So, after two years, I’ve nearly cut all ties to Facebook. I say “nearly” because I haven’t deactivated my account and do plan to check it occasionally to see what my friends there are doing. What I mean is that I’m no longer going to post anything there nor am I going to respond to any comments friends make to me there. If you want to talk to me, e-mail me, post a comment here, IM me, chat me, teleconference me or otherwise use the older, more established communications vectors.
I have several old posts here from a few years back about why I dislike Facebook, Twitter and whatever else is coming down the social networking pipe. But mostly it boils down to this, I’m a technician and I want as much control over my content and how it works in the Internet as possible.
Facebook and such are fine, if you don’t really want to understand how to build your own website or how all the technology works. Facebook is like Friendster from about eight or so years ago or Blogger before that or Geocities way back in 1996. They are all ways to make building web content easier, ways to make communicating on the Internet easier. For most folks that’s just perfectly fine.
But I’m a technician and a webmaster. I know how this stuff works and I want more control. So here I am, on my own webserver, using an open source content management system that I understand well enough and may understand better later on. It’s kind of retro in this post-smart-phone world but for the same reason why I migrated to Linux many years ago I’m back to doing this way. The Web is bigger than Facebook, the Internet is older. No one company is going to own it all if I have any say about it.
Now, obviously give the look of the site, there are a few tweaks I have to make. I have to get rid of that dorky scene of natural splendor at the top of this page for a start. I have to make this stuff validate as XHTML strict too. But I’m on my way! Hurrah!
Sounds like a winner Pace 🙂
facebook is surely frustrating in many ways. i dislike much of what i see, but in the end it is not about the tech it is about the fact that it is widely used and accepted, and therefor convenient. i’m sure that there are linguistic scholars that have complained bitterly that English sucks and went out and invented another language… we just don’t hear from them much.
i will miss you on facebook. – John
That is persuasive but you’re talking to a guy who only bought a mobile phone just recently despite the fact everyone uses those too.
Aside from the technology issues, I just don’t like the idea of all that information being concentrated in one company that we all have to rely on. I prefer much more decentralized solutions that are open and free as in speech not as in beer.
Besides my brain muscles were getting slack from neglect. Restarting my site is good for me.