Via Jessamyn West.

I encourage people to think about what is at the intersection of those three circles for them. What are you good at? What work needs doing? And what brings you joy? … The thing that’s been keeping me up, literally last night, was reading about the climate impact of the tech industry and thinking about the new data out of Bloomberg that just building out the data centers that are planned will increase greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity center by 20- to 30% at a time we need to be rapidly decreasing.

Via her newsletter, via Bill McKibben‘s newsletter.

How to bake bread: follow a recipe and then do it again and again until you start making good bread. The specific recipe doesn’t really matter as much as just deciding you’re going to bake bread and then keeping at it.

My approach is profoundly influenced by my friend and neighbor, Amy Halloran (subscribe to her newsletter, Dear Bread!). She encouraged me to pick a simple recipe and then make it my own. Amy gifted me Paula Marcoux’s Cooking with Fire, a book that isn’t specifically about bread or baking, but it has a basic whole wheat sourdough recipe that I’ve adapted over the last 7 years.

If you’re baking with sourdough, the first step will be to find some starter. Ask someone you know for some of theirs or look for local bakers in your area. Baking is a social activity and you’ll want someone to get advice from as you learn to bake, asking them for some starter is a good place to start.

Whole Wheat and Rye Sourdough recipe

Here is my sourdough recipe, split into sections. I start this process in the morning expecting to have my dough made at the end of the day. Then I let the dough sit in the refrigerator for one day and bake it on the third day.

I am not an adventurous baker, I bake the same sourdough loaf about once each week. It’s become a staple in our household and I’m pleased that Rosie (2yo) and Ginnie (a picky 7yo) are both enthusiastic bread eaters, despite the recipe having a fair amount of whole grain in it. It’s a kind of rustic sourdough boule with a pretty substantial crust to it, not what you might think of as kid-friendly.

Ingredients-wise it is still mostly white bread flour but with enough whole wheat and rye flour to justify calling it “whole wheat sourdough.” I adjust the process a little bit each time, sometimes intentionally and other times due to circumstances out of my control. After hundreds of loaves I’ve gotten to where I don’t refer to a written recipe. And the resulting bread has gotten better through practice. Bake, eat, repeat.

For my first few bakes I followed the recipe from the cookbook as closely as I could and then I started adapting it. I scaled it up, converted the measurements from cups to grams, and tweaked the flour mix to include equal parts rye and whole wheat. Through repetition I’ve gotten better at each step, each maneuver.

Sometimes the results are less than stellar and sometimes it’s hard to find time to bake. The key for me has been not to worry about any individual bake and to fit baking into my schedule even if it means letting a step go longer than intended, or just tossing the dough into the fridge until I can pick things up where I left off.

Baking with sourdough is, at its core, about keeping a colony of yeast punctuated by opportunities to make bread with it. The more consistently you bake, the happier your starter will be. Having a staple, weekly loaf has made for lively starter, so if you’re only baking sporadically you may want to feed the starter more times before you bake.

A recent recipe adjustment

I recently came to realize that my new oven keeps the heat in more efficiently and so the part of my process where I dropped the temperature partway through the bake didn’t end up cooling down as fast compared to my old oven and the crust was coming out crunchier than I’d like.

Over the course of 5 loaves I adjusted my baking temperatures to account for our new, more efficient oven:

1. 40min at 450°F then 20min at 400°F
2. 20min at 450°F, 40min at 400°F
3. 20min at 420°F, 40min at 400°F
4. 20min at 410°F, 40min at 400°F
5. 60min at 400°F

The starter I’m using is my second one, replacing a San Francisco derived one that started smelling foul and was making unpleasant bread. Amy shared some of hers with me years ago to replace my funky one, and it’s been doing great. At one point she needed some to bake with after returning home from a trip and it was satisfying to have some starter to offer back until hers were back in shape.

Why do I like baking? Mostly because I like eating fresh bread. It also feels good to work on something and get better at it, and to take care of a sourdough starter. And I’m grateful that my kids eat the same bread I like to eat.

Me on my forty-sixth birthday.

In a time of multiple, intertwining emergencies, we call on our community to create red flags, banners, capes, accessories, and other art work and to come together in simultaneous rage/resistance/grief and solidarity/celebration. Red is fire, red is emergency, red is rage and passion, red is poppies and watermelons (Palestinian solidarity), red is blood and the insides of our bodies, red is earth, red is roses (worker’s rights), red is red umbrellas and red lights (sex worker rights), red is resistance and revolution, and red is more light and less symbolically loaded things like tomatoes, lobsters, strawberries, sun burns and cardinals.

This is the third in a series of posts about divesting your social life from Meta. In previous posts I made a case for why I’m leaving Meta (and other Big Social platforms), and how to start the process of leaving.

