Being social without social media

It’s not that easy these days: you wanna share your experiences but you wanna also keep your data and privacy save. I started to get rid of Facebook services in the beginning of 2018. After the birth of our first child I realized how time consuming (and useless) it is to have facebook on my phone. Even if I opened the facebook app only once a week I lost minimum half an hour. Time not well spent and I was not really interested in the show biz of other peoples’ so called life. So I quited facebook which was pretty easy, relieving and just felt good.

When facebook bought WhatsApp I thought this wouldn’t bother me too much and that this wouldn’t have any influence on the messenger. Lots (ok all) friends are using WhatsApp and all had excuses when I suggested to switch to another service like Signal. The main excuse was that they don’t have enough space on their phone or all the messengers are anyway pretty much the same – I think the motivation was/ is not enough to switch the messenger because people are not fearing companies like Facebook enough – yet. When I read that Facebook wants to share all data and information between their service (Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram) and that even Acton (founder of WhatsApp who was first working for Facebook) said “he feels he sold his users’ privacy and lives with that decision every day”. I was more and more in doubt about using WhatsApp. Being unsure what to do because on the one hand you wanna stay in touch with family and friends but on the other hand you feel like Acton – sold. So it took me quite long to finally have the guts to say goodbye to WhatsApp. Therefore I consequently lost also lot of my friends like with Facebook before. But again it felt good and right and as we all know – motivation is the key – those who really wanna stay in touch, keep in touch.

Annika followed leaving Facebook and also WhatsApp. I always made my decisions pretty spontaneously (not the thinking and rethinking in my head – that was always for a long time but the actual act of quitting) and so Annika was always confronted with the final decision.

Now we are doing several trips with our kids we wanna keep our families at home updated of the trips. We also wanna give some tips and experiences back to those who wanna do the same because we got so much inspiration of others in the web.

Being not active in social media anymore we decided to use a blog. Because it would take too much time to read through all terms of usage for an already hosted blog, we decided to host our own blog on a German provider (Hetzner). This gives us a little bit the feeling of keeping our data for ourselves and not seeking it to anybody.

So much the background of using a blog, writing here but being not present on other channels like YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp and whatever.

Be (almost) Suckerberg free ✌️

UPDATE

We decided to publish a sneak preview at Instagram and a link to our blog. we’ll see how and if this work