Nobody has to leave LinkedIn (just yet)

(This post has originally been published on LinkedIn and has been cross-posted here for conservation and accessibility. It has been auto-translated from German and human-reviewed.)

🇪🇺 This comment by Maximilian Berghoff got me thinking: “What exactly does this imply? Everyone who liked this comment will be using (the German) XING again?”

I get what you mean. But I think we need to look at this with a bit more nuance. (And this is probably where I lose all the LinkedIn readers who were just scrolling for a quick clickbait take…)

Nobody has to quit LinkedIn – but everyone should be prepared for a scenario where it’s no longer around, making themselves less dependent on the platform per se. What that looks like in practice probably depends a lot on your individual usage.

📙 If LinkedIn is your personal address book, you should probably also keep the email addresses or phone numbers of your (most important) contacts somewhere else.

📰 If LinkedIn is your primary news source (Please don’t… no single source should ever be that critical), then you might want to diversify your setup (RSS, newsletters, feed aggregators, etc.).

📝 If you regularly post a lot of content here yourself, you might want to look into approaches like POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere).

There are certainly a few more use cases and examples out there. But I think the core principle is clear: using a service isn’t the strategic problem here; the (often self-inflicted) dependence on it is. That’s something we can mitigate, though. In other areas of IT, we’ve been doing this for a long time anyway (think multi-cloud, portability, etc.).

It’s time we start thinking about it here, too.