Leaving Facebook.

[ghm72]

Just an FYI my Facebook page won't be available soon. (Scheduled it to delete)

Today I also deleted my Facebook profile and won't be creating a new one anytime soon. I've had enough of the site and its policies that allowed third parties to read peoples personal messages.

I can however still be found on Twitter https://twitter.com/DJGaryBaldy I'll still be promoting the benefits of using RadioDJ over there!

[Capt_Fuzzy]

I can fully understand that decision, I've backed away from Facebook lately myself, due in part to the same reasons.
I haven't deleted my profile, yet, but I have been considering it seriously...

[RFU]

I use it for marketing but believe me, I would love to get rid of that POS

[plauri]

I'm still there just because of friends I'm in touch with. And yes I have my radio page even with a player.
I explained somewhere in the forum what happened to my page almost one year ago: I used to publish my played song covers with an automatic payed software. Sometimes the software didn't reconize the right song and used to publish a compilation instead. Well there was an old compilation with boops on it that every now and then came up. So they banned my page and my profile. No matter how many times I wrote explaining it was just an LP you can find on the market everywhere in the world... I never got answers, then I created a new radio page, but at that time I had 2k followers...       

[RFU]

Most of the time Fecesbook moderators and their stupid algorithms have their heads up their asses, and you'll never get an answer from them, no matter how many times you write.

The biggest problem is that they take every report as fact before looking at it. Someone reports it, and you're guilty until you can prove yourself innocent. And most of the time they ignore your arguments, or in some cases, you don't even have a chance to argue.

I was banned for 30 days after I posted a joke about Greece. They said it was hate speech because someone reported it as hate speech.

I had 3 images removed for posting nudity. I don't post nudity, EVER. And when I asked what the offending images were, I got no reply. And as far as I can see,nothing has been removed from my wall. None that I can remember anyway.

I have noticed recently in their "memories" section that some of my older posts have been removed and marked as spam. Yet every one of them were reposts of news articles from legitimate news sources.

I got banned for 7 days because I posted a photo of my three year old daughter with our dog. It was at the beach, in the summer, and my three year old daughter wasn't wearing a shirt. The whole point of the post was to find the dog because it got stolen. I posted it in various groups, on my profile and on my radio station page. Fecesbook decided the post on my radio station page was child pornography and removed the image. But didn't remove the same image from my profile or the other groups it was posted in. I did that myself

Two days ago I was banned for 30 days for posting a comment that was reported as "harassment" because I called someone a dumbass. I asked for a review and they apologized, reposted the comment and said the ban had been lifted. Yet here we are 14 hours later and I'm still banned. And the person who posted a comment after me, called the same guy an idiot, yet somehow that doesn't seem to be harassment.

What REALLY drives me nuts is that Fecesbook bought Instagram. They are two separate companies, yet if you get banned on Fecesbook, they ban you on Instagram too. So my SongPoster plugin won't post to either until the ban is lifted

[Vanlen]

Best move you could make DJ GaryBaldy.
I found out this past Summer that Facebook was in fact created by Darpa and not SuckerBerger and I immediately deleted my account.  Alas, it is never really gone but there will be new offerings coming in a few months. As for the Big "G".....Don't get me started on do no evil goog as that's a deeper can of worms. 

[xanaftp]

Believe me, if there was a decentralized social media platform out there that a lot of people used and had a lot of positive influence, I would delete my Facebook and use it in a heartbeat. But at the time, I don't know of such platform. Every platform out there that has a huge following are run by companies who sell your data to third parties for advertising etc.

That is the price you pay for using a free social platform: Unfortunately, in order for social platforms to maintain their costs while not charging their users for its use, they must involve advertising and investors. And this means your data will be passed off for business purposes. If social platforms were to cease this practice, they would have to begin charging for their service in order to pay for their costs.

[careloads]

Can a streamer only project succeed without all the big SM platforms?  What about google?  AWS?  Tune In stopped taking new streams.  It seems like the barrier to entry is growing as these companies bite the hands that feed them.

[Capt_Fuzzy]

Can a streamer only project succeed without all the big SM platforms?  What about google?  AWS?  Tune In stopped taking new streams.  It seems like the barrier to entry is growing as these companies bite the hands that feed them.

You actually can broadcast on the internet without having to go through the major 'carriers', the only drawback to that is that you will not see as much overall 'exposure' to the public at large doing it that way. You'll have to get noticed the old-fashioned way, by self-advertising and word of mouth.

[plauri]

You'll have to get noticed the old-fashioned way, by self-advertising and word of mouth.

Hi Capt, welcome back. It's a bit of time you were away from the forum 
Well, you don't go long by self-advertising and word of mouth: how many listeners can you get in that way? Most of us here do this as a hobby and we are alone... If your radio has 10, 20 people working maybe it can work: making live events for example can bring listeners.   

[Capt_Fuzzy]

I do this as a hobby as well, I'm the owner and staff of WVRR, no other 'employees' other than me.
Since I do this as a hobby, and as a local community thing, I have a rather small audience.

What I meant by my earlier statement was that it is possible to operate and broadcast on the internet without having to go through these big conglomerates, like Radionomy or Live365 to do it. As a result of "doing it yourself" you won't get the kind of 'immediate exposure' that you'd get with one of these outfits, but if you setup your own website (which can actually be done extremely cheap, I only pay $9 a year for my domain name) then you will eventually see traffic come your way.

It may not be thousands like you'd get from one of those 'big guys' but if your format is likeable, you will end up with an audience eventually.

[plauri]

What I meant by my earlier statement was that it is possible to operate and broadcast on the internet without having to go through these big conglomerates, like Radionomy or Live365 to do it. As a result of "doing it yourself" you won't get the kind of 'immediate exposure' that you'd get with one of these outfits...

You are right, but there should be a lot to say about Radionomy and Live365... I don't think all alone they garantee you any big exposure, much you can do yourself by playing something different and interesting, even if you are a local web radio

[Capt_Fuzzy]

You are right, but there should be a lot to say about Radionomy and Live365... I don't think all alone they garantee you any big exposure, much you can do yourself by playing something different and interesting, even if you are a local web radio

I'm not knocking those outfits, they serve a useful purpose, but in all honesty, they are a business, and as such require a fee for some or all of their services, depending on the company, of course.
If you are a hobbyist, like myself, you are not in this to make money per se, but for the fun of it, the experience of running your own radio station.
This generally means that you are on a relatively tight budget and having to pay those fees can sometimes suck the fun right out of it.

Doing most of the work your self alleviates a lot of those fees.
If you build and host your own website, all you really have to pay is a yearly fee to maintain ownership of your domain name, which is pretty cheap on average. I pay about $6 US a year for mine.
Then there's the actual server for your station, so that you can broadcast on the internet.
That can be run totally free, and there are lots of tutorials on the internet telling how to setup and do both, that's how I learned to do it.

But again, you have to put the work and maintenance into it all.
If you go through a host provider, you pay them to do all the work, so yeah, it's easier and much more appealing, especially to today's youth who prefer "instant gratification" over a bit of work and sometimes hours of frustration when some obscure setting is overlooked.
I find it completely gratifying, however, to manage it all myself. The only thing that I'm dependent on is my internet connection. That's the only part that I do not have any control over. If it goes out, I'm screwed. Otherwise, I control every other aspect of my station's operations, including the website, which I also host myself.

So, in a nutshell, it's completely possible to have and run an internet station on a meager budget and not have to be dependent on these companies to do it. The trick is to be creative and think outside the box, then make it happen.