BitDepth#1449

Mark Lyndersay

ON MARCH 5, for just over an hour, Meta's online platforms, including Facebook, Messenger and Instagram, went offline globally for hundreds of thousands of users. Meta's WhatsApp chat service and its virtual reality environment Horizon Worlds experienced minor disruptions.

The last time the company's services experienced an outage on this scale was in October 2021, when an accidental misconfiguration knocked the company's servers off the internet backbone for more than six hours.

These are ultimately small and largely inconsequential inconveniences, though it's notable that as of this writing, Facebook has not explained how its services, used by an estimated three billion people around the world, stopped working.

Nobody expects any service to be infallible.

But your concerns should lie beyond the occasional failure of sophisticated platforms and the intricate systems that underpin them to the broader reality that social media platforms are designed to turn your participation into profit.

Along the way, they may offer useful communications and socialisation tools, but as the tech-savvy never fail to remind us, if you are not a customer, you are the product.

Depending on increasingly whimsical social media platforms to run a business, provide a nexus for building communities and maintain communication channels is hopeful at best and foolhardy at worst.

"Corporations die (and) platforms fall out of favour," said Robert de Gannes, a growth marketing consultant.

"Having your own piece of digital real estate safeguards things. Think of all the hours and dollars you've invested into Facebook and now over a decade later it's not growing at the same pace. TikTok is taking over, and you have to build content for a new platform. This won't stop; there will be something else after TikTok too.

"But if you build your website and update it frequently, you're owning a piece of digital real estate that is yours."

It's an important point, and one that regular readers of this column might have heard me mention before.

As a way of presenting your thoughts, opinions and concepts to the wider world, social media offers a compelling billboard, but messages tend to be visible only for the fleeting instant that they appear in a user's timeline before being swept away by a raging flood of AI-generated blather, rabid invective and shameless falsehoods.

Step out of line and post something that a social media platform decides is controversial (and some truly innocuous things have been) and you're either shadow-banned, suspended or straight up ejected and all your posts are either lost or abandoned.

Trying to build an effective representation of yourself on social media is a whole lot like running through the rain with a funnel trying to fill a bottle.

You can do it if you put enough effort into it, but there are more effective ways.

The gold standard for controlling your presence is a self-hosted website with an effective domain name. Extra points for creating and using e-mail ad