Below is what I’ve posted to my Facebook account to give myself some closure before account deletion.

The recent changes to Meta policies have left me with an ill feeling and I no longer wish to be a part of any of their platforms. It’s not specifically the relaxing content moderation itself, it’s gleeful ways the changes make exemptions for harassment of the LGBTQ community (or any minority community if you read the policy) being okay as a dogwhistle for showcasing MAGA support. Everyone has the right to not feel threatened and these changes inevitably will have a negative effect on vulnerable communities. My concerns are not about Meta having the right to roll-back their policies and be more “neutral”, it’s with the lengths they gone to call out hate speech being okay and rid themselves of any affordances that could be linked with the now dirty three-letter-acronym DEI. As someone who is somewhere on the LGTBQ spectrum, I don’t want to be contributing to a platform that is actively signaling hostility toward it.

I always felt proud of inclusionary efforts that large tech companies, making employment more accessible to under-represented groups (of all kinds) and welcoming them to a community when they arrived. It genuinely felt like progress was made in the 2010s moving past eras of repression. I was a small, insignificant part of pre-Meta Facebook and it had a strong internal culture of diversity, debate, and emotional investment. Artifacts of which I was proud to take with me when I left and displayed on my walls and desks until last week. They now bring feelings of disgust to me and I now recognize that at the highest level of the company, it was all a lie.

Zuck was never invested in the well-being of the members of his staff or his companies’ communities. They are and always were a means to an end. Amassing power and growing his empire are what drives him. I get the sinking feeling that Zuck will follow Elon’s lead in encouraging the deterioration of whatever level of decorum existed in aggregate on Meta’s platforms.

Meta has centralized so much functionality into Facebook, it’s difficult to not get value from some part of it and make a clean break. For me, it’s concentrated in Groups and Marketplace. These features have nearly killed less commercially milked services like independently run web forums and Craigslist. So when you leave, can you replace the utility that you’ve lost? There are free, open, and now in many cases, decentralized alternatives. The primary hurdle is they are much smaller and won’t have a volume of activity that most people will find above their threshold for utility. However, even Facebook has suffered greatly in the last few years and needed to resort to surfacing completely unconnected posts to maintain some sort of inventory in its feed, not to mention the AI generated garbage.

Facebook’s primary achievements were in the usability space. It made posting and contributing a non-nerdy endeavor that anyone could do (even your grandma!). It became a multi-featured space where you didn’t have to think about which site to go to for some narrowly focused activity. By nature, these independently operated platforms collectively known as the Fediverse are not that. They’re generally more focused experiences that are usually modeled on the core experience of a corporate, closed platform. Some examples are:

  • Mastodon is a work-alike of Twitter/X
  • Pixelfed is a work-alike of Instagram
  • Friendica is a work-alike of Facebook
  • Lemmy is a work-alike of Reddit/Digg

These aren’t single sites, they’re pieces of software and anyone can use to run their own instance and those instances can communicate with each other via a common open protocol. If you’re tech-savvy that sounds like what e-mail is, it’s because it is. So by nature, it’s more nerdy and more involved to understand. But these services don’t have algorithms focused on using psychology to increase your engagement and sell advertising based on your demographics, behaviors and associations. In nearly all cases, there’s no advertising at all. They’re services run by individuals or associations funded by donations. I run private Mastodon, Pixelfed and Lemmy instances myself and will continue to experiment with more of them. Not all types of services will be suited to run without some commercial involvement, but even using smaller commercial sites is better than continuing to enrich a monopolistic behemoth.

It’s still fairly early days for these projects. Mastodon is by far the most successful but only has a tiny fraction of the users of Meta’s smallest platform. It’ll be a hard sell for most people to take steps backwards on usability and reliability to transition to these platforms, especially with the small user-bases. However they offer steps forward in de-concentrating power that commercial platform operators have and their ability to make societal waves by shifting policies.

There are so many caveats in the above and I’m not up for debate about Meta’s rights to do what they’ve done or the effectiveness of the policies themselves. I believe eliminating protections for minorities, even in just policy, harms society. I’m just explaining how it’s affecting me and why I’ll be deleting my Meta platform accounts in a few weeks after downloading my data and giving this post a little time to soak. I hope others follow suit over the long term, but it’s a personal decision.

Be kind to each other. ✌🏻