How to Move from Facebook to Idka in Ten Easy Steps

After learning that Facebook had mishandled millions of users’ personal data, Hosfelt Gallery, a contemporary art gallery in San Francisco, decided they needed to take a stand against Facebook’s unchecked gathering and dissemination of people’s personal information and ongoing security breaches.

Hosfelt Gallery was founded in 1996 and represents an international roster of emerging to established artists whose work is grounded in an understanding of history—visual, cultural, literary, political, and social—while incorporating new ideas, materials and methods. These artists produce work that often addresses the most pressing issues of our time, including the ethics, dilemmas, and power of social media and technology.

“We believe that continuing to participate in Facebook, while it steals and sells users’ information, and collaborates with criminals, trolls and despots to undermine democracy, condones their unethical behavior,” said Todd Hosfelt, founder and CEO of Hosfelt Gallery. “As a contemporary art gallery that showcases cutting edge artists, we don’t follow. We lead. Consequently, we decided to look for a new social media platform that was safe for our artists and clients and wouldn’t compromise their data or our integrity.”

In searching for a new social media platform, the gallery wanted privacy and data protection, compliance with Europe’s stringent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and a business model that did not require collecting and selling data to advertisers or third parties. However, they still wanted to reach customers and artists, promote upcoming events and exhibitions, and share visual images from the gallery.

The company decided to move its Facebook page to the Idka platform. Idka offers a subscription-based social media platform that does not rely on advertising or tracking user data. Based out of Stockholm, the company is fully compliant with the new GDPR regulations in Europe and its servers are housed in Europe where users’ data must be deleted upon customer request. At the same time, Idka combined the functionality of social media platforms such as the Facebook newsfeed, a chat feature like Skype, collaboration like Slack and document storage like Dropbox, all for a subscription price of under $30 per year.

“Thirty dollars seemed like a minimal price to pay for advertising-free, secure communications with our audience and the peace of mind that their data wasn’t being mined across the internet for nefarious, ever-growing purposes.”

Here’s how they moved their Facebook profile in less than an hour.

1. Go to www.Idka.com. Choose to sign up for a business or individual account.

2. Once you’re signed up, you can choose the kind of group you want to set up. This is an important distinction between Facebook and Idka. Instead of adding a page, like you do in Facebook, you add a new “group” in Idka. It can be hidden and completely private where members must be invited, or it can be closed, meaning people can search on Idka and find the group, but must be given permission to join. The third option is to create an open group. Because Hosfelt is a business wanting to attract customers, they opted to be an open group, which means it’s visible to anyone.

3. Once the group is set up, you are directed to the Home Page of your group. The Home Page offers a video and tips for further guidance on set-up. You can also add a profile photo and a background picture. 

4. From there, you can start adding posts to the group, which will automatically show up in the group’s newsfeed. We started by cutting and pasting from the Hosfelt Facebook page. Keep in mind that it’s important to post directly to the group. Idka is built on the idea that you will join multiple groups based on interests, family, friends, work, etc. Because the nature of the platform is privacy, the groups do not overlap. Therefore, you post to the group, not the newsfeed. Then all your posts plus the posts of your contacts show up in the newsfeed tab. The “posts” tab shows all the posts YOU have made to all your groups. But the groups are where you should post your status updates. 

5. After pasting the text into the Idka group post, we uploaded the same photo we used in the Facebook post.

6. We continued to add posts, including links to news articles. In Idka, news articles don’t always automatically generate an image, so we uploaded appropriate images to support news articles when needed.

7. Just like in Facebook, you can load multiple images into one post.

8. Group members can also comment on posts.

9. Once the page is populated, the final step is to invite your followers and friends to find you on Idka.

10. Start being social on Idka

In ten easy steps, Hosfelt migrated from Facebook to Idka. While Facebook has built up millions of users over the past 14 years, Idka is just getting started. Just like when Facebook first began in 2004, it will take time for Idka to build mass followers and groups. But thousands of new users have joined just in the past few weeks since the Facebook scandal broke. To get the most out of Idka, invite your friends and colleagues to join. 
Once they do, you’ll start seeing uninterrupted news and posts from your friends without advertising, bots, trolls or fake news. For businesses who are looking for an alternative to Facebook and their sister products, Idka offers a complete social media solution without the inherent risks and unethical behavior that has become part of the Facebook experience.