The concept that I finally latched on to restructure my online life in a meaningful way was sandboxes. This is a software concept for protecting data by isolating processes. An example is running Windows in VM for the one app you need it for to keep Microsoft from being to spy on you. Applying it social media and the rest of my life made sense. For starters I’m getting as much of my messaging as I can off of Facebook as I talked about last time. Next up was restructuring how I do social media.

To start off, I had over 600 Facebook friends. It was a weird mix of friends in real life, family, people I went to school with, former coworkers, fellow podcasters , and just about anyone who sent me a request as long as we had more than a few mutual Facebook friends. I’ve used Facebook less and less as time goes by and had reached the point where I basically ignored the feed. Instead I would interact with a podcaster group I run, talk to people on messenger, manage the podcast’s page, and use it to keep track of events that are coming up. As a whole, Facebook has been a net negative in my life since at least 2014, but it provides benefits that would be too detrimental to lose, such as my entire local social life and the podcast page.

So, time to sandbox. Here’s what I came up with:

• Personal – Friends and family on Facebook.
• News, current events, science, and technology – Twitter and Reddit.
• The Podcast – Twitter and the Facebook page.
• Networking with other podcasters – Facebook groups, Reddit, Twitter.

So, what really changed? I dropped 2/3 of my “friends” and I’m more active on Twitter. Facebook doesn’t piss me off as much and I have a manageable number of friends to be able to shape my feed to keep it from pissing me off. I’m finding the news less annoying and frustrating on Twitter and Reddit. Why? Not sure, maybe I just need a place for everything and everything in its place.

This also has the benefit of limiting how much data that Facebook can collect on me and by reducing how many friends I have, there are fewer people that can give away my data.

We’ll see how this goes, but so far it’s already a vast improvement. There’s more I need to clean up on Facebook, but this is good enough for now.

Next up will be values as they relate to the internet.