Since 2006 or 2007, I’ve been on facebook, for better or worse. I was happy to reconnect with old friends, and make a few new ones. I built up an author page there, and helped run a conference page that had over 700 followers.

Last week, my account was compromised. Facebook locked the account, and has now suspended it. I have no way to get back into this account I’d built over the past 15 years. All the work that went into building up those pages is gone. Despite repeated attempts to contact the facebook help center, no one responds to my messages.

I know this is my own fault for dealing with facebook in the first place, but it was a convenient and easy way to connect with readers and those interested in the conference. However, facebook has deemed me in violation of their terms of service because of this hack, and that’s that. It feels a bit like Judge Dredd, quite draconian.

I guess I’ve learned not to try and build something like that again on facebook. I’ve created a new account to try and connect with friends and family again, but the platform is way too unreliable to use for a small business or educational site. Better to just stick to wordpress, where I at least have control over things.

Facebook’s many issues have been well known for years, yet many of us continue to use it out of convenience. However, with all the problems for users over the past months, they may be charting a path to irrelevance. Already, no young people I know use it. Give it a few more years and it’ll be like myspace or google+.

A shame all that work has disappeared into the ether, but so it goes.