My dear friend Gerrit Eicker tweeted Dave Winer’s blogpost in which Dave announces he deleted his Facebook account. A decision that I’ve been toying with these last few months. A while ago Gerrit already invited me to Diaspora, a privacy-friendly alternative to Facebook, and he keeps asking me why I didn’t become more active there, instead of Facebook.
I can name one reason in particular. I have connections and interaction on Facebook with people that I don’t have elsewhere, nor can I easily migrate those interactions easily to a different channel. For instance the people related to my fencing club, the fencing community in general, old schoolmates that reconnect with me, members of my youth orchestra. Those connections are recent additions to my Facebook-experience and I’m not ready to let go of them.
Diaspora is a wonderful initiative and maybe I should give it a better try, but for now it feels too much of a YASN (Yet Another Social Network). There’s a limit to the spaces I can take care of and I prefer to take care of spaces where others talk back to me 
At the same time, I truly believe that Facebook is heading for a drastic decline in activity and membership as soon as the general public starts to realize how much information Facebook unrightfully gathers (about their kids). However, people are now so accustomed to having online interaction that they’ll be looking for alternatives. Perhaps this is the time to start inviting all my reconnected friends to Diaspora. That’ll be a first for me, usually a passive networker.
Still undecided, so I don’t delete my Facebook account yet, will enjoy the conversations there and keep my eye on Diaspora’s development.
Elmine, I’m *not* going to delete my Facebook-account any time soon: What I’m doing – no, what I’ve already done, is a shift of my personal attention. I’m not reading Facebook (or Plus) anymore and logically I’m not commenting or liking others’ posts there. I’m exclusively reactive now: So if someone sends me a message via or comments on one of my posts on Facebook – which I push there via my blog or via Diaspora – I will answer if necessary.
Why I really love Diaspora’s concept: Diaspora works very well and offers all functions I need for online social networking. Diaspora is open source. Diaspora is de-central and federated. So if you’d like to have a maximum of freedom, privacy, and security online, you can set up your own Diaspora Pod on your own machine and share to the public what’s truly public. I will do so later on as soon as there’s a stable beta. I will probably even stop blogging via WordPress as soon as the Diaspora software offers all functions therefore.
I’d really appreciate to talk to you and Ton on Diaspora… and skip Facebook, Plus, Twitter etc. entirely as soon as possible. – See you there!
PS: My thoughts and tons of links regarding Diaspora: http://eicker.at/DiasporaNews
Thanks for your thoughts, Gerrrit! I didn’t know about setting up your own Pod. Very, very interesting! I would be interested in how you would set it up, for blogging as well. Let’s talk about it soon!
Elmine, the blogging via Diaspora idea isn’t truly possible – yet: At its core Diaspora – like every other social networking service – is a blogging or microblogging engine. My Diaspora Seed (aka profile) is some kind of a “blog” already: http://eicker.at/eickerDiaspora – But there are too many functions missing: no commenting for “externals”, no trackbacks, no readable URIs (everybody’s posts are in one directory: /posts/…), no links to comments, and: no publishing tools in the backyard. This list would get even longer if we’d have a look at all the details a standard WordPress-installation offers today. – Moving http://Wir-sprechen-Online.com from WordPress to a Diaspora Pod won’t happen any time soon. – Still, I’d really like to have *one* “publishing and conversational system” for mostly everything I’m doing online. And I can at least imagine that it should be possible one day. Diaspora could become the engine.