Tag: social media

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Off of Facebook & Instagram

I’m a fairly private person, and most of my social networking has been minimal outside of a controlled environment like Facebook. There I would have all my posts set to private, and I would interact with a limited group of friends. That said, I’ve always been unhappy with the state of social media. To me, community gatherings should never be controlled by corporations, whether its public parks or online social connections. The recent actions of various social media companies has made me even more sure of that, and due to that I’ve decided to go with my conscience and not support those locations. So I’ve left Facebook and Instagram.

I’ll be posting on this topic in more detail, but the result is that I’ll be communicating in a more open fashion here on my website. So this site, which was ostensibly just about my writing, will be much more wide-ranging in the future. I’m sure there are things that will interest some of you and some things that will bore you. Either way, you’ll be getting a community version of me that is at least a bit more open and less hidden by a corporate walled garden.

In a lot of ways that’s the price I’m going to pay. As I noted, I’m a private person, but if being social online requires that I be more, well, social, then so be it. For better or worse.

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Find Me on Social Media

Beyond this website, there’s a few places you can find me in social media. Feel free to reach out to me, ask questions, or simply follow me if you want.

Threads: https://www.threads.net/@jakedfw
Mastodon: https://kerr.social/profile/jake
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jake.kerr.social
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jakedfw/

My Facebook profile is limited to close friends, but I occasionally publish publicly, so feel free to follow me there.

Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/jakedfw/

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Making the web your own

When Can Puppy Go Out

I could not agree more with John Scalzi’s post about the artisan web. I’ve spent a lot of time recently moving off of corporate structures that own the entire structure of not just what delivers your content, but the moderation and filtering of it, as well. His description of the why is compelling.

A metaphor is valuable here. Think of it as renting versus owning your house. In both cases, where you live is entirely your own, but the constraints and limits of renting are far greater than when you own a home. There are simply things that you can’t do and that you can’t stop that are run by the corporate entity that owns the building and property.

When you own a house, you obviously still have to tie into corporate structures for things like utilities and communal structures for things like roads. And, of course, there are laws. But at the end of the day, it is your own plot of land, and you have a lot of say in how you interact with others and what you can do.

That’s the artisan web that John is talking about.

To that end, I am moving from Facebook and Twitter to the social web, best typefied by Mastodon, but Mastodon is just one front end. I use Friendica, which is actually much more powerful than Mastodon in terms of filtering what you see and limiting who sees what you post. But they are linked and talk to each other, so it’s pretty much just a personal choice. Similarly, I didn’t want to be linked to larger groups to host my content, so I created my own server at Digital Ocean. The upshot is if Mastodon Social goes down, my little server will still be trucking along. You can find me at @jake@kerr.social. (And that’s another side benefit–my social presence is branded to me, not mastodon.social or mastodon.world.)

I’m pretty much moving my entire digital life “in house.” Of course “in house” doesn’t mean that I’m not reliant on corporations. I still have to connect to the Internet, and I pay Digital Ocean to host my servers. But it’s about as independent as I think you can realistically be at this point.

So I do recommend others to join a more personalized web. And, as John says, it’s not an either/or. I’m still on Facebook because I have important friends there. But it’s not my “home.” It’s like the local bar where we go to meet. If you want to find my home, well, you’re here! Or you can follow me at @jake@kerr.social. Or, god forbid, you actually want to email me? You can do that, too. You go, oldtimer, you go!