I’ve decided to get off facebook once and for all. There are just too many studies showing that it is damaging to people’s psychology. I’m hoping to utilize this site a little bit more now. We’ll see. I miss the good ol’ days. 
Need some reasons yourself?
congatulations! i left facebook back in 2014, deleted all my likes, comments, posts, etc except for one or two. the only thing i left up was my business ‘page’, where i forwarded posts from our site.
i’ve had very minimal internet access over the last 8 years, and have mostly just checked e-mail and uploaded posts to our blog/site about what we were doing on our homestead/hunting/foraging/etc.
back in late may, my honey and i left the alaskan interior and moved onto a sailboat in ketchikan, alaska. in september, we got into our ‘reserved’ moorage, which happened to get a good internet signal. we were busting butt at tourist jobs that month, but once october rolled around, i actually started using the internet again… like, every day, the way i used to before moving off-grid and into community.
having been living in progressively remote places, i’ve really appreciated seeing the massive upswell of action, noise, attention, etc being drawn to racism, sexism, and colonization in this country. i’ve learned so much in the last few months, and have seen so many more high quality videos/tutorials related to rewilding than were available a decade ago.
i’m happy for you, Peter. i noticed that i couldn’t tag you in a post a short while ago, and wondered why. i’m not sure how long i’ll stay on facebook, but i have been deleting my several-month’s history chunk by chunk so i’m not leaving too much info on there at any one time.
this is my first time on this side of the rewilding forum - the facebook group has been wonderful for me. i’m looking forward to seeing what this side is like.
cheers. (one small step for man…)
Do you have any tips for staying off? Was it difficult for you not to be on there, or did you just go off grid and it became not an option?
i changed my life so that internet was difficult to access 
i’ll try to give a condensed history to provide some context on how it went for me:
2007-2009: left college & moved into intentional community (acorn, in va). internet on common computers was always available, but with 1-3 dozen other like-minded people always around, computers weren’t really used for leisure except for the odd movie night. this got me off my high school/college trend of checking fb compulsively & browsing my way to distraction. i cannot overstate the awesomeness of having a pool of like-minded humans around every day (working/living in common, so you’re not all running off to ‘jobs’)
2009-2014: began my own off-grid homestead in missouri, as part of a community land trust. i had no electric, and so only used internet 1x/wk at a neighbor’s place or at the ecovillage down the road. i was fully focused on survival, improving my shelter, growing food, raising animals, and just basically living. some of that time was intensely lonely, but it did give me the space to get through a lot of trauma-related stuff. one year in here i was elsewhere, waitressing & saving money so i could come back and afford a lease on the land. i was working enough that internet just couldn’t take up much space.
sometime in 2013 i had a phone line put in (basically because of the insistence of my neighbors in community. i didn’t want it). during my last two months on the homestead, i had cable internet put in so that i could do some research before moving. it was during this time that i deleted my entire facebook history (going back to my senior year in high school, 2005, when fb came out).
2014-2016: lived off grid in the upper peninsula of michigan, transitioning from a farm homestead to a life focused on hunting & gathering. this is when i started living full time with my honey, Jon. we installed a small solar panel system (& eventually a small wind tower). i could charge my laptop 1x/day most of the time (except the middle of winter), and because i was working part-time in town (25 miles away) to pay for building materials, i used internet while in town. internet use was never convenient, but i continued to blog about what we were doing, sharing photos & stories.
2016-2017: we moved to the interior of alaska, had no power through the summer, got a small generator in autumn so we could have a little bit of light through winter. so we could watch a movie a day (vital for sanity in winter). we used internet ~1x/week at the home of our one neighbor (no one else for 60 miles), who had terribly laggy, low-data satellite internet.
and then my last post picks up in spring of this year. so… i Could have been using internet more, but it was always in either a public space, a cafe, or someone else’s home. so basically i made it uncomfortable to do through my living situation, and not very efficient compared to the daily tasks required in my life. i’ve tried to push forward into a life of rewilding as actively as possible, even though it was often clumsy, awkward, slow, or lonely.
i’m a creature of convenience, and so i try to take the most aggressive steps possible to force myself into the situations i actually want. for example, if you give me an apartment with a couch, netflix, and money to buy ice cream with… i’m done for. i sink into depression very easily. i really have to force myself to get out, forage, hunt, get those hides tanned that i scraped and dried, etc. now that i’ve had steady internet for a few months, i’ve been trying to do all the research i wish i could have done in the past, gather data, and bolster myself with the proof of how much this culture of rewilding is spreading and gaining traction. i try not to do frivolous shit (most of the time i succeed). and i try not to let it Reduce the amount of time i’m actually outside doing things, but i’m not the best at that.
i desperately wish i could just move into a physical community/area of rewilding folks that was decently remote and fucking do it, as much as is legally possible. i’m sick to my core of trying to do it without friends. and i don’t want to be online any more.
