Looks like WordPress makes a default post with the title “Hello world!” when you make a new site. That title is fine with me. This is my first website, after all.
So hello, world. Welcome to a little slice of my life, this time on my terms.
Like most people nowadays, I grew up largely on the Internet. I was part of the first generation that really did. Like so many billions, I made accounts on an interminable number of other people’s websites. Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Neopets, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube… just to name a few in alphabetical order.
But none of those are digital homes. They’re factories to siphon money.
That’s fine when it’s naked. I have nothing against Neopets. I barely ever touched their forums and they never pretended like that community was the point of it. I wanted to play Flash games and they wanted advertising dollars. Win-win.
But Facebook is irredeemable. They tried to lock all of your friends, family, and local businesses into their garden to monopolize your very lives. And it didn’t matter to them how many genocides were organized on their website along the way.
In case you don’t believe me about Facebook
For a quick primer on the many horrible crimes of Facebook, I’ll refer you to Behind the Bastards. They have multiple series on the subject. Here are links to the beginnings of each:
- Mark Zuckerberg: The Worst Person of the 21st Century (So Far) a three part series
- Mark Zuckerberg Should Be On Trial For Crimes Against Humanity a two part series
- Let’s Look at the Facebook Papers a two part series
So starting a couple of years ago, I’ve gone through the slow process of unwinding from the broader corporate Internet. I downloaded all of my Facebook data and, after a two week warning to whomever the algorithm decided to actually show my post to, I deleted the account. I didn’t even care to download the Twitter data when Musk took that over. I just deleted it.
But interestingly, the straw that broke the camel’s back was Flickr. I got an email that said I’d have to either pay them or they’d start deleting my photos that I’d marked as personal. So instead, I started to pay Bluehost to put them up here.