100%. These large social media companies are very capricious about what counts as breaking their rules, will kill your reach at the drop of a hat and will fold under the slightest bit of pressure from someone richer/better connected than you if the latter has any issue with your work or existence at all.
Gotta own your own platform to make sure you have a backup when that happens, and have at least some control over your own audience.
Having your own site on someone else's corporate service is no less of a risk of being shut out of your account. Free speech is only as free as the service you are using thinks it is.
There's risk and then there's RISK. A corporate service in the form of a simple VPS is cheap and can be had from a 1000 providers anywhere in the world. Very simple to change providers too. Nothing like the quasi-monopoly of FB/X/YT.
I think there's only that risk if you're using a website building service like Wix. If you build your own site and then send it up to a dumb host, you can just send it up to another dumb host when the first one pisses you off. Hopefully, you're at least managing your own DNS records too, and like that service.
If cloudflare goes out of business, for example, their collapse would not count as an action against speech.
Conflating free speech with Terms of Services is to mix up MANY issues. There is a distinction that must be kept upheld, between private networks, and government power.
This does’t mean that the modern issue of free speech on privately owned platforms is magically solved, just that we need a more precise set of nouns, adjectives and verbs to frame the harms and limits that arise. Otherwise we simply get caught up in the simple between actual free speech and private rights.
No, it's much less of a risk, because companies that sell domain hosting services have an actual financial relationship with you and have much better support infrastructure in place because you're a paying customer. The risk is not zero--no risk is ever zero--but compared to your risk of Facebook doing something stupid and unwarranted and you being unable to get it fixed, the risk with a domain hosting company is pretty small.
If you have your own* domain and are reasonably diligent in keeping a local backup of your site then it is trivial to move the site to a new host. As others have aaid, web hosting is a commodity business.
I'm not sure if that's still a thing but I remember period where companies were using their fb profiles and messenger to provide customer support. That gave me shivers back then.
Back when the internet was a nice place, I mean years 1999-2010, it was full of websites managed by individuals. Each site was different, some were pretty-hideous, quite frequently with unusual knowledge and curiosities. It was so much fun to Google them (Google was a damn good search engine back then too). Most people knew how to use FTP to upload a basic HTML page.
Now it's an expert level knowledge, especially amongst younger generation. Private websites are nearly extinct, thanks to (and not only) Google and SEO cancer.
Corporations like Meta are scared of people taking control over their own data, so they put lots of effort into making the content creation process as brainless as possible.
> Back when the internet was a nice place, I mean years 1999-2010
By 1999, Internet Explorer on Windows had over 95% of the web browser market. Modems were 56K. This is not comparable to the web in 2010, much less the web today.
You're experiencing nostalgia - it isn't factual, though.
> Private websites are nearly extinct
I wonder what these password managers are all about, then?
> Corporations like Meta are scared of people taking control over their own data, so they put lots of effort into making the content creation process as brainless as possible.
How exactly does Meta have any role in the ease or difficulty of content creation? Last I checked Meta makes zero of the top content creation tools and is mostly an ad company.
CM30|5 months ago
Gotta own your own platform to make sure you have a backup when that happens, and have at least some control over your own audience.
dylan604|5 months ago
bigbadfeline|5 months ago
Zak|5 months ago
stronglikedan|5 months ago
intended|5 months ago
Conflating free speech with Terms of Services is to mix up MANY issues. There is a distinction that must be kept upheld, between private networks, and government power.
This does’t mean that the modern issue of free speech on privately owned platforms is magically solved, just that we need a more precise set of nouns, adjectives and verbs to frame the harms and limits that arise. Otherwise we simply get caught up in the simple between actual free speech and private rights.
j45|5 months ago
Social media is a web app and mobile app.
A website is just a website. Somehow being shut out of your own hosting is something else entirely.
pdonis|5 months ago
andyjohnson0|5 months ago
* yes, I know...
pndy|5 months ago
johnisgood|5 months ago
I called up some place (yes, via phone) for an appointment, they told me to get one through Facebook.
fn-mote|5 months ago
a5c11|5 months ago
Now it's an expert level knowledge, especially amongst younger generation. Private websites are nearly extinct, thanks to (and not only) Google and SEO cancer.
Corporations like Meta are scared of people taking control over their own data, so they put lots of effort into making the content creation process as brainless as possible.
leakycap|5 months ago
By 1999, Internet Explorer on Windows had over 95% of the web browser market. Modems were 56K. This is not comparable to the web in 2010, much less the web today.
You're experiencing nostalgia - it isn't factual, though.
> Private websites are nearly extinct
I wonder what these password managers are all about, then?
> Corporations like Meta are scared of people taking control over their own data, so they put lots of effort into making the content creation process as brainless as possible.
How exactly does Meta have any role in the ease or difficulty of content creation? Last I checked Meta makes zero of the top content creation tools and is mostly an ad company.
alex1138|5 months ago