through the entire history of the year-end charts. Individual decades are available as public playlists on my Spotify profile.

Feb 06 2020
Music News, My Thoughts

“Scott, what were the 1980s like?”

They weren’t like this, because the Hot 100 is a very different filter than MTV was, and a much, much different one than the music I got exposed to through the people I met, and on the various margins I became privy to from the moment I got cable television, but this was an interesting experiment that I, of course, couldn’t help pissing away 2 days on, and I think it produced some fun results.

This list is twice as long as the ’70s one, which sorta makes sense, because I was alive for the entirety of the decade instead of 5 1/2 years of it, and paying more attention, as a slightly more fully formed person.

I’ve given y’all 51 hours and 28 minutes’ worth of playlists this week. I’d love some feedback on how I did, if you’re feeling up to it.

Feb 04 2020
2 Comments
Music News, My Thoughts

“Scott, what were the 1970s like?”

No one asks me this.

Being a rabid oversharer, though, I do volunteer a lot of what I remember, which isn’t a ton, and was almost all wildly inappropriate for someone in early childhood, just by virtue of life being fucking complicated. For some reason, though, I have a pretty strong sort of sense memory of what the music was like in the last age before widespread music video. I’ve wanted to do something like this for quite some time, but the combination of insomnia, caffeine, time I should’ve used on something else and obsessive behavior hadn’t aligned until last night.

(Note: share embeds from Spotify only list the first 100 songs, roughly 48.7% of the playlist, so you’ll need to go to Spotify for the entirety of the big list.)

This is an evolving document, but to the best of my recollection, give or take some things I never wish to hear again, either because they were terrible or because the people who made them were a bit shit, this is what the 1970s sounded like to me, as they were happening. My extra brain for this was Wikipedia’s series of annual “Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles”  from 1970-1979 (start here). Almost everything on this playlist can be found on those lists. A few non-chart songs snuck on. A notable exception was Giorgio Moroder’s “Chase” from the “Midnight Express” soundtrack, because, while it did not chart on those year-end deals, the song was absolutely everywhere in that time period. So many local television stations used it in the background of sports video packages, public affairs calendar stuff…you couldn’t get away from it. Which, of course, took a somewhat uncomfortable turn when I got cable television at a young age and wanted to see the movie that cool song was from, but that’s another story.

I will also mention that at least one song on here (David Naughton’s “Makin’ It”) is definitely a re-recorded version, and normally I wouldn’t go with those, but that song was such an important part of my 1979 (some of my earliest phone calls were to a local radio station to request it over…and over…and over again…) that it’d leave a gaping hole if it wasn’t in there, and it’s actually not a bad re-record.

You may notice that there’s really not much in the way of hard rock, heavy metal, punk or new wave on this playlist. I don’t really remember hearing it until 1980 or so. “1980, you say?”

Bonus: yes, because I’m a horrible cheater who is firmly in the “decades are 0-9” camp until I have to actually define eras of my musical life, I made a 1980-specific playlist. In my head canon, 1980 was still part of this period, but you can see that the selections I went with from memory were already very different than the ’70-’79 stuff. I would call both of these playlists part of the same era, but also sorta not.

Why stop here, though, if I’ve crossed the decade line already?

Two things happened around the end of 1980 that really created before/after markers, at least in my head. First, as I alluded to above, music videos started to be broadcast on a pretty widespread basis. My first exposure was probably Casey Kasem’s America’s Top 10 in 1980, and from there, we got cable in June of 1981, so I saw a lot of things on HBO Video Jukebox, and, eventually, MTV.

The other thing, which is pretty unpleasant, is that John Lennon was shot and killed. Hearing of a popular musician being shot and killed when I was 6 years old…well, it left a big fucking dent that I’m still grappling with almost 4 decades later. Yeah, that got dark, but it’s absolutely relevant to a conversation about my personal musical history, and really my life.

Before that happened, though, I had a good almost 6 1/2 years of musical discovery. Here’s what it sounded like. You’ve got about 17 hours to listen to. Some of it will be really familiar, some might not. I consciously put songs in vaguely chronological order, but also in “this would sound good here” order, but I’ve been testing both playlists on shuffle, and they work that way, too, oddly enough. Enjoy, and let me know what you think in the comments or otherwise.

Jan 27 2020
4 Comments
Music News, My Thoughts, Site News

I picked a hell of a week to get writer’s block, didn’t I?