Before you delete your Facebook, Instagram, and Threads accounts, I recommend downloading an archive of your data first. Even if you’re not ready to divest from Meta, having archives is still a good idea!

This guide is somewhat opinionated, I recommend that you request as much data as Meta will give you, even for stuff that you don’t think you need. I want to understand the gaze of corporate surveillance to the fullest extent possible. I’m also suggesting that you request it in machine-readable JSON format, to make it more useful to explore in the future.

Requesting an archive

These steps assume that you’re using a computer with a web browser, not a phone. The official Facebook documentation does include guidance on how to request account data from a mobile app. This guide will no doubt become obsolete as Facebook redesigns its pages and restructures how settings work, but as of now this is how things work.

Start at the Meta Accounts Center and then Download your information.

Next click on the button labeled Download or transfer information.

Select all your accounts.

I do have a Threads account and I wasn’t offered that as an option, it just gets bundled in with the Instagram archive.

Click on Specific types of Information.

This will allow you to request your Facebook data logs, they’re not included in the Available information option.

Click Select all for each category of data.

For each account you’re requesting data for (i.e., Facebook, Instagram) you’ll see a bunch of categories of data you can request. You will need to press Select all several times for each category in each account to get everything.

Scroll to the bottom for each account before you press the Next button.

Adjust the settings for your archive file.

• Date range: All time
• Notify: your preferred email address
• Format: JSON (this will give you more flexibility working with your archive in the future)
• Media quality: High

Click the Create Files button.

And now you wait.

You should see a message that says “You have pending downloads” under Current Activity and two different archives in progress (they separate out Facebook Data Logs as its own download). If you change your mind about some detail you can always cancel an archive request and start over again.

Upon submission, you should get an email with the subject line “Your Meta download request is in progress.” Wait until you get another email message when your archive is ready to download.

Look for a message with the subject line Your Meta information is ready to download. Mine took a couple days to arrive.

Going back to the Download your information page will show you a new button to download your files. You may notice the data logs are not ready as quickly as the other account archives, so you’ll have to wait a bit longer for those.

Download your files, finally!

Click on the Download button to reveal links to each of your account archives. Yes, this is what you’ve been waiting for!

Before each archive begins downloading, you’ll be prompted to enter your account password. The Instagram download option really does want your Instagram login, even though you’re on a page that looks very Facebook-y. It took me a couple tries to realize I was incorrectly offering my Facebook password.

And then what?

What do you do with this zip file of your digital life? For now, just keep it somewhere safe. The data it contains is possibly sensitive, so be careful how you store it. I do think it’s helpful to click around and see what’s in there before you delete yourself from Meta entirely.

So, what details do you get in your archived account data? There’s a lot going on in there, but it may feel like a letdown compared to what data treasures you might have been hoping for.

Here are some of the highlights of what you’ll find in the Meta archives.

• Facebook friend: each contact includes just name and timestamp. For a handful of my contacts I did see an email address included, so there must be some way to opt into making that more public than the default. Crucially, there’s no unique Facebook ID or other identifier, which is what could make it possible to reconstruct your friend network on another platform.
• Instagram contact: you get a profile URL, username, and timestamp. This is actually much better than what you can know from the Facebook friend data. There’s also a separate list of close friends, which is also a nice touch. You could theoretically reconnect with your contacts on another platform using these lists!
• Facebook posts: the main store of data for Facebook posts appears to come from a file called your_posts__check_ins__photos_and_videos_1.json, which kind of gestures at the sheer weirdness of what a Facebook post even is. But that’s just one of the files in the posts folder, there are more! (See the screengrab below.)
• Instagram content: by comparison, there is more coherency to the kinds of data you get from Instagram: posts, stories, reels, profile photos, and IGTV videos (I guess that’s what the live videos are called). And yes, you do get all your Threads content in there too, almost as an afterthought.

There’s also all sorts of fascinating advertising-related stuff:

• advertisers_you’ve_interacted_with.json
• advertisers_using_your_activity_or_information.json
• your_activity_off_meta_technologies.json
• ads_viewed.json
• suggested_profiles_viewed.json

You won’t find any social interactions or metrics on your own content—no likes, shares, or comments. The archive is narrowly a collection of your stuff. But you do get a comprehensive collection of all your Facebook likes/reactions (including who posted and a timestamp) as well as all your comments (including whose post you commented on, a permalink URL, and a timestamp).

Instagram similarly has your likes (including username and permalink URLs), comments (oddly, just the comment text and whose post you were commenting on), and a file called story_likes.json. That one is simply a list of usernames whose stories you’ve liked, listed chronologically. It’s easy to imagine how these machine-readable rankings are used to decide whose posts/stories you get exposed to on the platform.

