> If I lost account access to Facebook, I'd create a new account and build my network again.
If Facebook permits you to do so. They don't have to let you, and it is within their power to stop you. Whether they choose at this time to exercise such power seems to me less important than that they can, and that it's only up to you whether you participate in Facebook's privileged access to your friends, family, loved ones, and confidants, insofar as Facebook suffers it to be.
> Except in this case it's not a generic protocol but a specific service. That's probably more the issue with facebook/twitter than anything else. They created a closed ecosystem that people rely on not a protocol that can be implemented by anyone.
Yes, that's the point I'm making. They - and here I mean mainly Facebook, which is the only one of those two actually thriving - created a closed ecosystem which is entirely mediated at the whim of its creator, whose motives and methods are almost entirely obscure. And it has over a billion people using it - for many of whom it's the primary medium of social interaction.
That one relatively small and relatively secretive private corporation should have such astonishing insight into, and power over, the social interactions of such a significant fraction of the human species as a whole, is a new thing in history. To be sure, we live in an era of such novelties. But I think it's reasonable to question the worth of this one, as compared with the extent of damage it might be able to do.
That's why - while I'm not horrified by your choice - it would horrify me to realize, in retrospect, that I had inadvertently made such a choice in my own life. To the extent it is a choice, of course - when, as my own experience demonstrates, while one may indeed demur, to do so often incurs a peculiar new sort of social nonexistence by way of punishment.
None of this is simple, just as nothing else is, and I don't mean to suggest that only your choice, and not mine, bears a potential cost. It's only that, while I know in very real terms what my choice cost, the cost of yours has been a very abstract thing to me - as I said before, I've never actually used Facebook. I suppose the way you described it just brought it home to me in a way nothing had before.