Hello blog it’s been a while, and his post has been idling in neutral. Just about everyone has written their bird song post for Twitter. I won’t refer to it by some algebraic like single letter, nor to “The platform previously known as Twitter”- it always was, is, and in death spiral, just silly Twitter.
Back in my first year “twittering” (as I verbed it in several posts) (lo and behold the first one reveals again I stole that from D’Arcy Norman) I “crafted” a diagram that described my own path that started with the first experience / reaction “that’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard of.”
I put “crafted” in “quotes” because what I actually did was a friendly bit of satire from the style of the brilliant writer, blogger Kathy Sierra — her seriouspony blog vanished but the original TypePad one remains. Here, for sad nostalgia is the Twitter Life Cycle Diagram, published here first April 26, 2007.
I had ir posted on a now dead but archived by me Wikispaces site where I invited others to edit the wiki page to document their own trajectory, gathering 89 now dusty, mildewed, or just dead twitterers.
Of course, there were no proper dates on the x axis, but that start point for me was early 2007, and that peak with ???? may be ??? 2017? 2018?
It was time to update the Twitter Life Cycle, which, as a cycle, has returned to the original state of being “the dumbest thing”.
The knifing of the API without $ was among the worst. It broke many tools like Twitter TAGs, many of my bots, the DS106 Daily Create (which publishes, and needs an update, but no longer pulls responses from Twittering folks).
X It Stage Left?
Many have announced a nuking of their accounts. And as I still maintain that social media ought to just be our creative exhaust (not exhausting), I really have no value in my 16 years there. But I also have to wonder if account deletion has any impact on the Dark Lord of Twitter.
So I am just leaving my account there, as useless as it can be. Dead weight. The app is long gone. I’ve not posted since?? July?? Does this say I support the sickness of the space? Am I a pawn by not exiting? Am I part of the evil empire?
Hell no. But I am also not one to delete my own history, and all the embedded tweets in this blog (which also should have made it on the diagram, that to even see a tweet link you have to be logged in. I once sang a mock song about being a Deleter
I don’t even care much about downloading an archive, as I have my own copy already via a genius method by Martin Hawksey (and also killed when the API went under).
Seeking the Next Twitter
Of course there is much yearning for a new place that brings that 2007 excitement of Twitter back, as if there can be a singles space. Martin Weller has cast it perfectly as the 30th year of EdTech the Diaspora, as well as announcing his own eXit. Blogger on fire! Martin also metaphorized the post twitter options as 70s disco tracks.
Is it Blue Sky? Threads? Notes? Mastodon? et al? My hunch is there never will be, and probably never was the so called Town Square. A small point I gleaned from the Tech Wont Save Us podcast episode on the Musked One was that twitter’s total user base (200 million at best) was orders of magnitude less than big ones (FB, Instagram, YT, billions and billions), — there was some kind of effect that celebrities had that made it seem bigger than it was. Or for educators, maybe it was just a healthy concentration tha made it feel bigger than it seemed.
Don’t het me wrong, I loved those early and mid years, and even in the decline, I still got value in there. But that ran out for me.
Still, we seem to want that big happy tent. I tapped into Bryan Alexander’s Future Trends Forum on Where Will Educator Go After Twitter? I heard again some wishful though unrealistic to me pining for vital place of academic green grass and no insects. There was non stop sharing and claiming if Bluesky invites. There was the typical, “Mastodon is too hard” or more a common thread– if people felt unheard, if there was no instant crowd, it was worthwhile.
The only thing I saw not mentioned/suggested was going back to the spaces we own, you know those Things of Our Own? This blog thing?
I harbor my own doubts if the optimal route post twitter is to try to remake it under a different corporate owned tent. It’s like there is an expectation to jump start a new space with the peak witter experience and forgetting that even Twitter did not start with that. It was really a lot of people sharing what they ate for lunch. The beauty was, that no one took it seriously, it was looked down upon by proper academics.
It was, at the start, “the dumbest thing…”
I’m glad many are trying out more and multiple spaces. I frankly don’t want more channels to tune my tired attention to… and like back in 2007, SNF is a real thing.
My Space (not MySpace)
What I seek is less a platform to be heard and more one that informs me of interesting ideas, resources, tools, and funny life stories that I would not come across in other channels. It’s the serendipity I’m in for, not the likes.
I’m planting my home in the Fediverse— I really don’t want to park my energy in other corporate owned space, but also, even as it baffles most, the federated ActivityPub fueled space really has the only potential to pick up those cast into the Diaspora (not that one). If Threads et al do properly pull off ActivityPub, then the multiple tents have a chance.
I’m not here to be right or convince anyone, but will agree that Mastodon Is the Good One, and if it is complicated or does not act like Instant Twitter Juice, that’s a feature.
I really can’t convince many to join the tooting party, this is really about just marking here where I plan to put energy. It should not be what you get out of a platform directly (if things do happen that’s a bonus) but maybe what you can be part of for others (?).
Just marking this here as a ceasing of being active in Twitter, not deleting, just leaving it where it is.
And also… it’s time to get back to the blog, JoJo. Be a Reclaimer, not the dumbest thing ever.
I thought the web was only for status updates
Built by someone else but not by me.
Trackers are out to sell me
That’s the way it seems.
Surveillance transmitting all of my feeds.Then I got a domain, now I’m a reclaimer
Not a shred of me stored in their cloud
I’m in charge, oh I’m a reclaimer!
Couldn’t login there if I tried
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