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For the last several years it has increasingly worried me that schools (governments & others institutions) used Twitter as their main publishing system. A system not designed for users but for advertisers and owners and more evidently recently their owner’s unsavoury ideas. We seem in some instances to be encouraging pupils to look at services they are legally too young for.

My use of Twitter dwindled and as far as possible I used it as a distribution system for content I own. I now hardly bother with that.

The decline of Instagram from a timeline based service to an advert filled algorithmic stream doesn’t fill me with confidence for threads. Similarly LinkedIn and other silos.

What all these systems bring is ease of use and this bring piles of pals. The onboarding to threads was almost invisible.

Unfortunately the ethically cleaner alternatives like mastodon or a combination of RSS & blogs have more friction. So far they have not had the huge influx of users that allows folk to build up a pile of pals. It would be useful, I think for someone to start an instance on mastodon for say Scot’s educators and then do some propaganda to get folk from twitter to move over.

I also really rate the micro.blog approach, which could be used as a model for educators.

I’ve PESOSed this post here.

My use of Twitter has reduced massively of late. I still follow the odd link to see content. This is often in an iOS app. These usually open in the app’s ‘own’ browser rather than jump to Safari. This leads to a login page and I give up. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Ardinning loch winter afternoon. Dark clouds, light silhouettes trees and reflects on the loch.

Today’s #DS106 challange is worth more than a tweet. #tdc4124 #ds106 Is today the day it all breaks? | The DS106 Daily Create

If Twitter switch off the old version of its API, then some of the functionality of the Daily Create will break today. See Cogdog’s blog for an explanation.

This sucks. It really sucks. As Alan says, life will go on. But just in case it doesn’t, make something, DS106 style, that expresses how sucky this really is.

The twitter API has, over the years, enabled a lot of wonderful things. In my opinion none more so that the #DS106 #DailyCreate. This provides simple daily creative prompts, but more importantly it pulls responses together onto its WordPress Home. I imagine Alan especially feels this pain. He has tirelessly kept this up and running and helped other use the technology elsewhere (the Daily Stillness is one I love).

There may be a silver lining, the slim chance that there is an increase in open, shares and self owned streams, open protocols and interop may increase, or even flourish. Mastodon is growing, I hope RSS does too.

Featured image, my own.

Well, it’s come to this. Twitter is burninga billionaire owes moneyan API will soon get lobotomized, so Bridgy‘s Twitter support will die within the month.

A lot of the reactions on my blog come from Twitter thanks to Bridgy. A marvellous service. I really disliked it when Twitter swallowed comments, then Bridgy came to the rescue. Thanks so much for all of Bridgy.

Liked Leah McElrath (@leahmcelrath@mstdn.social) (Mastodon)
I hate to say this because I adore my fellow tweeps, but some of the least effective content on here right now are auto-posted tweets. 
They’re visually off-putting, and the content sometimes doesn’t translate well for this environment. 
If you’re going to cross-post to Twitter and Mastodon, perhaps consider doing so manually and adjusting accordingly. 
(Said with love :twitter:)

I POSSE and cross post a fair bit, but I often just do it manually. Helps with both formatting & alt-text on images. But this like I am relying on brid.gy. It works well for Twitter, so this is a mastodon test.

I do use Twitter for school work, just not comfortably I prefer to post to the class blog & syndicate to twitter. The latest twitter crisis reinforces this.

I’ve never really liked the idea of Twitter or any other service being the official or main channel of schools (or government services). Schools should not be promoting an advertising service. My ideal would some sort of #IndieWeb set up, with micro.blog style aggregation & syndication. Federation might be a close second.

Liked Dear Elon Musk by Manton ReeceManton Reece (manton.org)
We’re on the eve of the Elon Musk / Twitter deal closing. In his Dear Twitter Advertisers letter, Elon writes: The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy mann...

The common digital “square” should be the entire web, with a diverse set of platforms. There should be common APIs but many communities with their own rules, goals, and business models. Concentrating too much power in only a couple social media companies is what created the mess we’re in. The way out is more platforms, free to make the best decisions for their users knowing that there are options to leave and less lock-in for developers.

Manton always seems to hit the nail on the head.