Anyway…

First, some stuff that isn’t about what I haven’t been doing in the past week (I’ll admit it: I’m proud of that turn of phrase):

If you love over-the-top 1980s horror movies and/or present-day “Nicolas Cage gets weird” movies (but it appealed to me mainly as the former), see Color Out Of Space while it’s in theaters. I may see it again this week.

Wire and the Pet Shop Boys both have new albums out as of Friday. In fairness, I will tell you that I didn’t love either album on first listen. That doesn’t mean I won’t love them later, and the fact that they have albums out is still certainly noteworthy. Feel free to give a listen below. If you’re not Spotify-inclined, you can either catch them on other streaming platforms or buy them.

I’m going to be reworking some stuff on this site and the other site soon, mostly consolidating some sections here, and deciding once and for all which things I talk about where. Historically, this site has been the “personal insights and artifacts from past Internet lives, peppered with some stuff about what I watch and listen” site when it’s actually active. The other site is the “physical objects, sports, and occasional travel adventures, but clearly born out of both a previous site about trading cards and a desire to keep my personal life away from my hobbies and vice-versa” site. There’s definitely been some bleed-through recently, though, so it’s high time to set clearer definitions there, and stick to them.

As for the other stuff I’d really like to stop talking about, so I don’t bore you all to death:

I am a little under 2 hours past the 1 week mark, and quitting Facebook is really hard.

I’d say I’m mostly past the point where my brain tries to open Facebook on instinct. Unfortunately, my brain’s still making me try to find substitute activities online to get me that Facebook dopamine rush. When I do this, I don’t find them to the same degree, and end up just sitting here. I’m basically going through withdrawal symptoms, at least psychological ones, but possibly physical ones as well. As someone who’s quit a lot of social media over the years, I can tell you that this is unusual. This also tells me that Facebook are relentlessly effective at their goals, which is very bad.

I also figured out, a few days after I pulled the plug on my account, the one thing I didn’t account for: Facebook’s Crisis Response tools, or the “Mark Yourself As Safe” stuff. For reasons they’d probably describe as being privacy, security and safety-related, those tools are behind Facebook’s login wall. You can’t see them at all without an account, despite being one of the only helpful things the company does. That is gross, awful, emotionally manipulative shit right there, maybe the worst I’ve found so far in this entire process. What’s worse is that not even Google seems to have created an similar app that isn’t chained to Facebook. It’s also worth noting that telling Facebook that we’re near crisis situations could backfire on us. They’re not so good at keeping our data safe.

If you’re wondering what I did about the crisis in question, I emailed the people I know who may have been in or near the area, and asked a friend to check on the one person I know who I don’t have an email address for. My friend got ahold of that person, but five days later, I haven’t heard back from two of the people I emailed. Me noting this isn’t an attempt to shame anyone at all, and no one should feel shamed. It’s just commentary on how dismissed email is in 2020. I also don’t think that emailing my friends to ask them if they’re dead is going to scale well. As we know, “crisis situations” happen a lot these days, especially in the States.

The other thing that’s been unexpected so far is that I haven’t gotten one of the “Please, baby, baby, please…” emails from Facebook, begging me to come back, that I’ve heard of so many people getting after they quit Facebook. However, this is a welcome development. They must have me on a “yeah, fuck this guy” list or something.

These experiences, especially the “sitting here trying to make the Facebook feelings happen” thing (though I think the Crisis Response stuff is far, far more insidious, because eventually, my habits will change, whereas the crisis response stuff is a hostile corporate monopoly on public safety information), are anywhere from an annoying inconvenience to a little debilitating (and I say that without exaggeration). However, understanding the cruelty behind Facebook’s processes, and seeing that cruelty in action, is strengthening my resolve, rather than making me feel like I should just give it a rest and come back.

I believe that brings you all up to speed on my bullshit. If you have questions, feel free to comment!

Jan 20 2020
My Thoughts

An update to the Facebook thing, as I’m scheduled to leave today…

Here’s what I wrote on the way out the door.

“So, there’s less than 3 hours left now.

To those of you who I don’t end up hearing from after this, or who I suck too much to reach out to (assuming I’m able to stay away from this platform, of course, which isn’t a given): it’s been a pleasure and an honor, and I will miss you, if this is it.

