I’ve noticed a big uptick in followers on BlueSky in the days since the USA election. I do wonder if we are thinking this through. Moving from one silo to another might not be the best lesson learnt from X.
Why is joining Bluesky like buying an EV? | Memex 1.1 – John Naughton
So here’s the question. Here are two individuals who totally control two organisations – Facebook and X – that have had devastating impacts on the lives of some of their users (and in Facebook’s case, whole countries such as Myanmar), as well as polluting the public sphere and undermining democracy in the west. Why has neither been held accountable for the societal damage their organisations have wrought? The answer is simple: they have the impunity that their immense wealth provides.
John Naughton Our perverse respect for immense wealth allows Musk and Zuckerberg to run riot
The answer to many other questions too?
In reply to https://x.com/Mr_Minchin/status/1778675103540125929.
Maybe it’s because it’s been the holidays and I’ve had more time on my phone – but the amount of hate speech on social platforms 😥 People like Joey Barton able to tweet with impunity, vile TikTok comments the norm & never removed. More work for teachers brewing
Blair Minchen
And still we are here. It boggles my mind that nations, governments, schools use social media as their main conduit of information, platforms that they have no control of.
Replied to Replied to Behind a login on LinkedIn
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. 🤷🏻♂️
I just updated the twitter category on this blog to be called posse as it is syndicated to twitter & mastodon. I also disabled the twitter cross posting from micro.blog. Micro.blog does a lovely job of cross posting images along with alt tags to mastodon.
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.
In reply to So long, Twitter API, and thanks for all the fish by .
Well, it’s come to this. Twitter is burning, a billionaire owes money, an 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.
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.
