“Phil Johnston LinkedIn” (Leaving LinkedIn and Choosing Independence)

This is not a post about being angry at LinkedIn.

It’s a post about what happens when a single platform becomes too central to your professional identity, and what it feels like when that platform is suddenly gone.

My LinkedIn account was compromised. Whoever gained access used my account to reach out to people in my network and attempt to recruit them for a startup. That activity violated LinkedIn’s terms of service, and once that line was crossed, the account was unrecoverable. I worked with LinkedIn support and understood their decision. From their perspective, an account that has been used to harm others cannot simply be reset and trusted again.

That doesn’t make the outcome any less final.

I joined LinkedIn very early, around 2007 or 2008. Over nearly two decades, I built my professional presence there. Conversations, opportunities, long-running relationships, and roughly 2,000+ contacts accumulated slowly over time. It wasn’t just a list of names. It was a record of a career.

And then it was gone.

The experience forced me to confront something I had largely taken for granted: when your professional life is anchored to a single, centralized platform, you don’t really own it. You’re borrowing it. And when access disappears, so does everything attached to it.

To be clear, this isn’t a moral judgment of LinkedIn. I understand why they enforce their policies the way they do. Abuse prevention requires hard lines. But understanding the reasoning doesn’t change the reality that a compromise, even a brief one, can erase decades of accumulated social capital.

There’s also a practical lesson here. If you are still using LinkedIn, enable multi-factor authentication. Change your password regularly. I had recently changed mine. I had not enabled MFA. That gap was enough. Security failures are rarely dramatic. They are usually small omissions that compound.

After losing access, I considered starting over. Creating a new account, rebuilding from scratch, re-adding people where possible. But that idea never sat quite right with me. Not because LinkedIn is bad, but because the fragility of the situation was suddenly obvious. If I rebuilt everything in the same place, I’d still be exposed to the same single point of failure.

Instead, I decided to step away entirely.

Going forward, this website is my primary professional home. It’s not optimized for engagement or growth hacks. It’s not governed by changing platform rules. It’s simply a place where my work, my ideas, projects and my contact information live under my control.

If you want to reach me, the contact form here is the best option. I check it reliably. I’m also present on Mastodon and Bluesky, though I don’t check them as frequently. Think of those as ambient presence, not an inbox.

This whole experience also made me think more broadly about the shape of professional networks. We’ve already seen that social conversation doesn’t need to live inside a single corporate platform. Mastodon proved that distributed systems can work. There’s no obvious technical reason the same idea couldn’t apply to professional identity and relationships.

When one company holds decades of your career graph, losing access becomes catastrophic. Portability, federation, and ownership matter more than we like to admit, right up until the moment they’re gone.

I’m grateful for what LinkedIn enabled for me over the years. It genuinely mattered. This isn’t a rejection of that history.

It’s simply an acknowledgment that it’s time for something more resilient.

If you’re reading this and trying to find me, you already have.