I’ve been toying with leaving Facebook for a while now, even signing up to other social media platforms like Minds and Joindiaspora.com where one could with the right expertise set up your own community on a server thereby owning all the rights to your family and holiday pics that are posted online. Yes, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter reserve the right to use your content however they want. They have the right to sell your content to third parties to use in advertising.
We are social beings, no doubt, our immune systems are impacted by our social interactions or lack thereof. We need to interact and share our lives. We function in love and community. But why give all the commercial benefit to Big Corp, which functions in monetary value and manipulating feeds to extract more advertising revenue.
Yes, I’m finally leaving Facebook, because there are better options now and a greater community of people exploring other ways, peer-to-peer, decentralized, to be together.
First off, if you rely on Facebook to follow your favourite websites, why not use a news aggregator such as feedly. On one browser tab you can access all the latest updates/posts listed for your convenience.
Secondly, recently I had to email an associate and discovered that the domain name of her email address was her family name. Why haven’t more families or groups of friends got together and launched their own private website where they can have chatrooms, galleries, and my favourite, an email address @ yourfamilyname! (Spoiler alert: can’t wait for another email address.)
Thirdly, why post on Facebook (or twitter, instagram), creating advertising revenue for them via your content (labour, creativity), when there is a decentralized, social media platform called Steemit which pays you for quality content and your recognizing of quality posts for the network (via voting for your favourite posts). OK, Steemit is still in beta, rough around the edges, but it is certainly good enough. Maybe you will find feeds dominated by certain subcultures, but these are still early days with many bloggers, photographers, poets, artists, political commentators joining every day. It will be quite a learning curve, but well worth it for personal freedom, a great introduction to blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. Oh, and I’m sure we could run a community, even a government with Steemit-type infrastructure with enough will, distrust of politicians and love for Humanity.
