Ready to ditch FetLife? Tools to make the transition easier.
All right folks. FetLife’s founder, John Baku, unleashed a wave of pedophilic comments on an unsuspecting 9 year old boy. (Disgusting.) FetLife’s new community manager, Susan Wright, is telling a woman targeted by a convicted murderer that the other FetLife users who are sending her personally identifiable details to this felon are not in violation of the site’s Terms of Use. (Bizarre.) And the people who are continuing to post my full legal name and other information, despite many of my friends having sent me screenshots showing that they’ve repeatedly reported these violations, are continuing to do so.
And you’re on FetLife…why?
Because it’s the place where you find out about events? Check out FetLife iCalendar, an easy way to sync your Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook, or any other calendaring application with FetLife events. (Yup, I said “sync.”)
Because you don’t want to lose all your account history and FetLife offers no way for you to get it? Check out this free FetLife Export tool, which comes complete with a video walkthrough for making a full backup of your FetLife account.
Because your writings are on FetLife and it’d be a pain to move them to another blogging platform? Last night, I wrote a WordPress plugin that automagically imports your FetLife Writings from FetLife.com into your WordPres blog. It’s called the WP FetLife Importer and as soon as it gets approved, you can download and install WP FetLife Importer directly from the WordPress Plugin Directory. Until then, you can download a copy from my staging server.
If your blog is on WordPress.com rather than your own server where you can install plugins, try the FetLife to WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) Generator instead.
Recently, I got some email from folks who run a BDSM/fetish group concerned that FetLife isn’t the best place for them to be. (Y’think?) Moreover, although they had come to rely on the site for just about everything, they had no way to contact the over 2,000 members in their FetLife group informing them that they’d like to transition away from FetLife.
Turns out, I’m getting more and more requests from folks who are beginning to realize that FetLife is exploiting them and not letting them leave easily. When a company, or a service, or a person, tells you that you need them to survive, and at the same time they hinder your attempts to leave, what you’ve got is an abusive relationship.
And while I can continue to say “I told you so” until the cows come home, I’m taking a different approach this time.
- If you’re an individual person and you want some help escaping FetLife, leave a comment or make a request for some code and I might be able to make an exporter/importer/content migration tool for you.
- If you’re an organization or a group, check out my (still very new) Escape from FetLife page and ask me for a quote. I can make hours upon hours of labor-intensive work moving content out of FetLife as easy as…well, as easy as clicking a button. (Don’t believe me? Try any of the tools, above.)
I was a professional Web developer and free software programmer for almost a decade. If you (or anyone you know) wants help getting off of FetLife, let’s make it happen. (Because I can.)
