Keeping Contact Without Social Media

I’ve been through multiple iterations of losing contact with people I’ve met via social media. It’s high time we stop allowing those platforms to hold our relationships hostage. However, that means we must individually do a little work.

I’m not keen on collecting up other peoples’ data without them having a say in it. So, I’m proposing a new practice where I invite those who are mutuals (in more words, they’ve seen me around the Internet and I likely have seen them) to offer me, via any communication method that works to reach me, whatever contact details they’re comfortable sharing with me. If I am in agreement with their assessment of our mutual relationship, I will send back a reply with whatever contact details I am comfortable sharing likewise.

What will I do with the Data?

In a time when data breaches are common, protecting, as an individual, the privacy of others is an important thing. And I think beyond that, it’s important to communicate what I’m going to do with that data, where I will keep it, and so on.

  • I’m running an instance of Monica CRM on my homelab. It’s not accessible outside of my home network, except via my personal Tailscale network. I’m not forwarding any ports to it, nor do I have any domains pointed at it. I plan to start entering whatever details I receive there. I’m choosing this rather than a bog-standard address book because it gives me better tools for keeping track of context - how I know someone, where I first encountered them, and which people our personal Venn diagrams overlap on.

  • For some contacts, I may also keep some or all of your information in the address book that my mobile phone uses. I’m using a self-hosted NextCloud instance as the CardDAV source of truth. This service is accesible from the public Internet, via a reverse proxy, with SSL enforced. My mobile phone is secured with a PIN. It does not have any other auth methods set up - neither my face nor my fingerprints can be used to unlock it. I rarely travel by air, train, bus, or boat, but if I did, I would turn it off before going through security checkpoints (where feasible). As of the writing of this post, my phone is running Android 14 with Knox 3.10. My primary notebook (runs Pop!OS) is encrypted and I don’t generally reuse passwords. I do use hardware keys as a second factor whenever the option is available.

  • As a rule, I don’t give out other peoples’ personal information. If someone wishes to reach someone else and asks me to mediate, I send the requestor’s information to the person they’re trying to contact, and let the recipient choose whether to respond.

  • I’m not an IT security pro, nor do I even work in the IT field. Just about all of the knowledge I have regarding security was self-acquired. There are very likely holes in that knowledge, and my personal security practices are likely not perfect, but they’re certainly better than most non-IT-pros and perhaps even better than some IT pros who don’t specialize in security.

Which Contact Methods Work?

As of the writing of this post, I can be reached via the following methods. Note that for these, I am not going to put down my specific username, just the method. Either you will have seen me post about usernames on social media or you know me well enough to guess what they might be. Please introduce yourself in a way that I will be able to recognize you at the start - and don’t just say ‘hello’.

  • Email (PGP capable if sent to my domain, see my “About” page)
  • Federated/AP direct message
  • XMPP
  • Matrix
  • Signal
  • Discord
  • Snail Mail
  • Delta Chat
  • Veilid Chat
  • SMS to the mobile phone number I’ve had since 2001-ish
  • LinkedIn (this is a last, last resort. Please don’t make me visit that site.)

In the event that you only know about less-secure ways to reach me and would like to use a more-secure way, you could ask first via that less-secure method to connect on a more-secure channel. That could include using two less-secure methods to pass verifications.

If you know me in the meat-space, you can also ask to connect in person, as long as the travel required to do that is feasible for both of us. I have the resources to travel about 60 miles from where I live.

Do any contact methods definitely not work?

I killed all of my Twitter accounts. You can’t reach me there any longer. You should not try Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, or Tumblr. I don’t look at them. I never had accounts at WhatsApp, Telegram, SnapChat, etc. There are a few old email addresses (Yahoo Mail, for example) that I no longer use and do not log into, ever.