Keep your friends.
Leave the platform.
Facebook bundled four things together so completely that quitting felt impossible. This site is the prototype that unbundles them — into pieces you can host, hand-edit, and outlive any single company.
01The four things Facebook owns
A friend graph, a conversation history, your authored content, and your daily attention — tied together so tightly that the cost of leaving was the loss of all of them at once.
For roughly twenty years, the platform held all four hostage to each other. Walk away and you lost not just the scroll feed but the address book, the long threads, the photos, the birthdays, the way old friends found you again after a decade.
That bundling was a business model, not a law of physics. Each piece can be separated, exported, and rehoused on infrastructure you control.
Friend directory
A flat, searchable, editable list of every person you've connected with. Names, locations, mutuals, notes — the address book.
Lives at /facebook/list/
Conversation
Threaded discussion by topic, not by feed. Slow, considered, archived. A bulletin board, not a casino.
Lives at austinspring.com/bbs
Long-form profiles
Hand-written essays about the people in your life, pulled from public posts, written with care. Not the algorithm's "On This Day."
Lives at /marcos-goodman/, /roger-mueller/
Your attention
Goes back to you. There is no infinite scroll. There is no algorithm. There is no notification dot manufactured to pull you back in.
Lives nowhere. That's the point.
02What the prototype shows
paulsfriends.com is a single person's working copy of the model. 4,841 friends, 9,843 contacts, 1,675 archived posts, two hand-written profiles, and a wall that pulls in the live BBS.
- Friend list with table+card views, in-cell editing, sort by any of 28 columns, and 8 social-platform URLs auto-built per friend.
- Per-friend pages showing identity, contact, location, social, work/education, places, family, bio, life events — all the structured fields that came out of the Facebook export.
- Combined Facebook archive with timeline, friends, new connections, and statistics tabs over a 12-month export window.
- Google Contacts directory, basic-auth protected, with phone/email filters and full search.
- The wall, which is the core of this idea: a feed-style view of live BBS conversations, threaded by topic, ready to absorb the social activity Facebook used to mediate.
The wall replaces the feed. Topical conferences replace the algorithm. Long-form profiles replace the timeline. Your contact list stays in your own filesystem, exported once and yours forever.
03How it compares
Side by side, the swap looks like a downgrade in quantity and an upgrade in quality. That's the trade.
04What you'd need to run your own
The whole stack is intentionally cheap and boring. Vanilla HTML, vanilla JS, JSON files. No build step. No framework. No NPM install.
- A Facebook export (Settings → Your information → Download your information). The parsers in this repo turn the JSON dump into a friend list and a timeline.
- A Google Contacts CSV if you want the broader address book layer.
- A static-hosted domain. $5/mo VPS, GitHub Pages, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages — anywhere that serves files.
- A BBS for conversation. Use austinspring.com as guests, run a local Synchronet board, or stand up a Discourse instance — the wall doesn't care which.
- A few hours. The whole pattern is on the specs page, including pricing if you'd rather have it built for you.
The prototype is live. The pattern is portable.
Browse the wall, read a profile, look at the friend list, then decide whether you want one of your own.
Open the wall → Build your own05Status of the prototype as of today
Concrete numbers as of 2026-05-06. Every piece is live, owned, exportable, and not gated by anybody’s API.
- 5,362 friend records — current network plus 373 preserved removed-friend records, going back to 2007.
- 4,884 friend-since dates — the actual day each friendship started, from a 19-year-old account.
- 50,400 all-time interactions attributed to specific friends — 8,694 comments and 41,706 reactions parsed and joined to the directory.
- 81 BBS conferences with 2,930 topics and 149,945 responses exposed as the wall feed.
- Per-friend BBS suggestions — each friend’s page surfaces the topical conferences whose subject matter overlaps with their notes, location, or interests.
- Auto-refresh — the wall’s conference snapshot rebuilds hourly from BBS state.
- One zip extracted, twelve still archived — the media manifest documents what’s in each part of the 32-GiB Facebook export.
06The unspoken thing
A real friends page is more like a yearbook than a newsfeed. It rewards re-reading, not refreshing.
Facebook taught a generation that "keeping in touch" meant a daily scroll past someone's vacation pictures. That isn't keeping in touch. That's being kept in passive proximity, which is a much weaker thing.
The model here aims for fewer, slower, longer interactions: a short essay about a friend, a single long thread on the BBS, a quarterly look at the directory. It's closer to how friendship actually worked before the platform monetized it.
It probably won't replace Facebook for billions of people. It doesn't need to. It just needs to work for one person, one circle, one alumni group, one family at a time.