A Different Facebook

Today is day two away from Facebook.  Took a while but my fascination with solitaire has passed.  Now I am back to writing.  I am keeping up with the news, but I don’t need Facebook for that. 

As opposed to searching out who among my Facebook friends is angry or which one of them had the best fish taco, I have been downloading books on the history of the Iberian Peninsula onto my Amazon Fire.  The reason is twofold.  First, I am looking to move to Portugal, a country on the peninsula. My hope, God willing is to go within two years.  Kind of makes sense to understand the fissures and bonds that have hold over the peoples there. Second, I am watching a television series called in English translation, The Ministry of Time. Each episode presents me with some episode of history of Spain that I either have the vaguest knowledge about or I have never even heard of.  Searching out the references is becoming kind of a game for me. 

What I am missing from Facebook is the opportunity to offer support to the people I know there that are hurting.  One friend is battling a serious illness.  Another fired has passed just recently and I am sure the comments and condolences are flowing.  I feel guilty about not being involved on this level.  But Facebook has become something else. 

Facebook has always been about the money from day one.  I get that.  But it is the way that it has grown more and more into an intrusive marketing and data mining service and less and less of a community forum that has driven me away.  Cambridge Analytics is only one example, one big ugly glaring wound of an example, of Facebook’s problems but there are others.

I would join a Facebook-like entity that required a monthly fee of $10 a month if all they did was connect me with my friends and not data mine me and not market me things tied to every reference I have made in a post.  There would also have to be a term of service that indicated the stream of interactions would be monitored for abusive and manipulative posts.  If you had 80 million users paying $10 a month that would be 800 million dollars a month.  I think you could pay for infrastructure and capable monitoring under such a model.

Monthly I pay $6 to listen to music without ads.  I think most of us would pay $5 or $10 a monthly for Facebook without ads and without data mining.  For at least the next six days it is on to Lisbon and Madrid.