I really do hope that this isn’t it, though. There’s pretty much no reason why we can’t stay in touch (that’s on those of you reading this, and on me), and I’ve put a bunch of effort this month into making it possible. Yes, these things take time that’s streamlined into your workflow a little better here in an impossibly busy world, but then there’s that whole “everything that pisses you off about this site” business, and that eats time you could be using elsewhere.

Also, if you say that it’s not convenient to write an email, create a login on another service, send a text message, or, in extreme cases (because again, I kinda have some stuff going on around doing these), make a phone call, well…that’s how they got us all. Facebook made things really convenient, and then they spent years warping the view we got of both our respective worlds and the wider one. They’re still doing it, even after getting caught A LOT, because there’s no one in power who will, or maybe even who can hold them accountable within our current legal system.

An anecdote I have from yesterday: that deletefacebook.com link I posted got 51 Likes, which means that at least some of you are seeing my posts, maybe a little that we’ve figured out how to game their algorithm to elevate the visibility of posts, and also probably that they’re hyper-sensitive about looking like they censor all criticism of the platform. (Try to encourage people to go to a competitor, though, and you might run into some shit. I’ve totally heard of links to competing social networks getting eaten a bunch over the years.) On the other hand, I talked to 2 separate people who, somehow, in 17 days of me not shutting the fuck up about this individual process I’m making, had not seen a single post from me about my leaving here. Some of that’s very good filtering on their respective parts rather than Facebook shutting them out, from what I gather, but if you have to filter out so much bad shit on a platform to where you’re having false positives on your friends like that, what good’s the platform? (I should also mention, on this subject, that I’ve missed more than one death post over the years. One was a family member of a friend. One was the friend herself. Found out she was dead 8 months later. Those are just the ones I know about and can remember at the moment.)

Between all of the other platforms I’m still on, even if I don’t have an email address for you (still missing 70 of those), I have at least some tentative contact with all but 18 of you. I’m not gonna be as noisy about it as I do it, but I’ll keep trying to reach the rest of you. I’m gonna start leaving other platforms over time, though, if this experiment works out. Insta’s next, because, obviously, same company. That one’s happening soon, but I’ll be active on there for a little bit, because I have an audience for some of what I do there that I’d like to bring with me, and because I still wanna try to rustle up some more of y’all, too. Not in that order. From there, Twitter, and then Google. Google’s gonna take a while, though. There are other Internet companies that are also bad news (Twitter and Google come to mind as the worst), and I hope to get away from them for good soon, too, but I had to start somewhere, and somewhere was here, at what I think is the worst of the three.

I hope I’ll be able to stay away from the platform (and as I’ve said through this whole ordeal, I don’t know if I will; I’m a pretty strong-willed person who quit drinking on my own, so take that as you will), but I also hope that some people will follow me elsewhere. Or, hell, even if you don’t put that much value on being in contact and friendly with me, I hope that you’ll see this and consider leaving here anyway.

For the last time here, my relevant contact information is at scottcrawford.org/contact (I’ll be screenshotting this post and putting it on the main page of that site, as well), and I’m still reachable here until 12 PM Eastern Time.

Wish me luck, and I, of course, wish you luck, as well.
-S”

Update 01/20/20 12:06 PM:

A screenshot of the body of my Facebook account deletion email. A screenshot of the body of my Facebook account deletion email. "Scott, Your account is scheduled for permanent deletion. Facebook will start deleting your account in 30 days. After Feb 19, 2020, you won't be able to access the account or any of the content you added. To cancel the deletion of your account and retrieve any of the content or information you have added, go to Facebook."

A screenshot of the body of my Facebook account deletion email. “Scott, Your account is scheduled for permanent deletion. Facebook will start deleting your account in 30 days. After Feb 19, 2020, you won’t be able to access the account or any of the content you added. To cancel the deletion of your account and retrieve any of the content or information you have added, go to Facebook.”

Jan 14 2020
My Thoughts

So, I’m leaving Facebook.

Man Who Quit Social Media on New Year’s Going Door to Door to Tell Everyone

(Yeah, yeah, I know. Thanks, The Hard Times, for being there to keep us humble when we need it.)

Why Now?

