Interesting article making the rounds today detailing the noble 2018 challenge to go back to the internet instead of the walled garden of Facebook. It's good you should read it.

Stop reading what Facebook tells you to read.

Remember the 2008 financial crash? The (dumb, wildly over-simplified) reason it happened was thanks in large part to giant investment banks like Goldman Sachs or J.P. Morgan. These enormous institutions figured out a way to make money off of home loans people didn't have the means to pay back. As a result, a bunch of people who should've never been given home loans were, of course, given home loans. And of course, they couldn't pay the loans back. The entire thing kept going and going until the financial system fell in on itself.

The big parallel: Those investment banks incentivized the creation of a shitty product.

Which is exactly what Facebook did. Yep. Hi. We're there.

Their goal, as a company, is to keep you on Facebook—and away from everything else—as long as they possibly can. They do that by making Facebook as addictive to you as possible. And they make it addictive by feeding you only the exact stripe of content you want to read, which they know to a precise, camel-eye-needle degree. It's the kind of content, say, that you won't just click on, but will "Like," comment on, and share (not just for others to read, but so you can say something about yourself by sharing it, too). And that's often before you've even read it!

Neither my wife or I have Facebook accounts. A fact that makes the look on our nephews and nieces' faces just a picture. "Uncle, how do you even life right now?". It's tough kid, but somehow we muddle through. The reasons why fall on deaf ears. The creepy tracking factor, the walled garden lock in. Because Facebook is simply convenient in a way that overrides everything else. And they have critical mass, everyone is there.

My Mum loves Facebook. There's nowhere else she can "one stop shop" and see all the goings on with her friend's lives. Facebook is free, it's easy, it's addictive. None of my Mum's friends are technical, they aren't going to buy a domain, a VPS account, install WordPress. They aren't leaving Facebook any time soon. No matter how much you tell them they are the product and Facebook makes money off them, they don't really care much. Where else are they going to go?

But the central premise of the article is still sound, we should all encourage Facebook addicts to wander further afield. To try the real internet, try to break free from the echo chamber so carefully selected by Facebook's algorithms.

And to those who are technically sound, if you have the means to self publish you should. It's liberating and unique to you. Be different than the crowd. It would be amazing if those bloggers we lost to Facebook would come back again. That's what I hope for.