I still haven’t gotten the Data logs archive, I guess they really take a long time to generate. I’ll be curious to see what they might offer.

I have some ideas for tools I’d like to build to provide more context for the data in these JSON files and index them properly so they can be searched. Archives should be put into use, explored and referenced for future work. These static .zip archive files do not let you do much with the data, but having the data is still important.

I don’t have those archive exploration tools that I can offer you today, but maybe someday I will. And those tools will only work if you take a few minutes to download and store your account data now!

I wrote earlier this week about how I’m withdrawing from Meta social spaces and investing my attention elsewhere, on Mastodon and Bluesky.

What does that look like? I’m writing down some practical steps that I hope others might take advantage of. If you have your own ideas, please let me know!

This short guide is about the part you do to prepare for a Meta departure. I’ll write more about backing up your account archives and actually deleting things in future posts.

Easing out of Instagram

For most of my friends Instagram is the one they use the most of all the Meta apps. If Instagram is an app you use a lot and you want to use it less, consider removing it from the home screen of your phone. You can still access the app, it’ll just take a little more intentional effort to open up. Replace it with a different app you want to use more.

Instagram has a feature called Daily limit that lets you impose a daily time limit for your use of the app. Here’s where you can find the setting (the Facebook docs describe a slightly different path):

1. Tap your profile on the bottom right.
2. Tap the “hamburger menu” on the top right.
3. Tap “Time management.”
4. Tap “Daily limit.”

I’ve had mine set to 15 minutes for a while now and it’s been totally fine. I thought I might need to bump it up, but it hasn’t felt necessary. When you’re approaching the time limit, Instagram gives you a warning so you can wrap up anything you might be doing. And if you actually do need to keep using the app past the limit, you can dismiss the interface and let it bug you tomorrow. This is legit a Really Good Feature and I applaud whoever made it happen at Meta.

If you want to go one step further, delete the app from your phone entirely. You can browse Insta from a web browser, and even post new things, the website interface has improved a lot!

Gentle encouragement

If you’re ready to actually get off Meta (yes!), Start by letting your people know that you’re leaving and encourage them to do the same. At the time I’m writing this, leaving Meta is part of a larger collective action. Coordinating your migration to other networks while others are doing the same will make it more likely that your connections are retained and it sends a stronger message to Meta that they’ve made a huge mistake.

I started by posting a message on every social network where I have an account: “hey, I’m gonna be leaving Meta soon, let’s keep in touch!” And I gave myself one month to get my social media affairs in order. I noticed that people only seemed to see my announcement on Facebook when I attached it to a profile picture update, due to how their algorithm works. The feed algorithms are probably not tuned to surface these kinds of messages!

It’s important to me that I not come off as dogmatic while still encouraging people to embrace their agency. I’ve gotten some private messages from friends who are agonizing about how they know they should leave these spaces, and want to, but don’t feel able to right now. That’s totally fine, I really mean it! I intend to check in with folks who are staying put and find out what I’m missing.

Tending the contact list

I’ve started taking my contact list more seriously. I’m shifting the source of truth for who I keep in touch with away from my social media follow lists to something that I can control. There are a lot of people I only know “on the internet” and they do not exist in my contacts! I’m trying to correct that, just using the built-in Apple Contacts app. Your list could live anywhere (paper!) so long as you keep it updated.

For each person I’m connected to I’m trying to find an email address, phone number, and following them on Bluesky and/or Mastodon if they have accounts in those places. If they have a personal website (hell yes!), can I subscribe to an RSS feed? Newsletter? Subscribed. If I know them on Facebook, I make a note of their birthday.

I’m also paying attention to how I know people. Are they connected to other people I’m connected to, are we part of a larger community? I’m discovering some patterns like “they live nearby” or “we went to school together” or “we’ve collaborated on projects.” I think this context will be essential in the long term for making sense of my social graph and making sure I can continue being a functioning socially-connected human.

Taking over some work

Meta’s products have been doing a lot of work on my behalf—keeping a list of contacts, showing me their updates, maintaining spaces where we can interact—and I intend to take ownership of that work. This year I’m making an effort to be more intentional about keeping in touch with friends, so exiting Meta dovetails nicely with that New Years Resolution. But yes, it is actual work, and I need to set time aside for it.

I’m thinking a lot about the people in my life who feel overwhelmed by this stuff and who might find learning a new platform a daunting project. I’m trying to think about the rough edges that I can help make less difficult to navigate. I’d like to create easy to understand guides about social media data portability and explore ways to collectively maintain them (does this exist already?).

Clearing paths for others

As you wind down your Meta accounts, start getting comfortable in new online spaces. And while you’re doing that, see if you can make it easier for others to follow in your footsteps. I’m mainly interested in Mastodon and Bluesky, but this same pattern applies elsewhere.

