If you're recommending we revert to the Internet as it was before Facebook (where people had to manage websites to have a presence), that's like suggesting we fix democracy by removing woman's suffrage. Technically illiterate people are people. Fixing a system by excluding a huge chunk of people from using it isn't fixing it, and I'm truly stunned to see an otherwise inclusive community so blindly advocate for it.
@emsenn and in any case "recommending we revert to the Internet as it was before Facebook" is a strawman—I don't know of anyone who is advocating for that? in any case, before facebook there were plenty of easy-to-use centralized platforms that didn't share all of facebook's problems (livejournal, friendster, myspace). imo recommending people use something other than facebook is more like advocating for public transit instead of cars than it is like advocating for restricting suffrage.
@shadowfirebird @aparrish @emsenn I’m not sure what “reverting” means in this sense.
Facebook was already archaic from an “innovation” perspective by the time anyone noticed it. The only difference is that the people behind it were better at extractive capitalism than similar services.
A move away from Facebook would be progressive, not regressive.
@jjg @aparrish @shadowfirebird That's like saying a smartphone wasn't innovative, because it just took parts from other systems and put it together. Just because it's not innovative to you doesn't mean it's not innovation to another part of the market.
A move away from FB isn't inherently progressive - when I tooted this, I was legitimately seeing people advocate that people should have to write their own website from scratch if they wanna have a web presence. That is not progressive.
@emsenn @jjg @aparrish @shadowfirebird
We should teach people how to write their own websites so they can choose to do that certainly.
I taught exactly that in a College in Sweden and Community College in the US.
It absolutely should not be the sole privilege of an overwhelmingly affluent, white, cisgendered minority to control and determine the web experience of all of us. And I more or less fit that description. But my goal is to spread the power through education not to control&exploit.
@shadowfirebird @emsenn @aparrish @jjg
It also sounds less attractive if you say, "...where you can work for a billionaire, for free."
It might be different if the only way to publish on the Internet was by sharecropping for billionaires, but better alternatives have existed *before* the private platforms.
I've just never found a way to communicate this effectively to the majority.
@jjg @hhardy01 @aparrish @emsenn
I can certainly see the attraction for people in coming to pretty walled gardens like Facebook where you can just enter content, for free.
But when you look at the attraction for the folks *running* these sites, things get a lot darker. They aren't doing it out of benevelence!
The end win/lose reckoning for the end user is negative.