So Facebook rolled out this thing on Wednesday called Instant Articles. If you missed it: a handful of publishers, nine of them to start, can now publish full stories directly inside the Facebook app instead of just linking out to their own sites. The New York Times is in there. So is BuzzFeed, National Geographic, NBC News. Tap the headline in your feed and the whole piece loads instantly, no browser tab, no three-second wait while some ad network figures out what to sell you. Right now it's iPhone-only, which feels about right for a Facebook launch in 2015. They do iOS first and let the rest of us wait.
And look, I get why publishers said yes. The math is brutal for them. A story that loads in half a second on your phone gets read. A story that takes four seconds because of seventeen tracking scripts gets abandoned, and you scroll on. Facebook is offering speed and (for now, in the pilot) they're letting the publishers keep their own ad sales. That's a pretty good deal when your traffic is already coming from Facebook whether you like it or not.
But I've had this blog running since November 2011, on my own domain, publishing to my own RSS feed, and something about this whole thing has been sitting wrong with me all week. Not in a "get off my lawn" way exactly. More like, I remember exactly what it felt like when Google killed Reader back in 2013. I was one of maybe six people who actually complained about it out loud instead of just quietly switching to Feedly like everyone told me to. And the thing that stung wasn't losing Reader itself, it was realizing how much of my daily reading habit depended on infrastructure I didn't control and that could just disappear on somebody else's roadmap decision. I still open my feed reader every morning with coffee, still have about 40 blogs in there, still do it the old way. It's a stubborn habit at this point, honestly a little bit of a badge of honor.
Instant Articles is a different flavor of the same problem. Nobody's getting shut down here, nothing's disappearing. It's the opposite actually, publishers are choosing to hand their content over to live natively inside somebody else's app. But once your story only really "works" — loads fast, looks good, gets the algorithmic boost — inside Facebook's walls, how long before that's just where the story lives? I don't think NBC News stops having a website next month or anything dramatic like that. I just think this is one more brick in a wall that's been going up for a few years now, where more and more of "the internet" for regular people just means whatever's inside one app.
The part that actually annoys me on a practical level: I don't have a Facebook Page for this blog. Never made one. Partly laziness, partly I just don't want another dashboard to check. Which means whatever slice of readers are living entirely inside their Facebook feed at this point, and I'd guess it's a lot of people under 30, I'm just invisible to. Not banned, not blocked, just not there. That's a weird kind of gatekeeping that doesn't even require anyone to gatekeep on purpose.
I don't have a tidy answer for this one. I'm not deleting my Facebook account in protest or anything, that ship sailed a long time ago in terms of me having any leverage. I'll probably keep doing exactly what I'm doing, feed reader and all, and just watch how many of these nine publisher names turn into ninety by the end of the year. If you're one of the eight people who still reads this over RSS instead of clicking a Twitter link, hi, thanks for sticking around the old-fashioned way. It's getting rarer.
One more small thing while I'm at it: I finally put my Apple Watch on the charger for the last time this week and just went back to my regular watch for a few days, mostly to see if I'd miss it. I didn't, not really, except for the walking directions on the wrist which turned out to be genuinely great in a way I wasn't expecting. Everything else felt like a notification I already had on my phone, just smaller and more insistent about it. More on that some other day maybe.