How to ditch Facebook without ditching your friends

A new interop design fiction from EFF.

Facebook users claim to hate the service, but they keep using it, leading many to describe Facebook as “addictive.” But there’s a simpler explanation: people keep using Facebook though they hate it because they don’t want to lose their connections to the people they love.

Calling Facebook “addictive” plays into the company’s own mythology, the sales-pitch they make to advertisers, in which they claim to be neuro-sorcerers whose mastery of “big data” and “dopamine loops” can sell anything to anyone, which is why you should buy ads on their service.

The simpler explanation — that Facebook is holding the people you love hostage, and you’ll put up with a bad situation in order to stay connected to them — has many advantages over the “evil sorcerer” hypothesis. For starters, it doesn’t require that you accept Facebook’s own self-serving and improbable claims about having invented a mind-control ray. Instead, the “hostage-taking” explanation rests on a visible, easily verified fact: if you leave Facebook, the service won’t let you send messages to the people who stay behind.

Economists have a name for this: “switching costs,” this being everything you have to give up when you switch from one service to another. Internally, Facebook’s product managers are very frank that they deliberately design their products to have the highest possible switching costs:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

Here’s how their thinking goes: if leaving Facebook is easy, then we have to treat our users well or they’ll go somewhere else. But if leaving Facebook is painful, then they’ll stick around, even if we abuse them. The higher the switching costs are, the worse we can treat our users without risking their departure.

Now, digital technology has intrinsically low switching-costs, because the only digital computer we know how to build — a Turing-complete Von Neumann machine — can run every program we know how to write. Someone can always figure out how to plug something new into something old.

Plugging something new into something old is called interoperability. There’s no real…