...Nope, Facebook still isn't it. (One year later)

Well, I guess it’s time for me to make another change in my digital minimalism / social media workflow. And.. totally go back on a decision I made almost a year ago — to rejoin the Facebook empire.

Yeah, I think I’m going to leave Facebook again.

But I learned a lot about myself and what I’m wanting along the way, and I’m looking forward to my next chapter. So let me take this space to explain what went wrong, what points from “Back to Facebook” didn’t pan out, and where I’m headed next.

This is one of those articles that’s just as much for me as it is for you. The exploration in the writing is worth just as much as the final draft.

“Back to Facebook” Optimism

I’ll attempt to distill the “Back to Facebook” post down into a handful of points. Something like these:

• I love taking pictures and sharing them with people that want to see them (still do!)
• Sharing pictures apart from social media is hard; harder still if you actually want people to see them. I tried several avenues
• The strategies I tried for sharing pictures apart from Facebook ultimately all had too much friction, either on my end for uploading them or on the audience’s end
• Facebook might work if I trim my friends list down significantly
• Facebook’s algorithmic feed is significantly less powerful when you have <100 friends
• From “Beating Facebook”, a browser extension called FB Purity helps limit Facebook’s tactics even more

Ultimately I was optimistic that getting back on Facebook would allow me to share my photography and life-photos in a low-friction way (for me and for the audience) and I could avoid getting pulled into an algorithmically-addictive media feed.

But in practice? Yes and no.

Is Anybody There?

So, for starters, actually sharing my photos on Facebook is quite easy. I continue to be happy with their simple interface and creating a new post with a lot of pictures is simple. What’s less simple, and something I overlooked in my optimism last year, is getting those images in front of my friends!

That is, just because I post a bunch of pictures doesn’t mean that my friends are going to see them!

While I’ve pared down my friends list to a tight group and see just about everything any of them post, that’s not how a typical Facebook user’s feed works. My friends likely have well over a thousand friends each. They’re also likely not using the chronologically-sorted feed. So, as their friend, my content is weighed against a thousand other points of content for whether or not it should show up in their feed. My sense is that it often doesn’t make the cut 😔!

The reality is that the algorithm — the great unknown, behind-the-scenes algorithm — is a total black box. And I hate it. I hate playing the game. I hate drafting a post with some pictures and wondering who’s going to see it. I hate that I’m ultimately participating in the feedback-loop system just to hope that my friends will see my images. I hate having no feedback about it whatsoever. I’m just another bit of content choices for some unknown actor to choose whether or not it merits getting in front of my friends. Needless to say, I’ve grown strong feelings about this.

Oh Marketplace…

The second piece of unexpected experience has nothing to do with the core Facebook product at all! Once I got FB Purity installed, my main content feed became clean, simple, and boring (which is good)… but then there’s Marketplace.

Marketplace runs its own algorithm. And it’s likely quite similar to the content feed algorithm — it learns the things you like then feeds you posts (things for sale) that match up with that content. It does this anew every time you refresh Marketplace.

Sure, there’s no immediate feedback loop in this system the way the like-button or comments are… but there is definitely a “man, I got a great deal…” feedback loop. It’s slower, for sure… but every great deal you find on Marketplace reinforces the neurons that push you back to checking Marketplace.

I’ll just summarize it to say that I’ve spent too much money on Marketplace things the last year. Yeah, sure, I’d say most of them were good deals and good finds. But part of a minimalist life is appreciate that which you already have and I would like to do a better job at that.

Ethics

The last piece of my discontented Facebook puzzle is a bit deeper. It’s the piece I’ve been trying to ignore since I got back on Facebook last year. Participating in Facebook means participating in a system that I actively suggest others avoid… yet my participation depends on them participating too. My posting pictures on Facebook wouldn’t work if my friends don’t have their own Facebook accounts. And sure, I know most all of these people would still have a Facebook account of their own volition even if I didn’t have mine, but the principle stands. It feels slightly hypocritical to advocate against social media while using social media in a you-must-have-an-account-too fashion to share my images.

Last, though I won’t go into it very much, I feel uneasy about Meta. Now that James is with us, I continually feel uneasy about giving Meta my pictures of him. I don’t know how they’re scanning them, training AI with them, or etc. I just don’t trust Meta at all — especially with what feel like more sensitive images than just me and Kalika.

A New Forward

All of this leads up to change. So I’m going to try a new way forward based on an old way plus some new learning.

First, I want to switch to an email-based approach. Where I’d previously tried a ‘newsletter’ approach, which implies some kind of consistency and formatting, I’m throwing that model out. I’ll still use my emailing platform to make sending easy, but I’m going to reposition this as ‘just an email’. No longer is it going to be “The Sullivan Weekly”, now it’s just going to be more like “Simply Sullivans”. No expectations, just an email to a friend (and a few others 😜).

I believe this will solve, or at least significantly improve, the audience / algorithm problem. Most of my friends read their email. If they skip over my emails, that’s fine! I’ll at least know they had the opportunity to open it. This is a noted improvement from Facebook’s algorithmic black box.

Second, and also unlike last time, I’m not just going to post something on Facebook that says “Hey I’m switching to email, sign up here if you’re interested”. Given all of my prior thoughts about how the algorithm doesn’t actually deliver my posts to folks’ content feeds, I’m certain that nobody would sign up. No.. I did the work of culling my friends list down to <100 people that I specifically care about; I want that work to pay off in my email list too.

So yes, I’m going to message every single person in that list directly, let them know that I’m switching to email, and ask if they’d like to get those emails. I assume most will, so hopefully I’ll end up with a recipient list that really is everyone I care about getting my updates!

Third, my tooling has improved quite a bit since my newsletters of 2021. It’s not worth getting into the details, but I’m pretty sure I can write up and send one of these post-style emails as easily as writing a Microsoft Word document. Maybe even easier. I’ve ramped up how much writing I’ve done in general over the last few years and with it, I’ve worked to make my writing workflow easier. That should pay off here, too.

The Goal Remains

One of the major components to rejoining Facebook was to do so in a way that preserved real-life connections and didn’t allow for Facebook-only friendships. When culling down my friends list, I specifically wrote that the primary class of eligible ‘friends’ were:

people that I do actually physically see and interact with on a regular or somewhat-regular basis, that I consider to be friends. These are people whose presence on my digital ‘friends’ list only reflects their actual real-world presence as my friend. They are not my friend because we’re connected on Facebook. And they are physically nearby — these are the people I already interact with in-person.

Strongly keeping this barrier-to-entry will always prevent Facebook from becoming the basis of friendships and instead only ever allow it to be another outlet for existing relationships. I want the posts that I see on Facebook to be interesting updates from my friends that I can chat with them about the next time I see them, not just like-and-comment boards.

And I still stand by this sentiment wholeheartedly. I believe that email, since it operates in a different capacity, will still uphold this mental framework. You can’t comment on an email. There’s no like button. You can reply and it’ll go directly to my inbox, but that’s starting an actual conversation (typically), not just a “like”-and-move-on.

And, naturally, folks that aren’t really part of my life will likely unsubscribe from the emails. Reading emails and seeing pictures requires slightly more effort than skimming through posts on Facebook, so folks are more likely to bail from a given email sender if they don’t actually feel connected to that person.

Email requires more buy-in on both sides.

My goal remains to share my photographs and occasional thoughts with my friends and family who want to see/read them, in a format that’s easily accessible for both me and them, to support and sprinkle joy into established, in-person-first relationships. I believe this new setup will accomplish that task!

We’ll see how it goes over the next year! 😜

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