What the Facebook outage shows

It’s remarkable that when Facebook is offline for a few hours, panic seems to break out everywhere.

Even national news sites, which tend to report less on technology or Internet topics, suddenly publish several articles about the outage, and there are also reports on TV.

But this shows how much influence Facebook has with its “platforms”. Too much!

For some people, “Internet” is synonymous with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, Google and Tiktok. They don’t even realize that these are services provided by not even a handful of companies. That’s the oposite of decentralized.

But the outage is also a perfect opportunity to draw attention to alternatives: Your own website, your own blog, or even e-mail (with a provider other than Gmail – because there you would again have the same problem of centralization) are ways to reduce your own dependence on Facebook.

Those who use Facebook, Instagram or Twitter for their own publications may find a good alternative with their own blog. There are many different providers or even the possibility to set something up yourself. Through feeds and comment sections, it is also possible to build a community, contrary to some claims.

After all, it is precisely in the interest of the platform providers to keep closing the platforms to the outside world. After all, this keeps users more locked in and allows more personalized advertising to be shown to them, thus generating more revenue.

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