Facebook is a problem. It’s become the only way I’m in contact with a lot of folks, including far-flung family and friends accumulated over a decade of the Academic Nomad life. But it’s also absolutely awful at moderating the news or stopping the spread of falsehoods, and it continues to seek new ways to do unsavory things with the data we put on its servers even as it fails to secure that data. So I’m trying to cut as much of my life out of Facebook as I can, paring my profile there to a point of contact and not much else.

I’ve downloaded my data and done my best to clear out past postings — so many old photos! — and I’m going to use the holiday season to spread the things I used to do over Facebook to a variety of other platforms, which are at least nominally separate entities. I’ve put up a list of those platforms and profiles as my last Facebook post: my Flickr account, which needs something like eight months of updating (!); my Twitter profile; my e-mail and phone number for messaging; and this very blog for longer-form stuff. None of these are perfect solutions; some of them are entangled with corporations very nearly as unlikable as Facebook. But I hope I can use them together to achieve what a Facebook profile does with more control over the negative externalities of life online.

Also, it probably wouldn’t hurt for me to do more quick writing in a space like this one. We’ll see how this goes in the new year.