As many of you know, Facebook's family of apps (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp) are all down today and have been down for several hours.
We've been asked many times why we ask you to subscribe.
This is one of the reasons.
We've all become so reliant on Facebook that many can't communicate with others when it goes down.
What if there were an emergency right now, and we needed to notify you with important information? In our case, we can because we asked you to subscribe with an email address (reminder that you can subscribe to most info for free). There is no Silicon Valley gatekeeper in our case.
In addition, many don't know that Facebook recommended that businesses tell their followers to "Like" or "Follow" their page to see communication from the page/business. However, over the last few years, Facebook changed the rules and only lets those messages reach all who "liked" the page if the business pays for it. Otherwise, only a percentage of those who "liked" the page will see the content.
Finally, we can all see how the big tech companies can choose what content is approved and what isn't, bolstering their opinions and downgrading those of others.
Our goal here is to break the power stranglehold and rent-extraction that Facebook enforces on communities like ours, telling us what content is approved, and sucking money out of our local economy and sending it off to California, where it will never return.
Thanks for being a subscriber, and if you're not one yet, please join us in creating this new, local network.
(While our scope of functionality is limited at the moment, we're building out more features to enable broader communication).
