Is this thing on?

Have you thought about owning or at least controlling the fate of your web content lately? Especially anything into which you put labor as a writer.

I was reminded last night that I pour a lot of content and the labor behind that content into Facebook, which is an ephemeral medium-- and our accounts there are subject to the whims of FB staff. A friend of mine had her account of 9 years completely and permanently deleted due to a false accusation. Someone opened a FB account with her name, she complained-- and the name-stealer claimed *she* was the one who was the impostor and that was that-- poof, entire account deleted permanently.

This is chilling for me-- I operate in the FB environment as if it's *my* timeline, *my* content, etc. FB is good at creating that illusion.

Of course, similar issues exist with *any* web presence-- but here, at least, you can export an .xml file of all your posts to your computer. All of that time journaling and posting can at least be salvaged here. FB took over for a few years as a kind of microblog and online journal, but it's too precarious to be treated as anything other than ephemera.

Posting here and linking to FB, periodically locally archiving posts whenever there's anything you'd rather keep-- definitely a more reliable bet.