I probably don’t have to explain why, but sure, I will. The evening of the 2020 Baghdad International Airport airstrike, the rest of the Internet was on fire for about the first 3 hours. On Facebook, where I have plenty of politically active friends and news junkie types populating my feed? Literally nothing visible in my feed for the first 3 hours. That was the last straw for me. I decided that I couldn’t do business with the world’s least-trustworthy website anymore, especially not with world war still looming. There are countless other reasons why I should’ve left, and much sooner, but that was the one I went with.

Yeah, But Everyone Says They’re Gonna Leave!

I’ll be honest: I genuinely don’t know if it’ll stick. It’s gonna be really interesting to see how hard this is, once I pull the plug. I also have to leave Instagram eventually (owned by Facebook, if you didn’t know), but I’m spacing things out. In a perfect world, I’ll be out of there in about 3 months. (I admittedly punted a few Page contacts over to Instagram if I couldn’t find them elsewhere, so that’s a potential complication.) If I fail on either point, though, I’ll be transparent about it, and I’ll talk about why things didn’t work.

Aren’t You Abandoning People That You Care About?

This platform-driven guilt is how they got their hooks into us. It’s really pretty evil. Believe me, I thought about this question a lot as I was doing this whole deal. No, I’m not abandoning people. I’ve put literal weeks of work into pre-emptively not abandoning people here, as you’ll see below. I put what some would consider an unreasonable amount of effort into leaving a single website, and documenting the process, so that perhaps others might have an easier time of leaving after I do. I did this because I care about the people in my life (and the wider world), and I don’t want to lose touch with them, nor do I want them to lose touch with one another.

The Plan:

Let’s talk about what steps I took in preparation for leaving. I didn’t want to just rage-quit like many people do, since that tends not to stick. There are almost always unforeseen circumstances that bring unprepared people back when they do that. I looked at Facebook, and broke down which functionality I valued. I still more research to do on replacements yet, but it’s in progress. (Thankfully, this process helped me organize some prior research. Since I was bookmarking new websites, I needed to organize my bookmarks, probably for the first time in a decade. They look GREAT now, and I can find things. I recommend doing this, if you are a person that bookmarks websites.) Maybe what I say here will help you, maybe not. Hopefully, it does. If it looks like a lot of work? It was. I think it was worth it. Let’s dig in!

Staying In Touch:

The first thing I needed to do was make sure my address book was as complete and current as possible. If I had or could get everything, great, but most importantly, I needed email addresses and phone numbers. If you’re reading this, you think I may still need this information, and you’re good with me having it, drop me a line. I checked every friend on my list manually against my address book. Then, I checked my email account for anyone whose email address didn’t show up. I got contact information together and current for most of the people I know that way. From there, I asked for contact info in a post on my Facebook account. I heard from many people, but not a lot whose info I didn’t already have. It’s possible people didn’t see the post (again, algorithms), and also possible that they didn’t want me having their info. I’m fine with that, though. Some people on my list aren’t close friends these days, and a few, I never knew well.

Admittedly, it’s bewildering (and embarrassing) that there are people I care about who I couldn’t contact without Facebook right now. This is what happens when we start to depend on one company for everything, though.

Groups:

I wasn’t in a lot of them, but I had a few. I was mostly using these to keep up with my collecting hobbies, but I have other sources for that information. There were two that weren’t about collecting, but were pretty useful. One was a group for gatherings of my high school friends. The other was a group for my fantasy baseball league. (The company we use for fantasy baseball doesn’t give their users year-round access to leagues.) For the friend group, I’m looking into a few other platforms for private event planning. I’ll post about it if we find one we can all live with. With the league, we might be leaving our long-time fantasy baseball home (Yahoo). This is an admittedly bittersweet break from tradition, as I’ve been there for 21 years. Unfortunately, they’ve under-served their customers for years, and it’s getting worse under new ownership.

Pages:

I used these in place of websites for too many things. I feel like I was part of a big problem. Page admins, I implore you. Please update your websites with current news. Yes, it’s more work, and a leap of faith away from a dominant platform. (And yes, this means you have to build those websites, if you don’t have them at the moment.) However, you will probably spend way less money than you spend on Facebook ads. You’ll lose the artificial restrictions on who sees what you post. More than that, though, you’ll have a chance at building a community that will outlast Facebook.

