Why are you still on facebook?
You know what Social Networks are. You know what they do. You know that they suck.
Have you ever stopped to consider why they suck? I can think of a few reasons:
- We are the product, the advertisers are the customer
- They are impersonal, enabling people to hide behind their keyboards while spewing toxic filth
Social Networks serve two key purposes:
1) They are a great method for quickly disseminating (mis)information.
When done right, information (art, music, etc.) can spread through social networks at an unbelievable pace. This comes at a cost, though. Stories shared through social networks are often poorly sourced, if they are sourced at all. “Copy/paste Don’t share” is a great way to add authenticity to a message while also obscuring its origin.
Before the dawn of social networking, if you wanted to share your opinion on a topic you made a blog post (like this one) and published it through a website you controlled (or, later, through a blogging service like this one.) Folks didn’t have to go to your blog to read it, either. Most/all blogging services used RSS for syndication. Syndication gave you a feed (like facebook’s news feed) of all the new posts from all the sources you care about.
This tied the news/opinion to an identity, and gave multiple people a single reference point for sharing that content. These blogs had (have!) all kinds of features that Facebook can’t compete with. (Syndication! Moderated Comments! Communities! Reputations!)
Blogging is still the most effective way to share information on the internet (and you don’t have to worry about whether Facebook’s algorithm will bubble up your post for enough people.)
Even quick Linksharing and Microblogging is more effective on a blogging platform (and an RSS reader) than on facebook.
So, if sharing information and spreading content is easier, better, and more effective through other means, and Facebook is mining your data, and selling it to other people, why are you still using facebook?
2) As of right now, Social sites are the best way for communities to interact with one another.
I don’t know about you, but this is the only reason I’m still using facebook.
Back in the mid 90s and early 00s (before the dawn of modern social networks), it was via Message Boards, newsgroups, and Mailing Lists (and these still exist, to some extent) as well as personal blogs. These days, though, a community doesn’t exist if it isn’t on facebook.
In my opinion Communities are the magic that makes social networks worthwhile. Sometimes these communities are built around a shared interest (I’ve made good friends through Atlanta Vinyl Collectors) sometimes it’s people you went to school with, family, work colleagues. Heck, my apartment complex runs a pretty bustling social network for residents.
The fact is that Social Networks are at their most useful as centers for community interaction and engagement.
What can we do?
We can fucking leave. That’s what we can do.
I run a mastodon instance called Retro.Social but you can join any mastodon instance you please, and we can all interact.
You know why?
Because Mastodon is free. No one owns it. Anyone can set up their own server, and put mastodon on it. Anyone who uses that server can follow anyone on any server that runs mastodon.
It’s like email, but for social media.
And it’s great.
So leave facebook behind, come join us somewhere more free.
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