Welcome “back” to the forum then. Missed your presence here for sure.
I forgot how much more I like dialog in this setting than I do on facebook. 
I am still on facebook, but wish there was more activity here, I think I like this better, I started in the days when forums were how we meet and communicated online… not facebook, or even myspace that much. I stay on facebook to communicate with a few friends, but am trying to get their e-mails… then I will go off except for posting to my 2 pages. Lived without it most of the time for 2 years except library use. Can again.
Funny timing coming across this right now. Last night when I opened up Facebook this popped out and made me literally lol:
I’m about in the same place you are @ladyfoxfeather. I left internet, tv and phones completely almost 3 years ago and did enjoy it but missed connections to people. Ive been back on for a few months and have reconnected to some and made new friends but the noise especially from FB is too much. If I had a physical tribe close I don’t think I would be on at all but I do like forums like this one better.
One thing I keep thinking about with the internet in general is “Context.” Things are taken out of context. How can you say anything of substance in a bite size twitter post or facebook update? Context is everything. Especially when dealing with abstract, hard to understand or articulate issues. This is why books are a thing. Because you have to set up the context for a discussion. The internet assumes context very often. But the problem is that the internet has no context, or it is all contexts at once. This is why it both connects and divides people. It is everything and nothing. AaaahHH!!!
We’ve lost the knowledge and know how to communicate. All the drama and bickering (rewilding groups included) most likely wouldn’t be happening like it is if it were in person. I enjoy the connections I’ve made online and have developed some amazing friendships but I long for that real in-person relationships with others that are heading down a similar path.
I’m also highly considering deleting my Facebook page for good… however, actually joining this group on FB is one of my main reasons not to. Are things frequently bumped over here from the FB group enough to compensate for losing that connection?
There is only one way to make that happen.
Get a group of folks who’d like to maintain their FB presence to agree to bump posts from that group into a designated thread on rewild.com?
or
Hire an anarchist-based cyber group to shut down FB completely once and for all, thereby moving all traffic to this site by default?
Both sound viable to me…
i’m off facebook! left my profile up with contact info (ditto for my ‘pages’), but will be staying away for the foreseeable future. will be much more active here & on the feralculture forums intsead. 
i also set up an rss feed program in lieu of my timeline, since i did have awesome stuff popping up on there from some of the folks i’d followed. so now i’ve got a non-fb source for the types of things i Want to see popping up in my browser. would love to see some kind of ‘interesting recent articles’ thread here to foster active discussion of current rewilding-related topics. has anything like that been done here already?
thanks for the inspiration, @PeterMichaelBauer - it helps a lot knowing there’s a good handful of other people migrating over to similar watering holes at the same time.
I have been off facebook for over a year and half. With it gone…oddly life is less stressful
Well done, Joan! I’m cleaning out my social media to permanently delete the different accounts… I’m curious though, because there is some information I want to keep updated on primarily from teachers, if you can share more about the RSS feed program? Not familiar with that sort of software
@pupilseekingteacher it’s not even a program, technically - or at least it’s built into a web site, so it’s not something you have to download. i’m using feedly, but there are a variety of free rss feed sites available. i made an account, and then started adding blogs & sites i wanted updates from.
a few sites that i wanted to follow don’t have rss enabled for their content, or the way the site is managed it’s not technically a ‘feed’ sort of deal (for example, iaminuit.com presents its posts/articles as an image gallery). but for the most part, it’s a convenient way to grab content from specific sites, authors, and categories of interest. then i can sort it however i like - normal news, rewilding related, health, whatever.
so now my feedly page is set as the home page on my browser, & will show me what’s new when i open a new browser window. you can bookmark articles for later, create ‘boards’ to share with others (vaguely similar to pinterest, i think), and filter out certain topics by keyword if you don’t want to fall into particular rabbit-holes.
anyone else have more experience or insight on using rss for things? i used it for a short bit way back when Everything went into one feed reader by default. then google, blogger, yahoo, etc all started separating ‘their’ content so you had to use multiple ‘readers’ to see everything. would love to hear from folks who use rss effectively & what your preferences & tweaks are to make it work for you.
I just logged off, semi-permanent from Facebook, for the foreseeable future. I hope we can grow this group more, and make it very lively!
One thing I have done for a couple of years to stay up to date on rewilding related news it Google Alerts. I have multiple buzzwords tagged so that google will send me a daily or weekly update with all the news articles that use those words. Obviously “Rewilding” is one of them. I would say that 95% of those articles are about wildlife conservation rewilding in the UK. I also have things like “paleoanthrology” “traditional ecological knowledge” “hunter-gather” things like that. I noticed that most of the time I would see articles start trending on facebook about a week or so after they got to my inbox.