Where Do We Go? Here? There? Everywhere!

Tis here a bubbling goo of a post. It’s been oozing in my drafts folder, the one between my ears. And iits actually not even new.

But I have been getting these questions from a few corners, seeing the ripples everywhere. I am already lined up to vent my opinion on at least two panels coming up around Open Education Week (yes my work requires I shill for the project I manage).

A lot more people are finally waking up to the house of entrapment that we call Social Media (stay tuned for the rant on how the term has been co-opted). Zuck has sure done a lot to get people off of his bloated ships of crap. “Where should we go now?” “Where are all the good conversations for educational technology?”

I have a lot of opinions which would not be hard to guess (c.f. the t-shirt), but I am sure of one thing. I have no answer for you. You gotta decide, and you need to also ask yourself, “Am I willing to take on some effort?” or “I just want the easy way.”

I will keep annoying my pal Martin Weller with my assertion that there never was a single place, no internet town hall. Twitter was an illusion, it did feel that way, but only if you were in it. And do not get me wrong, I gained so much from my run there (2007-2024, R.I.P. Rot In Pieces). But that ship sailed off like a Tesla in a hurricane. I barely give it a thought.

Sure we can go high ground super moralistic with our departure notes and shine the virtue signaling bat flare in the sky, but the Great One, Cory Doctorow, who I should just blog by quoting his text, put it well in Enshittification isn’t caused by venture capital:

It’s lazy and easy to think that our friends who are stuck on legacy platforms run by Zuckerberg and Musk lack the self-discipline to wean themselves off of these services, or lack the perspective to understand why it’s so urgent to get away from them, or that their “hacked dopamine loops” have addicted them to the zuckermusk algorithms. But if you actually listen to the people who’ve stayed behind, you’ll learn that the main reason our friends stay on legacy platforms is that they care about the other people there more than they hate Zuck or Musk.

They rely on them because they’re in a rare-disease support group; or they all coordinate their kids’ little league carpools there; or that’s where they stay in touch with family and friends they left behind when they emigrated; or they’re customers or the audience for creative labor.

All those people might want to leave, too, but it’s really hard to agree on where to go, when to go, and how to re-establish your groups when you get somewhere else.
….
That’s why people stay behind – not because they lack perspective, or self-discipline, or because their dopamine loops have been hacked by evil techbro sorcerers who used Big Data to fashion history’s first functional mind-control ray. They are locked in by real, material things.

Big Tech critics who ascribe the legacy platforms’ “stickiness” to users’ moral failings or platforms’ technical prowess are their own worst enemies. These critics have correctly identified that legacy platforms are a serious problem, but have totally failed to understand the nature of that problem or how to fix it. Thankfully, more and more critics are coming to understand that lock-in is the root of the problem, and that anti-lock-in measures like interoperability can address it.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis

Two Paths Diverge in the Woods, I Took The Path Most Trodden That I Entered via the Easy Button?

Those yearning to grab the town hall party hats, seem to think they can just click their heels and pick up elsewhere where they left off. Or you see that recently with all the furor to jump from Instagram to Pixelfed with all the “tips” on the magic of how you can migrate all your stuff. People don’t want to start over. Oh horrors I will lose all my connections.

The secret missed is that it is healthy to prune the shrub all they way back and build anew. Its refreshing. Is it really that onerous to rebuild? I guess so.

Folks want it Easy. My friend Todd had one of the best takes… er smashes on the allure of easy.

And I have had my Mastodon go arounds with George Station about the “hardness” of getting started in Mastodon (I love these exchanges, George, and I respect ya to the max).

What’s the proudest achievement you’ve notched that was easy to do? As a teacher, when you give a challenging assignment or ask your students to solve a complex equation or unravel an obscure section of convoluted latin, do you just let them get away with, “I can’t do this… it’s to haaaaaaaaaard.”

And for the last nail in the coffin, as I Gasticated:

“But it’s complicated!” “It’s confusing?”        

So is love.
So is poetry.
So is learning. 
That’s opportunity.

Get Federated, OER24

So lots of folks are leaping after each other into the sky. I wish you well.

Where The Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day

Sure, I get the appeal of Bluesky. I mean c’mon it is the exact look of Twitter before it got ad-infected and shrunk down in letters. It’s easy. Just grab your starter pack and pick up where you left off tweeting.

In one of the prep sessions for the panel I was one, someone was gushing about how great it was — “It’s like Twitter in 2010!”