I did find other sources for the information on some of the Pages I use, but not all of them. There are still a few Facebook Pages that I’ll have to slog through the not-logged-in, nagware versions of, because they’re not replaceable at this time. The worst part: most of the ones I can’t replace yet are local community interest content, and not businesses. To paraphrase what I said on Facebook about this, “your customers, your communities, your people are trying to leave this site because it’s terrible, and you’re making it harder for them to do that”. Again, if you run a Page with no off-Facebook website, please reconsider the path you’re on. Facebook does not have our best interests at heart.

We should also talk about what my ads have looked like since I deleted almost all of my Page likes, and started talking about leaving. I get lots of right-wing “news” sites, some obvious *chan troll jobs that are really well-funded by your Cambridge Analytica types, a mess of far-right churches who are looking forward to the Rapture, the apocalypse, and “the great war”, and funeral homes.

Music:

Facebook isn’t as musical as MySpace was, but it still gets used to keep track of musicians. If you do that, I recommend that you find their other points of contact, if they’re using them. Go to their websites, if they have them, and sign up for their mailing lists. Follow them on Spotify if you use that. Follow their Bandcamp if they have one (and buy stuff from them, whenever possible). Twitter, if you’re on that awful site…yeah, you get the picture. Also, if you end up talking or corresponding with them much, politely and gently (I can’t stress these words enough) encourage them to shy away from Facebook, which is this awful platform that requires them to pay to play, because I can just about guarantee that they’re being lied to about their reach here. Everyone is.

News:

See also: my reason for leaving Facebook. I don’t wish to rely on Twitter for news, either, even though they’re still the best (and the worst) for breaking news, so I’m working on that longer-term as well, but not quite yet. It still needs to be easier to follow the work of individual, reliable journalists (for as long as their work is reliable) without getting tied down to the rest of the garbage their respective outlets publish. RSS doesn’t always get the job done here. Facebook’s generally anywhere from 3 to 36 hours behind on everything except for celebrity deaths, though (and they make up for that by getting people to reshare those obituaries as new, years after the fact), so it’s not great for news, and generally not what I use it for.

Events:

I am really fortunate here, because, while I’ve used them before, I am not someone who habitually uses the events functionality, either as an attendee or a creator/promoter. There’s a huge void in the marketplace right now for “Evite without being terrible, and Facebook Events without being, well, Facebook”. I’m not sure how it makes money, but people are clamoring for it. As I said above when talking about groups, I’m looking at a few options here, and will update you all when I settle on something or a few things that I like.

Birthdays:

This, I’m gonna miss, from either side of it. It’s really nice to hear from a ton of people on your birthday, and to be one of the ton of people making someone else feel good, all in one place. I’m going to do my best to approximate this (despite Facebook making it very hard for you and I to collect them all, I have every birthday I could find on there), but it’s definitely much more work basically anywhere else.

Messenger:

I’ve been trying to get y’all to stop using Facebook Messenger for years, because it’s where they do the worst of their data-mining, aside from covert microphone use (which, sad to say, most apps use).

Marketplace:

Nope. Craigslist, which still exists, is bad enough, and it serves the same purpose. Facebook Marketplace was visibly worse when I’d look through it.

Fundraising and Donations:

NOPE. Never donated through here, hopefully never will. Facebook handling the cash for charities creeps me out. I deal with some other creepy companies on this front, but this has always felt so much worse.

Ads:

Absolutely not. Honestly, their Ads functionality is perhaps the greatest swindle in human history.

What I’m using instead (these are not endorsements per se, they’re just means to an end):

Address Book:

Right now, I’m just using the ones for my respective desktop and mobile platforms of choice, and making PDF backups periodically. Nothing too fancy. Eventually, possibly soon, I may see what an ordeal it’d be to print said PDF. It’s currently around 64 pages, not end-of-the-world stuff, but the export doesn’t format especially cleanly, as I just saw. May need to tinker a little.

RSS:

What? Yes, RSS still exists, functions quite well, and is a terrific way to keep up with websites about your interests, news, and so forth. It took a big hit when Google Reader shut down (basically because Google wanted to push Google+ as a replacement, and that didn’t work out for them), but it still works, and there are still a bunch of different ways you can use it on desktop and mobile devices.

