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< | (DE)VALUING FACEBOOK?: How to Change People's Perspective and Preferences [REVISION] | >
> | LEAVING FACEBOOK: Understanding the Soft Migration to Federated Social Networking [REVISION #2] | | | -- By DavidKorvin - 21 Dec 2012
Introduction | |
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< | In my first draft, I argued that though I did not particularly like Facebook nor did I feel comfortable using it as a means of communication, I still felt compelled to use it on a daily basis because all of my friends use it. However, as we progressed in our discussions this semester, and spoke of the ways in which Facebook serves to manipulate and restrict personal liberty, it became increasingly clear to me that I no longer felt comfortable using my Facebook account as a means of socializing on the internet. The easy party was deactivating my personal Facebook account and joining Diaspora*, which emphasizes that “you shouldn’t have to trade away your personal information” to connect socially. Though am I am very new to the program (and not particularly gifted with technology), I have thus far enjoyed my experience because it allows for a more creative, personalized profile. (One application I have particularly enjoyed using is cubbe.is, which is a way to collect photos on-line.) Additionally, because Diaspora* is open source, I no longer feel pressured to put my data on Facebook’s pre-determined server.
The easy part was personally choosing to join Diaspora* and become more involved in the open source movement; the more difficult part will be to convince my friends to do the same. The rest of this essay will focus on how individuals, such as myself, can convince friends that are currently deeply entrenched in Facebook’s platform that there are better options out there on the internet, such as Diaspora*. | >
> | In earlier drafts of this post, I argued that though I did not particularly like Facebook nor did I feel comfortable using it as a means of communication, I still felt compelled to use it on a daily basis because all of my friends use it. However, as we progressed in our discussions this semester, and spoke of the ways in which Facebook serves to manipulate and restrict personal liberty, it became increasingly clear to me that I no longer felt comfortable using my Facebook account as a means of socializing on the internet. The easy party was deactivating my personal Facebook account and joining Diaspora*, which differs from Facebook because Diaspora* is an example of a strong, federated platform that allows people to do all the sharing they currently do, more securely, because there's no "man in the middle" sorting all the data and looking through the data all that the middle man wants. | | | | |
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> | When I rewrote this paper in December, I thought it would be fairly easy to convince my friends to move away from Facebook to more secure platforms; as the remarks noted, I have not found this to be the case. | | | Diaspora* is FREE | | | The main problem in combatting Facebook is that it is currently the on-line social platform that most people use, and from my experience, most people are resistant to change. For a long time, I thought it was enough for me to simply deactivate my Facebook account; however, because of Facebook’s huge size, I think a more active approach is necessary to combat it. For example, I no longer that that it is enough to lead by example, and my current goal is to tell my friends about the problems of Facebook and also demonstrate the benefits of using on-line social platforms such as Diaspora*. I know that I cannot force people to leave Facebook, but I think I can make a difference just by letting others know that a desirable social networking experience exists without Facebook. | |
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< | My impression from our
recent conversation is that this may not have been a tenable
position for you to occupy in the longer term. It sounded good to
you back then, but perhaps it wasn't so straightforward.
But the good news, not reflected in the essay, is that may not have
mattered. Perhaps you didn't find it as easy to turn the people
around you into free software users who avoided sharing with unfree,
surveilling services like Facebook. But the central value of
Diaspora* is its determination to implement a crucial migration path
to federated social networking. People have to be able to use better
technology while staying in touch with actual friends who continue to
use the centralized systems where a "superfriend," the service
operator, gets to see everything. If everyone who wants to use better
sharing has to convince others to move to something different, the
result may be discouraging. So the point of Diaspora*, or anything
that follows in its wake, has to be that it will permit "soft
migration": as your friends migrate, the sharing becomes safer and
more secure. But no one ever loses touch with people who remain
"behind." So long as you are sharing some particular bits (photos,
status updates, microblog entries) with some people through
central-storage services (Flickr, Facebook, Twitter), those bits will
be stored where the services put them. You will also be sharing
those same bits with other people who, like you, use the federated
service. That sharing will occur with strong security, and you will
be the one storing and serving your bits, so there will be no log
somewhere else showing who accessed what you were sharing, how often,
from where, etc. As your friends move away from the centralized
services, whenever that happens, you stop sharing bits through those
storage locations, your traffic disappears from the surveillance
stream, and the people who read what you share stop being watched
while they do. Eventually, all your friends have moved, no one is
sharing anything of yours anymore through the centralized services,
and you've regained privacy.
Timing isn't crucial. When we have a strong, federated platform that allows people to do all the sharing they currently do, more securely, because there's no "man in the middle" sorting all the data and looking through it all he wants, that's going to be the "coolest" thing there is to use, and every young person will switch away from surveilled social networking. They will carry others with them, as young people carried older people to Facebook. There's lots more to say about all this, but the crucial point is understanding how the soft migration process works. Your essay would be stronger if it dealt with those ideas. | | | | |
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