Below is a reduced form of our discussion which can be used as a starting point for the conversation here.
We have been unofficially boycotting Facebook and it’s holdings, not saying we should stick to nothing, also not sure if we should have anything on Google.
On the topic of an unofficial boycott, there might be value in having a page about it.
May be good to have placeholders, may even generate momentum
Is this being open, even temporarily, to things that go against our core philosophy?
No to FB and similar social channels, we should lead by example.
Undecided about best strategy, personally I use it for groups/professional connection and discourage personal connection.
Can we figure out how to have minimal exposure? I hate the social pressure/lock-in.
There are concerns about FB blackholing posts and other information.
We would want to maintain values of Snowdrift, not create content of value to stay there.
Accessing the walled garden makes sense to introduce people to Snowdrift (who might not otherwise have yet heard of the project).
However, there’s also the optics of enabling people to stay locked-in there, or encouraging any more FB-exclusive activity
Leaning towards usage of a placeholder, disallow further conversations and instead reference forum, etc.
Value in posting to a placeholder in an IndieWeb type situation might be useful.
Don’t want people to be posting in the walled garden, but want people in the walled garden to be aware of the walled garden.
FB has algorithym for burying posts that are pushing people to leave FB even via external links
People who are buried in their own ‘newsfeeds’ potentially won’t see Snowdrift posts anyway
Instead of just having placeholder/shadow account, we could promote accurate information to negate misinformation, but skeptical if we’ll even be found by others on FB unless we go viral.
What’s the point of saying we’re here to be here, but we’re not really here?
If there’s not a way of stopping conversations happening on FB, not a good placeholder.
We need to weigh potential benefits, could be confusing to people understanding what we are about, because on the face of it looks contradictory.
We don’t have a Twitter to have a Twitter, we use it to direct people to Mastodon / Social.coop. Content doesn’t get posted there, it gets referenced.
People may discuss Snowdrift out of context if we don’t have a presence there, not sure how much we can influence even if we did have a presence.
Being able to reach people in the walled garden is possible benefit as opposed to preaching to the choir.
From a pragmatic view, if we have limited time/outreach bandwidth, we might want to focus on a smaller number of communication channels where we’ll have the most impact. Maybe FB won’t be one of those channels at this time.
In building the team, we want to find people who already have some understanding.
Should we be explicitly negative (adversarial) about FB?
Hope to hear a bunch of opinions before moving forward on this!
Originally, I wasn’t really sure what to do with this, and that remains the case. Both sides make some amount of sense to me. I think I’m in favor of at least having a placeholder on those platforms, but it doesn’t seem a high priority. It’s the kind of thing that I think we should do once we’ve fully engaged with the free-er platforms.
Another consideration is that conflict is likely to be lower when we start with a less ethically diverse group of people (ie, already aligned with our mission). Eventually we want and need to bring in a larger group of people but I think it’s a good idea to start with already-aligned people, so that we’re not dealing with culture clashes at the same time we’re trying to get launched.
I am wondering where the line is drawn if Facebook is not acceptable? Most non-tech people I know seem to be getting their updates from Instagram these days (FB subsidiary…)
Either way, we clearly don’t want people to stay in the silos, but are we risking too much to not have a presence inside them? Do we have any sort of users that we WOULDN’T want to join?
Yes, we are risking too much by not at least having a presence on them. If someone is on the network itself, they are clearly fine (enough) with it, so they won’t necessarily think “oh they’re missing, hmm it must be because they are against it” – but if we have a presence, we can explicitly say as much. We can put it all over the page, make sure all content is actually just a link to the content on more acceptable platforms (our website, Mastodon post, etc), and we can even drive the point home with a page title like “Snowdrift (Unofficial)”.
IMO, the FSF should do this too.
Anyway, we don’t need to put any more effort into it after that, but rather than leaving it empty and lifeless I suggest we automatically mirror the posts from our main platforms. Post on one, appears everywhere.
Of course we do. We don’t want the sort who would join specifically to be trolls or saboteurs or even who want to see us succeed but drop our ethical concerns. Obviously there’s a point where the trade-offs are fuzzy.
As I said in the original discussion, I’m open to something like a Facebook account that specifically existed to draw people away from Facebook and in which every comment or mention gets some sort of response from us like “please do not put any value into Facebook’s silo, come discuss these questions elsewhere” and really worked to discourage anyone from having meaningful discussion there.
That still allows people to get the value within Facebook. I’m not totally opposed to this because I see the trade offs.
There was a great quip I heard on a podcast that went like this:
Should I advertise on FB? I have ethical qualms cutting them a check.
Well, I think FB is fundamentally an outrage-addiction machine run by someone who never had any other job, any real world perspective, cannot be removed from his position, shows all the signs of sociopathy, enabled actual genocide, supported destruction of democratic societies, and it’s all around the most dangerous institution on the planet… 100% yes you should advertise on FB because they have a monopoly effectively enough and just because you care about pollution doesn’t mean you stop turning on your lights…
That said, what about having only posts on FB that were like “check out the Snowdrift.coop blog, there’s new updates, we’re not going to show you the content here because we refuse to participate in enabling you to stay more sucked into FB. Leave this and come see the original update” or that direction.
I’m not convinced this is worth it, but it’s an option.
“The” value? Some value, sure - but like I said, most things will be hidden behind a link that points elsewhere.
Yeah, exactly what I’m saying. Only trivial updates that can’t be linked to will be there. (Though even then we could link to the e.g. Mastodon copy of the post, just to be thorough.)
Anyway, I see no point in having a placeholder account that gives out no value. If me or my friends are going to spend X minutes scrolling through our Facebook feed, we’re going to spend X minutes regardless of whether Snowdrift appears in it. So Snowdrift might as well appear in it.
