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.