LinuxExpert.org is leaving Facebook. We're not pausing the page or posting less. We're closing it.
What changed
On January 7, Meta announced that it will end its third-party fact-checking program, starting in the United States, and replace it with "Community Notes" written by users. It's also loosening its rules on what people can say about several contested topics, and moving its trust and safety teams.
Meta can run its platform as it likes. But we publish technical material that people use to run real systems, and we care whether it's accurate. A platform that's stepping back from checking what spreads on it is not a place we want our work to sit next to.
The bigger reason
Fact-checking was the last push, not the only one. Facebook has never fitted what this site is about.
- It's opaque. Nobody outside Meta can see how the feed decides what you see, or why a post reaches a thousand people one day and ten the next.
- It's centralized. Your page, your followers and your history live on Meta's servers, under Meta's rules, which change whenever Meta decides.
- It's built for engagement. The business is attention and advertising. Accuracy, and the people reading, come second.
Open source is the opposite on each point. The code is visible, anyone can run their own copy, and the community decides the rules together. Staying on Facebook meant asking readers to come to us through a system that works against all of that.
Where we'll be instead
We're putting that effort into Mastodon and the wider fediverse: social networks made of independent servers that talk to each other through an open protocol, ActivityPub. There's no single owner and no algorithm deciding what you see, and if you don't like how your server is run you can move, followers and all.
We'll keep looking at other open platforms too. And the website itself, with its RSS feed, isn't going anywhere.
If you followed us on Facebook, thank you. We hope you'll follow along somewhere better.
Since then
Added October 2026. The move went further than we planned. The LinuxExpert.org domain is now a small Mastodon server of its own, for people who work with Linux and open source, and its articles moved here to jcoffey.dev. I wrote about it in LINUXexpert.org Is Now a Mastodon Server. For a primer on the fediverse, see Join the Fediverse.