Two weeks ago I posted “Delete the Technology” talking about the idea of removing entire technological elements from your life, such as smartphones or social medias, as a way to simplify. Little did I know one of those elements in my life would soon be deleting me…

Story time! While at my desk last week I saw I had an email from Instagram about the ScaleBright account. It had been suspended due to being connected to my personal Facebook account, which was an admin on a Facebook Page for an old business (closed 5+ years ago), which was currently suspended for “violating community guidelines”. I could of course appeal this decision, which I did, and during the process it was explained that the offending Facebook Page was suspended by one of their automated systems. Also, because the ScaleBright Instagram account was connected to my personal Facebook account, it too had been suspended, as well as my associated personal Instagram account. To reiterate, the causal chain of events was:

1. automated suspension of an old, disused Facebook Page, which caused

2. automated suspension of the ScaleBright Instagram account, which caused

3. automated suspension of my personal Facebook account, which caused

4. automated suspension of my personal Instagram account

After appealing the suspension of the ScaleBright Instagram account another automated system released it, saying the suspension was in error. In theory this should have automatically released my personal Facebook and Instagram accounts. As luck would have it, this did not happen. Those accounts are still suspended.

The instructions from Facebook to appeal where to “log into your (scalebrightsolutions) Instagram account to appeal our decision”. This of course does nothing as that account is no longer suspended. After much searching I was able to find an email address that is supposedly for manually appealing suspensions (appeals@fb.com), but Facebook’s own documentation makes no mention of that address or any other. I’ve sent an email anyway.

Given my earlier suggestion of deleting technology, it may behoove me to take my own medicine and let those accounts go. Do I even need them for anything? I did make extensive use of Facebook Messenger and Marketplace, as well as Groups and Pages. Lots of teams and businesses use these tools exclusively for communication too (such as my local farmer’s market), with little chance of them changing platforms because little ol’ me “doesn’t use Facebook anymore”. But what are my options?

I have two options before me, both of which have downsides. If I can’t successfully appeal, I could let the accounts go and live without those platforms. Or I could create new accounts, but that goes directly against Meta’s terms of service, and I’d risk getting automatically suspended all over again. As of today I’m leaning toward shouting a hearty William Wallace “freedooooom!” and abandoning Meta’s platforms permanently. After all, there are other options for chat and social media that are built to be the antithesis of this sort of centralized authoritarianism, some of which I’m already using.

Nostr is a social media protocol I’ve been using for about a year now. This is different than a platform, such as Facebook, as there is no central ownership or authority for Nostr. Nostr uses a combination of servers (called relays) and apps (called clients), of which anyone can create and use. There are no “official” servers or apps, and while a server operator could ban my account from their server, they can’t ban me from the protocol or anyone else’s servers. If I wanted to I could even create my own private server just for me and my friends. One of the downsides to Nostr is that’s there’s no integrated chat or messaging functions.

For chat I’ve been testing Matrix. It’s similar to Nostr in that it’s a protocol and not a platform, and uses a combination of servers and apps. You can connect to the wider Matrix network, or just your own private server.

The biggest problem with both Nostr and Matrix is that to be useful, people need to use them. This loops us back to Facebook; the people I want to communicate with are there, and have no effective reasons to leave and use Nostr and Matrix instead. I guess I’ll need to brush up on my Braveheart speeches. *Ahem* They may suspend our accounts, but they’ll never suspend our freedom!