On Bluesky search for the names of people you know, or if you have an account on X there’s a tool called Sky Follower Bridge that you can use to help migrate your connections. You might create a starter pack of people you know, based on some community you’re a part of.

On Mastodon there are so many places to start, there’s a lot of work to do! For my part I plan to write documentation that can help make social.coop more accessible and gather information from coop members to discover if there are specific needs I can help resolve.

If leaving Meta sounds daunting to you, don’t stress about it. There‘s plenty of time and you don’t need to rush it. But for my part, I wish I’d started doing this ages ago!

Last week Meta—the company that operates Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads—changed their Community Guidelines in a way that’s designed to appease the incoming Trump administration. Rules that guided moderation decisions to remove hate speech based on gender and immigration are now lifted. They changed it for just those two categories of hate speech, gender and immigration.

Right wing politicians and their supporters will capitalize on these policy changes and Meta’s products will become more of a vector for online harassment and for organizing physical violence. One detail that especially concerns me is how Meta removed all mentions of “offline violence” that originates from online hate speech. In other words, Meta has intentionally made hate crimes permissible to organize on its networks.

Meta has an established track record of allowing its platforms to incite violence, in Myanmar against the Rohingya ethnic minority and elsewhere. I’m feeling uneasy about how these changes will accelerate the scapegoating of trans, nonbinary, and other gender diverse people in the United States, and anyone whose appearance or accent is deemed “foreign” to white supremacists.

I encourage you to spend some time with Erin Kissane’s essential series, Meta in Myanmar. Part 4 opens like this:

The Atlantic Council’s report on the looming challenges of scaling trust and safety on the web opens with this statement: “That which occurs offline will occur online.”

I think the reverse is also true: That which occurs online will occur offline.

Our networks don’t create harms, but they reveal, scale, and refine them, making it easier to destabilize societies and destroy human beings. The more densely the internet is woven into our lives and societies, the more powerful the feedback loop becomes.

Practically speaking, I now regard Meta and its products as untrustworthy. By making their online properties unsafe for people I love and care about, those spaces are now unsafe for me as well. It’s part of a larger pattern: deleting trans and nonbinary themed Messenger themes and removing tampons from the men’s bathroom. Would I frequent a store or cafe with a “no trans people” or “no immigrants allowed” sign? No, I would not, it’s abhorrent.

Where to next? The Fediverse.

I’ve announced on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads my plan to withdraw from those networks by February 6th, allowing some time for me to reconnect with friends elsewhere. (If you’re looking to connect elsewhere, I’ve linked to some social networks I am using in my contact info.)

I’m intentionally investing my attention in non-corporate, smaller scale online spaces. I realize that this divestment will seem unworkable for many people whose income and professional lives are entangled in mainstream social media. Others may just not feel ready to abandon their follower counts and migrate to something new. To put a finer point on it: for many people things may need to get worse, more harms may need to manifest, before it will seem obvious to delete Instagram.

Taking seriously the online/offline feedback loop quoted above, consider that embracing good governance and safety in your online spaces is a material way to prefigure the same things happening offline. If you want to build a better society in general, you can start with the online spaces you inhabit.

The Mastodon instance I use, social.coop, is operated as a cooperative. Members collectively own it and run it similarly to a food coop. We pay sliding-scale dues and governance decisions are made using a tool called Loomio, using threaded discussions and polls. Mastodon is a federated network, part of what’s called the Fediverse. You can join other Mastodon servers, or Pixelfed (similar to Instagram), or Lemmy (similar to Reddit), or Friendica (similar to Facebook). Each of these Fediverse services is designed to interoperate with each other, so joining one strengthens the social value of all of them.

If you’re feeling even more adventurous, sign up for Izzzzi (and then tell me your username).

I am going into this clear-eyed; I’m going to end up losing touch with a lot of people. For many of my contacts, Meta controls the only connection we have. It’s a real loss, withdrawing from communities that I’ve built up over the years (or decades in the case of Facebook). But I’m also finding new communities with different people on the networks I’m spending more time in. Those are exciting in part because of the shared values that brings people to alternatives like Mastodon.

Yes, I’m also on Bluesky. But I’ve been burned enough times—Flickr, Twitter, Instagram—that I don’t see how it can avoid a similar fate. (It’s not going to be through decentralization.) I don’t want to sugarcoat Mastodon—it’s much smaller, it has some real usability challenges, and its lack of diversity is a problem. The benefit of the Fediverse is that it isn’t a property that can be sold and/or enshittified like Big Social. Its problems are going to take work to improve, and that’s what I’m advocating we do together.

Me on my forty-fifth birthday.