On Wednesday, March 13th, 2019 Facebook’s family of apps suffered outages that lasted several hours.
Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services. We’ve now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience.
— Facebook (@facebook) March 14, 2019
It’s eye-opening to see how many people not just frequent social
And because of that, I think it’s important to take a minute to revisit ownership online.
Revisiting Ownership Online
I strongly recommend focusing on things you own and control as a priority, and utilizing everything else with the awareness they are a privilege, not a right.
Things You Own
- Your Website. Assuming it’s on an open source platform or custom-coded.
- This excludes non-open source platforms like Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, Godaddy Sites, Blogspot, and WordPress hosted blogs (Not to be confused with self-hosted WordPress).
- Your Email List.
- Your Intellectual Property:
- Content (Audio, Video, Written word)
- Trademarks, Word Marks, and Copyrights
- Your Data (and the insights gleaned from it):
- Analytics Data
- CRM Data
Things You Lease
Things you own temporarily, or as long as you keep paying.
- Your Domain Name (First right of refusal)
- Paid Saas Tools (You lease the right to use them)
Things You Have The Privilege Of Using
Things that could be taken from you at any moment, leaving you with very little recourse.
- Social Media Platforms
- SEO Rankings
- Online advertising platforms
- Web hosting (unless you own the server)
Here are just some of the reasons you can lose you privileges on third-party platforms.
- Violating terms of service
- Being wrongly accused of violating the terms of service
- Platform acquisition or insolvency
- Knowingly or unknowingly breaking internet laws
- Getting hacked etc.
In Conclusion
It’s okay to put all your eggs in one basket, as long as you control the basket
Elon Musk