In wake of the Delicious “sunsetting” and subsequent hub-bub around the web, Jeremy Keith decided to homestead his bookmarks.

Now I’m hosting the canonical copies of my bookmarks, much like Tantek hosts the canonical copies of his tweets and syndicates them out to Twitter. Delicious gets to have my links as well, and I get to use Delicious as a tool for interacting with my data …only now I’m not limited to just what Delicious can offer me.

He actually first wrote about this when Magnolia screwed the pooch and lost everyone’s data. He nails the homesteading vision in one sentence.

Really, I should be keeping my links here on adactio.com, maybe pinging Delicious or some other social bookmarking site as a back-up.

Freedom and self-sufficiency always seem to go hand in hand. But specialization is for insects, right? Everyone should know how to make a website and deliver a baby. (I believe that’s how the expression goes.)

I definitely prefer this self-hosting-with-syndication way of doing things. I can use a service like Delicious without worrying about it going tits-up and taking all my data with it. The real challenge is going to be figuring out a way of applying that model to Twitter and Flickr. I’m curious to see which milestone I’ll hit first: 10,000 tweets or 10,000 photos. Either way, that’s a lot of my content on somebody else’s servers.

Unlike the real world, if we don’t like it, we can kill it

But there is on thing that we should always remember. At the end of the day we, the users, control the success of Facebook just like every other brand or product in the world. Facebook is making money because we are allowing it to become every marketers dream, it is the code from the Matrix wrapped around everything we post, share, comment, or connect with. If tomorrow we stop showing up that valuation would go south very quickly. It happened to Friendster, it happened to Bebo, it happened to MySpace, and it will and should happen to Facebook. Users have expressed concern about the privacy policy and the ownership of content uploaded to their network.

Greg Cargill on Big Method