I’ve been thinking about removing myself from Facebook for a while now. To be perfectly blunt, the platform sucks. As a blogging site, it’s clunky and rigid. It doesn’t do messaging well. Its Marketplace has serious regulation issues. Most of the games are garbage easily outperformed by free games from the Google Play Store. And video? Don’t make me laugh. YouTube easily outperforms it, and you have specialized video sites for what YouTube either doesn’t really cover or only covers haphazardly like in-depth tutorials or actual classes.
The enforcement of TOS would be laughably bizarre if it wasn’t so actively toxic. I’ve reported actual Nazi propaganda – not just some edgelord trying to “pwn the libs” by being all extra shocking, but Third Reich fanpages and racist cartoons direct from Stormfront and other white supremacist sites – and been told “that doesn’t violate our community standards.” I’ve also received three-day bans for pointing out that the Nazis were in fact Christians, or posting a picture of a phone charger. A friend has had perfectly innocent and supportive comments deleted for some unknown reason, while misogynists have shouted her and others down because “you’re overweight. I don’t want to see that so you need to shut up,” and these comments are deemed perfectly acceptable.
And don’t get me started on Zuckerberg’s open support of rigging elections in favor of who he likes. Yes, it’s a private company, but when you’re openly admitting you won’t fact-check your side’s propaganda while deleting factual posts made by the other side you have a serious ethical failure.
The whole situation reminds me of when people started leaving AOL in droves when they realized what a garbage platform that was.
So I started thinking about how to replace the core and even not-so-core functions of Facebook that I actually use. I’ve been doing web design off and on since the mid ‘90s, so most of this is pretty straightforward as far as I’m concerned. What I’m trying to do is set things up so almost anyone can jump in.
It is important to note that this “Facebook Replacer” isn’t a single concrete thing, any more than people’s web presences were after they migrated away from AOL. It’s a suite of already-existing sites and technologies you can harness and make work for you.
The first thing you’re going to need is a gmail account. Gmail specifically because it comes with a number of nice tools. You probably already use a lot of them. It also comes with a YouTube account, but more on that later.
After that, get a Gravatar. It’s a cross-site avatar so you can have the same picture on a bunch of sites, WordPress blogs included, and link to some other sites as a mini-profile. It’s kind of like your FB profile pic and profile, but not. For a proper profile, you’ll need to build an About Me page on your WordPress site. The important thing is it helps you maintain a single identity across all the WordPress sites you frequent as well as a few other sites. It’s optional but useful, especially if you want to have a coherent presence across multiple blogs and sites belonging to multiple people.
You’ll also need a WordPress blog, and preferably a full WordPress site. This blog is the core of your FB replacement. I’m specifying WordPress over Blogger (even though access to Blogger with your Gmail account) because it’s a better platform overall. There are three basic ways to go about this, broken down by price and complexity.
The cheapest and easiest is to go to WordPress.com and set up a free account. It’s pretty easy to set up (on par with Wix and similar “website builders), and for most people it will be sufficient. You can also upgrade your account for more features at costs from $2 to $45 per month. I don’t personally recommend the $25 “Business” or $45 “eCommerce” accounts simply because you can do what they offer far cheaper if you know basic html, CSS, and JavaScript. And by “basic,” I mean “know enough to understand what it does so you can copy and paste from elsewhere.”
Next up is just a modification of the above. Go to GoDaddy, BlueHost, or another domain registrar and buy a domain. At GoDaddy, a domain will run you $17.99 a year, plus $9.99 a year for a privacy upgrade so people don’t get your address, real name, phone number, etc. by doing a whois. Attach your WordPress.com blog to said domain. What this does is changes your blog’s URL from “example.wordpress.com” to “example.com/org/net/etc.” It’s largely a cosmetic upgrade.
The most expensive and (feature-rich overall) method is to get a domain as above and get a hosting package from someplace like GoDaddy. This will run you about $12 a month with a decent bandwidth and storage cap. More than you’re likely to need unless you generate some serious traffic or decide to host a ton of video on your own site instead of YouTube. These companies tend to run nice intro deals too. I think Stacie and I got our first year of hosting for our sites for around $12 each, and when I upgraded to a better package that gave us unlimited sites and storage, I got a deal to get three years of hosting (usually around $16/month) for about $65.
I do not recommend using a free host because as in all things you get what you pay for. I have used a dozen free hosting companies going all the way back to Geocities and Angelfire up to present hosts that give you an “example.co.cc” or similar domain. At best you have to deal with ads, crappy bandwidth and storage, and periodic site outages. At worst, you’re setting yourself up for hacking. Plus a lot of free hosts are blocked by sites like Facebook because they’re used so often by spammers. And some of them have clauses buried in the fine print that give them the right to use anything you post as they see fit. You know, like Facebook does and Blogger used to (and may still; I haven’t checked in a while). And no, that “I do not authorize blah blah blah” thing you see people putting on their profile pages doesn’t stop this or anyone else.
Now that you have a WordPress site, you have some work to do. You probably have a bunch of preformatted pages with generic filler text. Go to your dashboard and find Menus under Appearance. Remove every page you don’t plan to use from the Primary Menu. Definitely keep Home, About Me, and Blog. Contact Us is probably better replaced with Contact Me unless you’re using this for a business or group. Replace the generic text in these pages with what’s appropriate for you. You can modify these pages all you want down the road, so don’t sweat it too much.
OK, so you have your WordPress blog. Now what? You blog, of course.
One of the cool things about WP compared to Facebook is the custom post types. With Facebook, you basically get a generic post that adds a picture or video plugin if you happen to upload pictures or video. With WP you can customize post types to act differently depending on what content you want to post and for what purpose. You can do a standard post that’s your (html-enabled) text and an optional featured image. You can do an aside that’s basic text kind of like a Tweet. You can set up a gallery post so it shows thumbnails with a custom layout and background. There are a bunch of them, and if you know how to code custom themes you can make them do almost anything you want.
Did you notice that comment about “html-enabled” text? You read that right. Want to use bold, italics, etc.? Different text sizes and colors? Drop a numbered or unordered list in there? Add pictures at specific places? A table? Links? A scrolling gallery slideshow deal? If you know basic HTML, you can. Even if you don’t know basic HTML, there are plugins that let you drag and drop all kinds of goodies into your page or post. With WordPress, every post can be like a web page. You can also do stand-alone pages that don’t show up in your blogroll.
Plugins are another useful WP tool. There are plugins that add all kinds of functionality, including eCommerce and setting up user groups. So if you have content you’d rather only share with a certain semi-fixed subset of your readers, you can do so. Sure, Facebook lets you do stuff like “friends only,” “all friends except these,” etc, but this lets you define groups and just hit a button. Is nice. If you wanted to, you could even up opt-in or paid subscriptions for certain content.
I recommend setting comments to “must be approved.” It doesn’t allow the free flow of comments like FB does, but it also lets you keep idiots and spammers from running wild on your posts. You could allow anyone who has had comments approved automatically get their comments approved, but some people have figured out how to exploit this. Unless you really want to lock things down, do not set it so users have to be registered and logged in to comment. It severely limits your ability to interact with the general public.
So yeah, once you get the hang of it, WP is a vastly superior blogging platform than FB. And no, I’m not getting kickbacks. I do, however, make custom themes.