There are people who care enough about Snowdrift to check for updates. We don’t want to let them go with “I can just use FB, and I’ll know there whether there are Snowdrift updates”. That encourages use of FB.
That’s not a final rejection of the idea, but it’s not entirely benign.
These days, I don’t think many people check Facebook for the purpose of “knowing if there are updates” to any particular thing, because no one can possibly exhaust their news feed anymore (it’s been that way for years). So if I happen to see a Snowdrift update, that’s cool, but just because I don’t see one doesn’t mean there aren’t any - there could be tons, but they’re buried under lots of other updates from lots of other things/people.
In other words, checking Facebook (the feed) is a poor substitute for checking the Snowdrift site (regardless of how much we post to it) – because it’s even a poor substitute for checking the Facebook Pages themselves of the things you’re subscribed to. I contend that even novice Facebook users intuitively know this. If you care enough about something on Facebook, you have to check on it manually. And at that point, it’s just as much effort as checking our website (you have to go find the Facebook page - but why bother when you can just go to snowdrift.coop?). If they happen to see us while scrolling the feed, it will serve as a reminder to check for updates - one that we should assume they would not have otherwise had. Once they click through, they are on our canonical, approved source of updates anyway, so they’ll continue to browse more of our stuff in the appropriate medium as they see other snowdrift stuff around.
Like me. I also check Facebook, too, though not to see updates to projects. If I remember to check updates to projects, I’ll go to their official place directly. But I might not remember to, unless I’m reminded by seeing something somewhere else that I visit.
I disagree. If I’m not on a Snowdrift-sanctioned site nor Facebook, it’s just as much effort to arrive at either, so someone truly looking for Snowdrift updates is not likely to use the former. If they do check Facebook, it’s not specifically for Snowdrift updates, and they would have gone to Facebook anyway regardless of the Snowdrift presence.
Snowdrift being on Facebook is not going to make anyone use Facebook more or less than they would have. So it’s simply a matter of whether we want to reach that wider audience, or not.
I haven’t used FB for many years so I can’t comment on how people use it these days. I am not opposed to having a token presence there, but I am opposed to publishing native content there, because that enables people not to leave the bubble. For example: I think posting a link to one of our blog posts is okay; posting its content as a Facebook post is not.
There are also practical concerns:
Where do we want to spend our limited time and energy? At this point, when we could really use more volunteers, I think our time would be better spent reaching out to people who are already aligned and might become volunteers.
Once we’re a bit more polished and are looking to grow the size of our patron base, outreach on more popular platforms will become more important. Although I still have concerns (mentioned above) about an Eternal September type scenario, especially before our bylaws are in place and we’ve been operating normally for a while. I’d prefer to err on the side of slow and steady growth.
For now, I think it makes sense to create a placeholder entity on Facebook, with just a few sentences describing us and and our ethical concerns with FB, and a link to our site. Then, if we want to post more actively later, we can.
We haven’t specifically thought about that. On a related issue, we have intentions to really update our overall defined roles for the team, that’s an ongoing tension.
I’d be fine with someone engaging in that sort of outreach if there was a concerted effort to get people’s attention away from Facebook rather than engaging a lot directly within ongoing conversations there (but there would be some amount of deference to good judgment case-by-case).
The question here, is whether to create a presence on those platforms. Having someone who spends their hours monitoring a walled garden for relevant conversations to add to seems like something I would be pretty solidly against, as it is promoting more use of the platform.
Instead, my proposal, and what I look forward to discussing further, is to create a profile/page/etc. that has no “added content” but does allow for network effects. In general it would always be framed in ways to get folks off the site, whether in a general sense, or targeted to see our updates elsewhere.
Anyhoo, I’m head-under-water with thesis writing for 10 more days, and this is less of a priority than other things, but glad to see eyes on it and do look forward to returning to this conversation before long!
I think using Facebook as a funnel to snowdrift is the way forward. For example:
Facebook Post: “Hey, we updated Snowdrift, we made this adjustment, which has some effects. Click here to learn more.”
The 'Click here to learn more." links to the snowdrift.coop community site, and acts as a funnel to get more people migrating to the main site. We use social media as a recruitment tool, NOT as an actual social interaction tool. All interactions and posts on social media should be designed to get people to migrate to this site.
I might accept that if we emphasize to people NOT to trust Facebook as a way to get Snowdrift updates and to please separately and directly sign up for updates.
Bumping this conversation as a specific scenario has come up.
I’m updating my LinkedIn and would like to create a Snowdrift.coop company page, so that there isn’t a blank icon next to the experience on my profile.
In general, I think that creating pages like this have basically zero drawbacks. The issues come up when we start using them to post things out.
Given that, I’d like to continue discussing how to make use of these sorts of silo’ed sites, but go forward with registering an instance on them.
For context, my personal policy for people posting photos of me on Facebook is: Please either edit a black box over my face orset the visibility of the post to fully-public. In other words, either preserve my privacy or don’t use my likeness to contribute to FB’s walled garden.
I think the harmful parts are:
Posting anything exclusively on those platforms — encourages others to join them.
Treating those platforms as first-class — removes reasons to leave the site.
In contrast, posting a snippet and a link to the canonical source, or even posting the full thing, but delayed by a set amount of time (if we’re posting regularly)— these things act as an off-ramp to get people off the site. They might even be beneficial compared to having no presence at all.
[For us] generating too much attention, too quickly, as I already mentioned:
So, I think for now the best policy would be to establish a placeholder presence on proprietary 3rd party platforms, but not post anything yet.