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[Neil Jerram]

wonderphone at posteo.de writes:

> Hi all,

Hi there.

> A question to the people on the list:
>
> Do you use or like Facebook?

I used it for 2-3 years, only very intermittently, but decided to delete
my account in January 2013.

I've always had mixed feelings about it; but the specific trigger for
deletion was when some people started assuming that, because I was on
Facebook, they didn't need to let me know about certain things in any
other way.  Unfortunately, because I only checked Facebook very rarely,
that meant I missed things, and I thought it better to delete my
account.

> Are your interested in an alternative?

I don't know; I haven't really sorted out my thoughts on this yet.
Obviously there are the privacy concerns.  But regardless of that it's a
strange way of communicating with people anyway: it's odd to imagine
that one can say something simultaneously to all one's friends and
acquaintances.  On the other hand, people on Facebook (or similar
systems) do have a better background knowledge of what's going on in
their friends' lives, which it's difficult to achieve using more
traditional means.

> Has anybody experience in using Friendica? Or do you think it is not
> so important?

I had a bit of a look at the available free software and more
privacy-respecting alternatives, and out of those Friendica certainly
seems the best.  (Maybe pump.io is also promising, but I haven't
understood it yet, and already it seems the developer is moving on.)

If one does use Friendica, the question then is whether to connect it to
Facebook and/or Google+ etc. - in that case does one have any more
control than if one just stayed with Facebook or Google+ in the first
place?  I haven't worked that out yet.

Or alternatively, how to find or grow enough of a community on Friendica
to make it interesting...

All in all this is an interesting but complex area, and I haven't worked
out what I think about it yet.  Perhaps someone else can add more
clarity...?

Regards,
        Neil