So I’ve been around Liberty.me for about a day now. The difference here from facebook is staggering. Really just amazingly different.
Facebook always has negative posts, with only a few exceptions. I have to dig through my news feed (which I always need to manually reset to “newest stories”) in order to find something uplifting. Usually, it’s RT bitching about something in America or Occupy Canada bitching about Stephen Harper or one of my friends bitching about what’s happening in their lives. There’s really just a lot of bitching on facebook.
Not so on Liberty.me. Unlike facebook, I don’t have to be friends with someone to read what they have to say. This is not a consumer culture here where I am constantly bombarded by advertising I don’t care about. That’s why I’m willing to dig out 14 dollars a month- I would much rather pay up front for a site than let the advertisers threaten to take away revenue if they don’t like what’s going on.
Did I mention the big chat rooms? You can chat with anybody at any time. Not so with facebook, where you have to go out of your way to join a group in order to chat with everyone at once. Even then, the members of the group might not be online all at once. With liberty.me, you can talk to anyone on the site at any time. It really is quite brilliant.
Also, the best part: everyone is so nice here. I have yet to meet a person who automatically disagrees with something I said just because I posted it in a public forum. That seems to be the way of it on facebook. As soon as I post a contrary opinion, people come out of the woodwork to smash it all down. I sometimes wonder whether there aren’t government agents trolling about facebook looking to derail conversations from going a certain way. I’ve heard about such things happening on open forums.
So I guess, if I had to summarize, I’m really happy this place is here. The only reason I still have my facebook account is to keep in touch with my friends in different areas of the world. If they all came here, I would just close it and leave the NSA data mining behind.