We should replace Facebook with personal websites

Where does the author get that idea? The majority of Facebook's 2 billion users do not post to their profile feed. Instead, the FB account is mostly used as a way to passively receive content. Some of the content is from family and friends, and some is from media outlets (NYTimes, etc).

Recommending "personal websites" is talking about a solution to a problem that most of the billion users don't have.

The way most people use Facebook is more of an RSS feed rather than a 1999 Geocities personal website. (But that doesn't mean RSS readers can replace Facebook because that technology is missing a "real names" reverse directory lookup database.)

I thought NextCloud might be a good solution, but I'm still searching.

Things to get started with:

- https://www.netlifycms.org/ - completely free static website on top of github pages

- http://mastodon.social/ - federated microblogging, which can be self-hosted as well

- https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/ - one click wordpress for 5$/m

- https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/projects/wordpress/ - another near one-click wordpress for near 5$

- https://yunohost.org/ - easy self-hosting, even on top of a raspberry

- https://indieweb.org/WordPress - make your site communicate with other sites

- https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ - decentralized, sneakernet friendly, private social system

Contrast this with maintaining a personal website. Even in a world where FB doesn't exist, it's still a chore to get people to memorize yet another URL and regularly visit it, especially if it isn't updated on a consistent schedule (which most personal websites aren't.) Furthermore, given that the author seems to be advocating for self-sufficiency as much as possible and avoiding centralized platforms, assuming you're hosting your own website and not using a cookie cutter template, you're now fighting Google for search engine visibility and that's a battle that is absolutely not based on merit of content.

This is not to mention the unpleasantness of using most personal websites because they're poorly designed (light text on a white background), or they try and guilt-trip me into supporting them with Patreon/Paypal popups, or the only consistent content produced is content promising to produce more content in the future, etc.

I'm probably reading too much into the author's article, to be honest. It's a nice sentiment and I agree, but at the same time the thing I don't understand about the recent trend of publishing articles on mainstream news sites preaching the life benefits of going cold turkey on social media is that it isn't a binary choice. I know it's a novel idea, but you don't have to quit FB to pick up that hobby you once loved again! You don't have to quit FB to maintain your personal website! In fact, you can probably use FB and your audience on it to grow your readership on your personal website! Even if you accept the author's argument that personal websites fulfill the purpose that FB does (strongly disagree), they give no reason why you have to pick one over the other.

¿Porque no los dos

1. Google creates the first noteworthy current gen search engine.

2. The web slowly starts moving towards a semantic platform with separate presentation.

3. Google creates the world's largest ad platform.

4. The semantic web inexplicably dies (see 3).

5. The web painfully and lossily becomes a series of dense monolithic networks.

6. People realize this might be a bad thing.