Now that my blog is up and running, I do not plan on keeping my Facebook account forever. As such, over the next two years I will progressively reduce my usage of Facebook. This can be summarized in two phases:

Phase 1

From now until 2018-09-01, I will gradually reduce the time I spend and the interactions I make on Facebook. I will delete (and in fact have already been deleting) a number of old posts. Interesting posts may be migrated to this blog. New posts will be posted here, and a link to the post will be posted on my Facebook account.

Phase 2

On 2018-09-01 I will enable Facebook’s email notifications. Afterwards I will not actively log on to Facebook, except to respond to notifications. On 2019-09-01 I will delete my Facebook account.

Reasons

Reducing third-party service dependence

I would like to reduce my reliance on third-party centralised services. This is also the reason why I am hosting this blog on my own server (not on e.g. WordPress), and I am running my own email server and gradually switching from Gmail.

Better functionality

I have greater freedom here on how I want my posts to look like. I can bold text, colourize text, insert inline pictures, and much more. I can also easily find my old posts, either by time or by keywords.

Facebook’s UX just sucks

I’ve been using Facebook for 6 years, and have unfriended 100+ people. A few days ago as part of my plan to reduce my Facebook usage, I unfriended someone.

Facebook decided to show me this. Six times. Six.

Facebook unfriend notice

This does not end here. Every time someone liked or commented on my public posts I get a notice to “review my privacy settings”. And every time I choose to read “Most Recent” stories on News Feed, it gets reset to “Top Stories” on page refresh.

I am also getting tired of seeing all these “Sponsored” posts. I mean, I get it, you need to make money. But can you not show me the same post 10+ times? Once on my Kindle I’ve even had a page with more ads than actual posts.

Waste of time

I find that I waste too much time reading about things that I don’t care.

Other ways of contact

You may contact me using the following methods, listed in order of preference.

Email

My primary (preferred) email address is me@adrianiainlam.tk. This is hosted on my own server, so there may be downtimes. For really important emails you may consider ail30@cam.ac.uk (available for the next two years) or adrianiainlam@gmail.com.

Where possible/reasonable I will sign my emails. You can also encrypt emails to me. My public key is available here and also on pgp.mit.edu.

RSS

If you want to follow my blog posts, you can do this via RSS. You are also more than welcome to send me a link to your own blog if you have a feed or a mailing list.

IRC

If you are looking for me to just chat and kill time, I am often online on Rizon, using the nick “ail30”.

Instant messaging / VoIP / Video call

I have started trying Ring, using the username “ring:adrianiainlam”. I have no idea how well it would work, and more downtime is expected as I run this on my notebook, not my server. Update 2019: Stopped using Ring, now using Matrix, with username @adrianiainlam:matrix.org.