These are the kind of responses I get when I try to convince friends to create their own websites (and my internal reactions to them):
Me: You should post on your own website instead of using Twitter and Facebook.
Friend: I don’t know how, Twitter/FB is much easier.
(Me: But it’s easy, I can even create the website for you… wait a minute… most of you have been the owners of a Diaryland/Geocities/LiveJournal/Tumblr site in the past, you know how to goddamn use a CMS. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻))
Me: But you can have your own domain name.
Friend: I don’t want to pay for it/anything.
(Me: 😒)
Me: But FB/Twitter is evil/terrible/not a good citizen of the internet/etc etc.
Friend: I don’t care. / I know they’re terrible, but everyone’s on it, what can you do? 🤷♂️
(Me: I don’t know which answer is worse.)
Me: But you get to own your own content. Don’t you care that everything you post is living on somebody else’s server?
Friend: No.
Me: Don’t you want to keep a record of everything you post?
Friend: No.
(Me: I mean I guess I should have known when I received a wedding invite via FB instead of traditional mail…)
@vishae I have so many friends who used to have blogs (most of them still exist, even, frozen in amber); it is endlessly frustrating. Your last reaction, though…that situation was a real WTF!
@vishae As someone who doesn’t have fb, I missed a then-friend’s wedding; when I told her I wasn’t invited she replied “of course you were, I invited everyone on Facebook!” Was a good reminder that people are more willing to hand over their lives than I previously thought.
@vishae I completely I agree and I too had gone through a similar experience recently. I feel sad that we are ruined by the simplicity at the cost of control, ownership.
@vishae I can relate to this! Even mentioning that alternatives exist wins me an eyes-glazed-over look.
@vasta Wow! What’s bothered me a lot is the deaths that I have missed because no one bothered to tell me about them, even though everyone I know on Facebook is a friend/former classmate or collaborator from real life, and they all know I am almost never on Facebook. After finding out about a couple of missed deaths all at once a few years ago, I decided maybe I should engage more, but that didn’t work out well. I’ve decided I’m much happier with my friends being on Facebook where they ignore me and me here on Micro.blog where no one knows me but I am among “my people”: the historians, the poets, the lovers of names and language, the app-builders….
@smokey Yes: I love the idea of finding one’s “people”—and especially that our “people” changes based on context. (And this, changes our mechanisms and tools to find and engage with them.) If more people were more conscious (and more deliberate) of who they surround themselves with, rather than just going where everyone is, we’d have healthier, more supportive communities.
@vasta @smokey I view FB/social-media invites as a good gauge of who is a good friend worth keeping. When a friend invites me via SMS/mail/in-person to an event that was otherwise circulated on FB, the fact that they went out of the way to keep me in the loop means that they want me, Vega the particular person, to be involved in their lives, instead of lumping me in with the amorphous “they” of FB friends. This is something to be respected and reciprocated.
@vasta @smokey re. Social groups based on context – I think my first brush with this was when FB purchased Instagram.
Prior to this, my Instagram “friends” was just a list of fellow bullet journalers and fountain pen addicts. My timeline was full of stationery porn.
Then FB intruded and I had RL friends commenting on my posts, asking me why my timeline was full of pen and ink pics. It was most jarring when I was live streaming an ink review and I had RL friends log on asking me what I was doing. 😩
@amit Exactly! If people don’t care about the content that they are creating (even tweet-length content), it is very hard to convince them that they should host it own their own sites.
@vishae At some point they’ll realise just how much of their lives can be significantly affected but that point how much damage might have been done to actual, real relationships?
It’s sad to see just how shallow people can be, how they live to serve themselves more than anything; choosing to have more control over your web identity is an act of putting other people first by saying “Here. I am in a stable space, reliably available for the people who matter most to me. Right here.”
@vishae Exactly! I keep small-posting about and/or alluding to my thoughts about how corporate social media has “flattened” our identities, forcing us to be all facets of our selves, to everyone, at all times; I really need to get a dedicated long-form post about it done….
@vega Indeed. I have a very, very, very small set of friends I keep up with via analog and older digital methods; it’s harder and more time-consuming, but definitely more meaningful.