Facebook was already getting to be an unreliable tool for this business. Too many long-time readers have told me that they had no idea a release was coming out until they checked Kindle, despite the fact that I’d been posting about it for a month. Facebook has set its algorithms to determine what you should see, regardless of what you want to see, unless you’re using something like Fluff Busting Purity. As a result, I’ve been urging subscriptions to my newsletter for some time. At least then, you’ll get notification in your email, provided you check it, when something comes out.
Now, it appears that Facebook is in quite a bit of trouble. Whether due to astounding degrees of incompetence or hostile action remains to be seen. There are a lot of rumors flying around, many of which I have yet to see corroborated. The end result is essentially the same, however. The biggest platform is down, hard, and it’s a good thing I didn’t have a release scheduled for tomorrow.
I’ve had a backup social media presence on MeWe for some time, complete with a backup to the Action Thriller Renaissance group I built on Facebook. A lot of my readers haven’t moved over there, for various reasons, but this is a large part of the reason why I staked out a spot there. In this case, it wasn’t that I got banned from FB (Never have ended up in NiceGulag, probably because I’ve shared fewer memes and used long words when I posted Wrongthink.), but that Facebook itself appears to have imploded.
Maybe this is going to be a good thing in the long run. Hopefully I won’t lose contact with some of those folks on FB, if the outage continues indefinitely, but some decentralization could be desirable, especially when the centralized platform has been turning into Plato’s Cave.
So, head over to MeWe, or just sign up for the Newsletter (you get a free novella when you do). The world got on fine without Facebook for a long time, it’ll get on fine without it. We just have to adjust some of our business strategies to disentangle, which is no bad thing.