Loss of control of online identity Options

[james]

From Redesigning Waxy, 2016 edition by Andy Baio:

More people than ever before are able to express themselves on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Medium, YouTube, Pinterest, and countless other social platforms. All of that is great.

But there a few reasons why I’m sad about the decline of independent blogging, and why I think they’re still worth fighting for.

Ultimately, it comes down to two things: ownership and control.

Last week, Twitter announced they’re shutting down Vine. Twitter, itself, may be acquired and changed in some terrible way. It’s not hard to imagine a post-Verizon Yahoo selling off Tumblr. Medium keeps pivoting, trying to find a successful revenue model. There’s no guarantee any of these platforms will be around in their current state in a year, let alone ten years from now.

Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoying ads on it, or sell it to a phone company. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t say, and I have complete control over the way it’s displayed. Nobody except me can change the URL structure, breaking 14 years of links to content on the web.

I think this is a great point, but there so much more to the problems with the current social media/self publishing landscape. It's great that there are free and wildly popular tools out there which people use to keep in contact with each other and communicate their thoughts (even if the vast majority is recycling other peoples nonsense and monumental narcissism), but as ever the problem with 'free' services is that someone is paying, and in most cases that someone is advertisers, which makes the user the product to be sold.

[Matt]

Yeah, I totally agree.

There was an interesting TED talk the other day on how Google censored Google bombing of Michelle Obama, but not if Anders Breyvik. It was an interesting perspective.

As a minor irritation in a similar vein to your post; we bought the first 3 episodes of Billions on Amazon Prime.... Then they decided they weren't showing it anymore. Now I can't watch the rest of the series and that's one of the major reasons I bought the Firestick!

[Matt]

James, is there a mobile friendly skin for ipb or even a mobile app?

[james]

In short I don't know - it's something I need to look into. The version we are running is old (and free), there may be something that can be done for it (possibly a mobile skin, very unlikely to be an app) or I could make a skin with responsive features but it's time which I just don't have at the moment.

The other options are to:

1. Upgrade to the latest version (if that's even possible - I don't know if the content can be transferred over such a large gap between versions) but that is a paid product, and I'm disinclined to pay for it (it's not especially cheap), when it's just the 2 of us regularly using it.
2. Move to another system, with the same caveats around transferring the existing content.

I appreciate your frustration - most of your interaction with the system is via your phone and this is just not designed for that form-factor - and that may be why other people are not using it as well (I suspect it's far from the only reason - I have a bunch of thoughts on that...), but it's a catch 22 - without more people using it, it's not 'worth' time & money to fix it up, and without fixing it up this problem potentially stops people from using it.