Announcement: Facebook Service Ending

By Lusipurr
6 Comments
Lusipurr.com

Lusipurr.com

Hullo, FaceBookers.

We wanted to let you know that, in a few days, Lusipurr.com will close its FaceBook presence. Our Facebook fans deserve an explanation for this, so here it is.

Our readers know that Lusipurr.com has a strident anti-advertising stance. We deplore corporate monetisation policies. Our support for Indie games and the free-use and ad-free design of our site reflects our devotion to the ideals of a user-centred, open internet.

Unfortunately, over the years, sites like Facebook and Twitter have become increasingly corporate-focused in an effort to generate revenues. These movements have come at the cost of their user’s rights. Now, Facebook’s opaque data collection means that its users (including this account) do not have access to the information stored about them, nor do they have control over that information. A user cannot take their FB social network with them, despite that it is comprised of the user’s own friends and connexions.

This might have been fine when there were no alternatives; when, as a free service and the most successful of its kind, Facebook was new and unchallenged. However, there are now excellent alternatives, the best of which is App.net (ADN), which opened an invite-only freemium access on the 25th instant. With better alternatives–alternatives that are focused on the individual users and not on advertising or corporate profiteering–it is time to leave the initial stages of the social network behind.

If Facebook was Social Network 1.0, it is time for us to move on to Social Network 2.0: a network where users own their content and their connexions; where those properties easily can be taken from one service and transferred to another, leaving nothing behind, if so desired. It is time for users to have control of their own data for, after all, that data is about them, local to them, individual to them.

WHEREAS Facebook seems to have become too associated with advertising to be compatible with the goals of Lusipurr.com and WHEREAS there are other and better alternatives available, Lusipurr.com will close its FaceBook page on 1 March. Henceforth, Lusipurr.com will maintain a Social Network presence on App.net and, for the present, Twitter.

We encourage you to follow us on either of those two networks, and to share with your friends the Social Network 2.0 revolution. Goodbye, Facebook. Hello, world.

Our App.net page can be found here.

6 Comments

  1. Eric J
    Posted 2013.02.27 at 21:11 | Permalink

    That was fast!

  2. Lusipurr
    Posted 2013.02.27 at 21:28 | Permalink

    Strike whilst the iron is hot!

    We want to be part of the current push in this direction. Even if it is only a little push, at least we are not alone!

  3. Matt Dance
    Posted 2013.02.28 at 01:19 | Permalink

    Good choice. I only keep the FB to keep in contact with old friends (which even recently proved useful), but the data collection issue is troubling. I worry too about what kind of information Google or Yahoo keep; datamining seems inescapable. But it’s great to see someone moving forward for good reasons, rather than staying put out of conventional ones.

    I think the prevailing timeline of social networking is a little off though. What makes Facebook the original? Firstly it’s a distillation of Friendster and Myspace. Before that we communicated with chosen groups of friends on Livejournal (which was pretty ad-free and I doubt there was much uninformed data mining), and in the beginning, I can’t recall what they were called, but those interest-specific kind of mailing groups in the early 90’s had a similar group dynamic. Maybe it’s the absence of any particular interest in friends circles which makes Facebook popularly successful. But it is at the absolute pinnacle of commercialism, and likewise to be regarded disdainfully and villified by great prosecution of one’s moral conscience, if one is possessed of conscience for that issue.

    A friend once proclaimed Google+ to be Sicial Networking 2.0. Being corporate-operated, it could only mean more of the same.

  4. Lusipurr
    Posted 2013.02.28 at 15:06 | Permalink

    Well, I’m not implying that Facebook is the ‘first’ social network, surely there was Myspace before it, and the proto-social networking site LiveJournal before that. But Facebook is the first site to be the ‘definitive’ social network; the network which more or less dominates to the point that all the alternatives are so marginalised as to be effectively nonexistant. To employ a gaming metaphor, Facebook is the World of Warcraft of social networks.

    Previous sites all had their competitors which maintained a spirited and effective divide. Now, the divide is so marginalised and fractured as to be virtually invisible. Sure, there are people who use Google+, but where are they? Does anyone even notice? And, as you point out, it is just another site created out of the same starting point as Fb: corporate, advertisement driven, based on harvesting user data, etc.

    ADN has a different starting point; one that begins at the users, instead of at the corporate or financial level. And that means that it, presently, offers us the best choice for something different, better, and (we hope) successful.

  5. Matt Dance
    Posted 2013.03.01 at 10:23 | Permalink

    And I think it foul scorn that Facebook or Google, or any CEO of a Corporation, should dare to invade the borders of my internet privacy.

  6. Jahan 'The Legendary Zoltan' Honma
    Posted 2013.03.05 at 06:14 | Permalink

    In all honesty, it is things like this that made me a fan of Lusipurr in the first place. I hope others can see this as a great example of staying true to one’s beliefs even when it involves making sacrifices.