That’s completely leaving out how mangled Twitter got in 2016 with its infusion of ads and shoving us s*** by algorithm, and that was only minor as the Dark Lord bought the ship, killed the API, and gutted it for his plaything.

That’s not saying this is the future of Bluesky, but, well, poster beware. But again as Doctorow pens so well on the trap of signing up for a place that has no fire exits:

This is why Bluesky is in a dangerous place: not because it is backed by VCs, not because it is a for-profit entity, but because it has captive users and no constraints. It’s a great party in a sealed building with no fire exits.

Pluralistic, Enshittification isnt caused by venture capital (direct text fragment link, are you hip to this?)

Despite how easy and friendly it is to get in, and the promise of a protocol that might gom farther, you are in large single owner house. I am perplexed by everyone gushing about how great it is- are you going to ponder at all what happens when it comes time to pay for the building? Who’s gonna shell put for the venture capital mortgage holders? Is it gonna be ads? Fees? Checkmarks? Sell your data?

Despite my tone, I do not begrudge anyone going there for some of that 2010 spirit connectivity. Send me a postcard.

This is Social Media?

I’m also perplexed how the concept I recall from the hazy glory days of Web 2.0 (old internet person signal) of “Social Media” got reduced to basically this same swath of a large messaging space where you post, follow, repost, reply, slap emojis left and right, scroll through… columns of messages. All that was Social media is funneled down into this same modality.

That’s not how I remember it.

So I trudged over to Wikipedia to take in the article on Social Media, which is a doozy. Like 300 references. I did not find the exact cut and paste I’d like to put here, nor will I try to write my own. I was sure hoping there was a Clay Shirkey quote (I always thought he quipped that it was “stuff that gets spammed” but I bet I am wrong). The closest element I walked away with was:

Social media outlets operate in a dialogic transmission system (many sources to many receivers) while traditional media operate under a monologic transmission model (one source to many receivers). For instance, a newspaper is delivered to many subscribers, and a radio station broadcasts the same programs to a city

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media

It was the thing about where it took a tool or way of organizing media/information that might have use for one person, and what could be leveraged and grows in value when many people do it together. It was the hey day of tags not meaning a message full of #signal cruft but beautiful and messy folksonomy.

Regardless, I think of all the wash of social bookmarking tools, and it was not only the grand daddy del.ici.ous, I remember earlier things like furl. For photos it was and f**** yes still is for me, flickr. In many ways blogging was a loosely distributed act of social media, but then again, what about Bloglines?

Yet one that was beautuful and completely forgotten but most folks was 43Things. You would list 43 goals in life as tags, and it would connect you withy others that had the same goal as well as others that had achieved it. I am struggling to full capture it well, but it was elegant, and of course, free from ads and surveillance capitalism. Thus it never made money and vanished in 2015.

Bless the Internet Archive, you can at least savor the past. My gosh I found my own! Bless the Internet Archive. Bless the Internet Archive.

Enough Pontificating and Past Glorifying, Where Do We Go?

The “where” as a single response is the problem. It reeks of solutionism. So given that I firmly believe, dear Martin, the town hall was an illusion, I think we should go everywhere, meaning not looking for a single place, but leaving the doors open to everywhere, aka, Ye Olde Yet Still There Internet. And keeping your base home, do not forsake your own home, do not count on being a renter in the house of ZuckMuskEtAl.

I firmly do not want to skate across so many “places” to scroll and click, so I am staying mainly, when I chose to in the fediverse. It’s the only sensible place, for me, because I am with the fire escape dude.

Nor do I really want to pursue the things I see other people vibing to do, where the use a service to spray their messages to many channels. I can appreciate that ideal, and once I might have latched on, but frankly I do not want to pay attention to so many channels. I have blogging to do!

But that said, I am not in the place or demanding / expecting others will think the same. Nor will I say anything ios wrong if you chose to join the Bluesky party or (gag me with a shovel) blog in LinkedIn or sneak in the backdoors for TikTok. I will not peer down my nose at your choices. It would be nice if you stopped by the blog once in a while, but hey, no expectations.

You might go Here. Others may go There. I want an Everywhere as in the free, open, unpaywalled open free range internet. Where one link connects to another, unfettered. And where I can take the back roads, not just the crowded expressways.

Where are you going? Matters not as long as its the path you choose and serves you well.

Happy trails.

---

Featured Image: No tokens were burned or reservoirs depleted in the creation of this image. 2016/366/48 Can We / How do / We Connect? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license