Getting rid of Facebook

The Problem

Most likely I don’t have to sell you on why we should get off Facebook. You’ve probably heard a lot of this before. Still, it’s worth putting in one place, I think.

I’m a big fan of this piece, which talks about what happens when you get too much of the fire hose of the news cycle. Facebook’s incentive is to keep you on the site as long as possible, and that leads to some manipulative practices. Wall Street Journal has a page that shows the difference between what people with different political beliefs see on their news feed. If you play around with the WSJ feeds a while, you’ll notice that not everything is blindly in support of the beliefs that either side would hold.

Mark Zuckerberg is not exactly a role model, and while the site is starting to change (soft paywall, open in incognito), this is mostly in light of the extremely negative press and even international attention the site has gained post Cambridge Analytica, and it’s too little too late.

While I don’t want to come off as too dramatic, in my opinion, social media use is one of the world’s greats threats to democracy. Fear sells. Fear begets desparation. Desparate times call for desparate action. Strongmen take the action no one else will, defying societal norms and protective institutions.

Like I said, nothing too dramatic.

Why I still use Facebook

Anyways, it seems like everybody and their mother hates Facebook. I’m trying to see if I can get rid of it. There’s 3 main reasons that I still use Facebook at all.

Photos

This one’s an easy one, figured I’d deal with it right off the bat. I have a bunch of photos on Facebook. You can download all of your data, though, and with it comes the photos. Read about how to do that on Facebook’s official help page.

Messaging

While I miss a lot of the functionality of Facebook messenger, I’m not a fan of what they do with my data. Theres been a few alternatives that I’ve explored. Wire is one, but the client just isn’t there yet. I only have a few friends that I use this to chat with, and to be honest I could see us switching to something better.

I’ve also heard some things about Telegram, but I haven’t tried it yet. Reading about it Russia and China banned it, so it must be good.

Finally, there’s plain ol’ SMS and phone calls. It’s not sexy, but it gets the job done, and everybody with a phone number should have access to it. I’m not sure about the security of it, but suffice to say there’s enough alternatives that I shouldn’t really care too much about messaging.

Events

The only big feature that I can’t seem to get past is events. To their credit, Facebook does events very well.

My Dream App

An alternative that I’d like to use needs to have the following features:

Easy Invites No sign ups, shouldn’t need an account to attend, I want to be able to send a link to people.
Event Page Invitees should be able to see the details of the events at a glance easily. No scrolling through comments to figure out where they need to go or what’s going on.
Comments People should be able to talk about the event somewhere central, and see other comments there too.
Reminders Look, people just don’t remember things. I’d love to be able to send some sort of notification so people remember to come. When events are on Facebook, you get notifications, and it’s always something that you can check in your events tab.
Ease of Setup I don’t have all the time in the world. If I can avoid writing an application that does this, I’d prefer that.
Free or Cheap to Use This is nice to have, but I get it. It’s a business, after all.

There just doesn’t seem to be a good alternative to using Facebook events. So far I’ve explored the following:

PaperlessPost (more e-invitey than event hosting tool)
Ticketmaster (costs money I think)
Eventbrite (doesn’t allow discussions)
Meetup.com (costs money, don’t think it can be private)
Discord (nails 1, 3, 5, and 6, but doesn’t do 2 or 4)

HTML + Discord

This may be the answer. This hits 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 super easily. 4 can be implemented with browser notifications, something that I’ll have to look into: I don’t know if I can run this off a static page, but ideally this would be something that I could run even off this blog. I’m planning on hosting something soon, and I’ll use this approach to do it. If it works well, expect to see less of me on Facebook ;)

Are you off Facebook? What’s your secret for events? Is there an app I don’t know about that can do everything I’m dreaming of? Email me zmmille2(at)gmail(dot)com.

Facebook Event Alternatives