The cult of Facebook: You can log out any time but you can never leave
From my perspective, there are more reasons to leave Facebook behind than to continue a presence on the service. I have been on or around the internet since 1988 when I had an account as a contractor at David Taylor Research Center in Carderock, Md. This was prior to web browsers, multimedia, and even the domain name service (DNS) which was released on the DTRC network around the time I worked there.
I had been using dial-up bulletin board systems (BBS) and eventually building computers to host them and designing or at least configuring ones based on Wildcat or The Bread Board System (TBBS) software. These companies rapidly disappeared or changed their product lineup when web servers emerged in the mid-90s. Along the way I had user accounts on the following dial-up services:
- The Well
- GenNIE
- Prodigy
- AOL
- CompuServe
- MySpace
and was a regular reader of USENET postings via various news readers. I was also a member of a user-driven service called FidoNet that had postings from around the world.
Needless to say, I am accustomed to leaving one service behind and waiting until the Next Big Thing happens. Facebook has broken trust with its users, an act that is magnitudes worse than the censorship of Prodigy or the outrageous unsolicited propositions on MySpace. For the present I am content with local community sites and the Nextdoor system which tries to be local. You can find my videos on Vimeo, photos on Flickr and there is a podcast site which I will talk more about when there is something to download from there. [slide on over to the Media page on this blog for a compendium of links!]
Keep your eyes on the road and encryption strong!
Chip
[and here is the confirmation that the account is scheduled for deletion "within 14 days:"]
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