Facebook decided to “temporarily block” me earlier today after I attempted to post an album critique ON MY OWN WALL and the share button didn’t work. Clicking it a second time gave me an error pop-up, which unhelpfully described that I had been blocked from using the post feature for “going too fast.”

The block lasted a good eight hours, during which I tried to find a way to contact Facebook’s customer service to let them know that I had been blocked in error, or rather, BECAUSE of THEIR site’s error, but, as anyone who has tried to do the same already knows, there is absolutely no way for a user to contact an actual person at Facebook. There is no customer service phone number, there is no “contact us” form, there is no way to open a support ticket. There are forums that don’t seem particularly well moderated or kept up in a timely manner, there’s a Facebook Twitter account you can fire off useless tweets to… But being banned from my own page for a whole day, with no recourse to rectify an obvious error, or even any way to get a definitive estimate of when the block would be removed, had a deeply infuriating effect on me, that only got deeper and more furious as the day wore on…

Combined with the fact that several close friends of mine are concurrently giving the platform a breather, and the numerous news articles describing in great detail what total shits the people who run Facebook are, and how much they really (don’t) care about our privacy and data security, I realized that my only recourse was to say:

Fuck all that noise. I’m making my own blog. Zuck can suck it.

I managed to get this motherfucker spun up with WordPress & MediaTemple before the FB block was even lifted. We’ve come a long way, internet! Too bad using Facebook has started to feel like walking backward… while wearing a blindfold.

Unlike my real-life friends who have already bailed from FB, I do need to keep my account there active (to be able to manage my band’s page and related events) so I can’t just outright quit. I can, however, stop providing Facebook with content that I’ve spent my own time generating, and, going forward, provide only link-outs to a more friendly, less algorithm-driven site. See here.

This will undoubtedly be a process of re-training myself exactly how to post online, having become accustomed over the past 10 or so years to the way Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, etc. have trained me (and all of us) to do it. So please bear with me. Feel free to comment and contribute, but be forewarned: I do not truck with trolls. Here, we operate under my rules. And the first rule is: I’m not going to talk about the rules. Just try not to be a dick, pretty please.