Lately it has become fashionable to delete your Facebook account. The privacy issues, the politicization, the arguments among old friends have taken much of the old fun out of Facebook. I have posted a few articles over the last year about some of the problems of social media, so there is no need to rehash those here. I have decided that I don’t necessarily want to dump Facebook completely. I would just like to have a place to post content that they don’t own and exploit.
I have to admit I do like my Facebook. Keeping in touch with friends, finding out about interesting articles that I might not have run across. Joking around. What I have found is that in the last year or so I have reverted to email communication with a few close friends. Facebook turn out to be a poor substitute for personal communications. So this got me to thinking: maybe there is a way to supplement other parts of Facebook. I didn’t want a replacement, which would just bring about the same problems, just a way to shift away from their platform a bit.
Not that WordPress is any less ‘private’. Heck, the Facebook people could just as easily come over to this site and collect data on me. But I just want to make it a little more difficult and give myself a bit more control back.
We will see if this works out. Best case, I keep doing this and so do other people and maybe it works as a counterweight to the concentrated power of Social Media giants like Facebook. Anyway, much of what I like about Facebook is that it is an archive of things that I did and things that interested me. This serves that purpose completely. I expect a lower level of interaction here, but hopefully a higher quality.
Alt-Facebook, here we go.
[…] in September I started this experiment as an alternate to Facebook (Welcome!, Facebook Problems, Early Thoughts). I like it and have decided to pony up and pay the good folks at WordPress for […]
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