Edit: The Seen.is account was closed because it was a pointless waste of time. However, the email address (broken at unseen dot is) remains active, ostensibly as a “lifetime member.”
Original post below:
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Parish members, I have an administrative message for you.
Okay, so Facebook became untenable for me in this ministry. It was too much of the wrong stuff and virtually none of the good stuff. Read about the technology changes on various tech news sites and you’ll see where FB is increasingly just a tool for surveillance. New rules make it more likely FB will shove garbage at you without any restraint and the door is wide open to any government agency. It was already way too time consuming on useless noise, so that was enough to close the account.
But I still want to open the door for some kind of chatter and friendship contact. This blog is too highly structured and maybe a bit too public. Email is too private sometimes, though still quite useful. I suppose I could run a mailing list but that is simply not suitable for fellowship as it once was. And I don’t see enough traffic to justify a dedicated forum site. However, I still want a chance for random folks to find me and chatter about things that might interest the rest of the parish.
So I learned about something similar in concept to FB but far more secure and private: Seen. It’s hosted in Iceland, which requires a whole lot more work for surveillance to take place. With less than 30K members, it’s still pretty small and quiet. You can find my profile here. If you feel the need to chat with me on an occasional basis, could I recommend you sign up there? It’s really got a low entry barrier and you don’t have to give up much more than what is absolutely necessary for it to work at all.
I’m doing my best to lower the barriers for accessibility to myself and each other.
