I've very deliberately scaled down my use of Facebook over the last month. I finally gave up on trying to get them to turn it into a decent blogging surface. Without links, simple styles, titles and podcasts, it was stifling my online writing to try to make it fit into Facebook's limits. If I were them I'd be embarrassed. It's 2016. That shit was innovative in 1992. Facebook is a very serious step backward.

So instead of full text, my posts appear as links. And now going to Facebook has become a much less interesting thing. I decided that's fine. Perfect in fact. They decided that they don't want me to have an interesting time there, by imposing the limits. So I'll create my own fun. It'll take some time, but what's the rush. ;-)

When Jerry died in 1995, I wrote:

Like the big tree that fell last March, the death of a huge human being like Jerry Garcia frees up a huge amount of space. Once there was a tree, now there are seedlings. After the sadness, there will be huge creativity.

Same would probably be true if Facebook ever relented and stopped stifling the web and embraced it instead. Then the growth could flow through them instead of around them. Ultimately I think the web will go on, treating Facebook like the outage that it has chosen to be.

PS: It's worth mentioning that my posts still appear in full text on mobile, with styling and links using Instant Articles. That I get zero engagement on those is also interesting. Not one comment, ever. Zero. All the engagement apparently was coming through the web version of Facebook.