Among the web-based options are Feedly (I believe Feedly’s the most popular these days, and it has mobile apps, so you can keep what you’ve read on desktop and mobile synced pretty consistently), The Old Reader, Feedreader Online, and Flowreader. Of these, I’ve only used Feedly (free account). Some free desktop software that you can use for RSS includes RSSOwl (I haven’t tried this one yet, but I’m gonna), Thunderbird, and, if you’re on MacOS, Vienna. For iOS, while it’s pretty bare-bones, RSS Mobile does what you want it to do, and will let you just import an OPML file without requiring you to connect to a subscription service of any kind (something that you can’t say about Feeddler or Reeder, I don’t think). Windows and Android stuff, I am admittedly not super up-to-date on for RSS these days, but if you have recommendations, please make them in the comments!

Bookmarking Stuff:

I organized my bookmarks, as I mentioned above, so that things I use regularly are easier to find, and things I find are easier to find again. I’m just using folders in my bookmarks menu on my browser of choice. I haven’t decided if I’m going to use any bookmark syncing service just yet. Like most of you, I have cloud fatigue. I can certainly look into importing my desktop bookmarks into my mobile browser manually. Hopefully, that’s not a complete nightmare.

Messaging:

I use Signal (get my info from me privately) for one-on-one conversations whenever possible, and, for now, I use Discord for multi-user chat. Both work, though I wanna find something a little more trustworthy than Discord, eventually. The big problem there is that just about anything self-hosted requires a separate hosting package and more tech knowledge than should be necessary for an install of it. No, FOSS bros, this stuff shouldn’t be getting progressively harder to do. Software like Hotline and KDX worked better, and was far, far easier to maintain than all of your “must run on Docker via command line on some server you have absolutely no control over, to stick it to the man” business, 20+ years ago.

As an aside to the messaging conversation, in doing some research about how best to stay in touch with people, I have no idea why in hindsight, but I was genuinely surprised at how many people still use regular text messaging, rather than something like Signal or WhatsApp, as their main form of immediate communication. I’ve had 8 text conversations since May. It’s just not my world, probably because I own an iPad, but not a smartphone.

Email:

You’d be surprised at how well email still works. Eventually, I would like to get away from A Leading Internet Email Provider, but again, one thing at a time.

Music:

I broke down what I used above, but Spotify, Bandcamp, musician mailing lists, and Twitter.

Events:

Still testing stuff, and early enough in the vetting process to where I don’t want to give anyone any ideas by mentioning a thing. I will update this as I have more.

Birthdays:

It wasn’t pretty. Because Facebook doesn’t include birthdays in “Download Your Data” anymore, and because I didn’t want to fuck up my address book (or give them much access to it) with a data import, I had to hand copy every single birthday that was available to me on Facebook’s Birthdays page into my address book. If anyone has a better idea for the next person who needs to leave Facebook, I am all ears.

That Fantasy Baseball Thing I Mentioned:

People in my league and I are testing out Fantrax, which is open for the season now. It has robust free league settings, more features than Yahoo in general, and doesn’t seem to have off-season lockouts.

What to do if you can’t, or don’t want to leave Facebook:

If you’re planning on staying on Facebook, either because you need to stay in touch with someone whose only point of contact is here, or because you just wanna, and want to have the best possible experience, this is some of my advice (I may add to this over the remainder of my time there, and perhaps after I’ve had some time and distance from the place):

1. Give Facebook as little data as you can. Don’t fill out profile information in any detail you don’t absolutely have to use, keep geographical information to a minimum unless you want them to really turn the screws on you, that kinda thing. Be mindful, because humans tend to volunteer information all the time.

2. The one noteworthy exception I’ve found to this, though my experience may not align entirely with how others have found the platform to function, is to say “NO” to basically any ad. Use Hide Ad/Irrelevant/Hide All Ads By all day, and don’t hesitate to report ads that are gross enough to feel like Terms of Service violations on an actual functioning website.

3. Don’t keep a bunch of Pages liked, or stay in groups you aren’t fully committed to being in. Metadata, once again, is the enemy. There are people who will pooh-pooh my saying this, because their current plans depend on high Page Like numbers, even if there isn’t a lot of engagement with the people who Liked their Pages, but that also sounds a whole lot like multi-level marketing to me. If you’re a creator, or anyone, really, please try not to fall into this trap.

4. Be as willing as you can to remove people from your friends list who are regularly awful, whether it’s family, acquaintances, or friends who make it hard for you to continue to be friends with them. This doesn’t mean “bail on people who are struggling”, not at all. Trust me, if they’re doing their struggling out loud on Facebook, it might be a bummer to see, but those people really need your friendship and support. If they’re mean for no good reason, generally terrible people, or bigoted, though? Yeah, it might be time to give yourself a break from them.

