I noticed an inundation of Facebook hate articles, posts and general commentary across the wider general internet again. It seems to come in cycles. The most infuriating thing about this, is that few people seem to want to do anything about the state of affairs despite expressing their own disdain for Facebook. Almost everyone is waiting for their friends to move off before they do… this situation presents a sure fire way for Facebook keeping it’s dominance and dare I say, for us to encourage Facebook’s ongoing track record of behaviour.

All I can say is, at least I’ve tried… One sets up alternative services for people to elevate at their request, after setting it up, people find excuses (Some Valid, some perhaps less valid) to not even look at it. As each service fell into disuse, I ended up eventually re-purposing these sites along with the domains they were on for personal use…

• nui.nz – Originally an Oxwall CMS, Meetup like environment, after no interest, this was eventually relegated to being a place to put my photos, Oxwall was later ripped out and replaced with WordPress and then repurposed to become my Main homepage + Photo Gallery replacing my old static homepage (circa. 2003) at youngnz.com (hosted with FastMail whom can only handle static HTML)
• A Google Group was setup at the suggestion of one friend. After a flurry of activity, that soon died away.
• peak.nz – Originally set up with PHPBB3 with the suggestion that any replacement to Facebook groups should be a Forum. After some initial activity which again later died off, it was then ripped out in favour of WordPress / BuddyPress (again to act as a Meetup Alternative), before the WordPress installation was repurposed into my Personal blog. (What you are reading now)

With all that said, have gone back and re-established the Matrix chat server at mana.nz. If anyone is truly genuinely looking for alternatives to Facebook’s instant messaging products (rather than just being “virtue signalers”) then I feel Matrix is the better solution in terms of being a decentralized protocol, much in the same way as E-mail operates today.