5. A thing I didn’t do enough of on Facebook, and I have huge regrets: if you go through your friends list, and see someone you haven’t talked to in forever, if they’re a person you’d still be up for keeping in touch with, consider messaging them on the spot, and asking how they’re doing. If they seem uninterested, or are unresponsive toward you while still actively engaging with the rest of the world, you can re-evaluate then. (Make exceptions if you know that the account is largely inactive, of course.) If you do hear from them, though? Wow. When I have done it, it’s been really good sometimes, and you can make someone’s day by showing them that you care. I’ve been trying to be better about this off-Facebook, too. It’d be cool if my inbox had personal correspondence take over again, instead of bills and ads.

Is there a better, full alternative?

As for wider, more social network-like multi-user replacements for Facebook? I’m still looking, but let’s talk about two of what have been, in recent years, the most interesting ones.

Mastodon:

Mastodon ain’t it, because the culture there has become garbage. Even with a supposedly “open” fediverse, development is pretty much ruled with an iron fist by one guy who steadfastly refuses to understand why people wanted to escape FaceTwitterGram in the first place (they were running from abuse that his software pointedly doesn’t give them the tools to protect themselves from). We’ll start there, and not get too deeply into the bigots, con artists and abusers that pepper the landscape of the platform now.

A lot of what’s happened at Mastodon is the logical outcome of an Open Source community that’s famously maybe 5% women, privileged, and very, very white, pretty much by design. Unless someone forks the software off and makes a functional, well-tested version of it that enables things like instance-only posting, the ability to turn off all connection to the fediverse and its users and opt people into your instance, rather than being forced to opt literally thousands of servers and millions of users out to keep your userbase safe, just to name a few major sticking points, I can’t in good conscience endorse its wide use.

Retroshare:

It’s fair to say that a platform that won’t run on iOS, no matter how conflicted by or against its use you are, is never going to gain widespread traction, so that means Retroshare isn’t going to get anywhere until someone gets an iOS app approved for it, which will probably never happen. It’s cool, but it’s an extreme long shot as an approved iOS app. From what I’ve seen, it’s also a little tough for everyday computer users to get the hang of.

Other Options:

Past those two (anything less useful, active, or harder to run a server that end users can get to through a browser or a mobile app for isn’t worth discussing), I’m looking into some other self-hosted solutions, but still not finding quite the right mix of features and ability to protect the people I’d invite to them from other users/outside attacks/admins well enough to even feel comfortable testing any of them widely. If that changes, I’ll at least let my friends in the audience know.

In Closing (For Now):

I put a lot of work into this process, and documented steps as I did. What I’ve done here may be overwhelming to some people (even just to read about), and I get that. I still wanted my weird, meticulous process of thinking this through out there, because it helped me, and it could help someone else. If it does help you and you want to give a little back, there are ways that you can do that. Also, whether you followed me here from Facebook or not, if you’re not on my mailing list yet, feel free to join. (To current subscribers: there was a recent problem involving settings changing at my host, so you may not have gotten notifications of my last 3 or 4 posts, but you should be good to go now.) A link to my RSS feed is also at the bottom of that page.

Some of the time I put into this, I admittedly wouldn’t have had to if I’d been better about upkeep over the years. If you’re like me, and can be slack about some of the things I discuss here, learn from my mistakes. Be proactive about maintaining a complete address book, and up-to-date Web bookmarks, among other things (I also recommend saving PDFs of articles you find online and enjoy or get use out of, because the Internet’s way more ephemeral than you think it is).

This is an evolving document. As I do further research, and follow through on this process, I will add to it, and modify it. If there’s stuff you’re curious about that I didn’t write about here, please let me know in the comments, or via email. If you have what you feel are better suggestions for any of the steps I took or solutions I used, I’d love to hear about those, too, but I can’t guarantee that I’ll endorse them personally. What works for some people does not work for others, of course, so I may not agree with or adopt your suggestion. However, if it’s interesting or worthwhile, I’ll give it space here.

As I type this, my Facebook account is still active, and will be for a few more days (sometime during or right after the weekend, I’m pulling the plug), but after that? I’m out, and I hopefully won’t be back. Wish me luck. I’m going to need it.

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