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title, date, permalink, tags
| title | date | permalink | tags | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open Matters | 2023-10-09T13:32-04:00 | /open-matters/ |
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When I set out to write my last post I had a different thought in mind than where I ended up. I'm still thinking about questions of ownership, and in particular want to return to the leap John Maxwell pointed out between "academy owned" and "serving the public good," because there's quite a lot of terrain to consider.
But this morning I want to back up to where my thinking originally began, which is social networking after Twitter.
If you're reading this, you likely already know that my colleagues and I over at Humanities Commons launched a Hometown-flavored Mastodon instance at hcommons.social a little less than a year ago. We started this process once it became clear that Twitter was going to have new ownership, and very likely a form of management that we weren't going to like, and that it was time to get out.
Lots of folks joined us in that exodus, but many haven't stuck around Mastodon, finding it too complex, too scoldy, too unwelcoming, and no doubt other things besides. We've been working on trying to make it friendlier, and trying to make clear the benefits of having your social media presence on a platform that you have some real voice in -- on which you can reach out to your admins and say, "dude, this is a problem," and actually get listened to.
Nevertheless, a bunch of folks have moved on. And that's fine! People should be where they like! But I've been a tiny bit broken-hearted by the apparent re-settling of DH Twitter, a community that really mattered to me once upon a time, on Bluesky. And I've been trying to figure out why, and whether there's anything to be done about it.
One thing that might be done about it would be to say "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," and use the platform folks have settled on. But as I told Roxanne Shirazi a couple of weeks back, every so often I have cause to remember how miserable I was on Jack Dorsey's Twitter, and it steels my resolve not to be part of Jack Dorsey's anything else ever again. Which is to say that we needed a better alternative long before last year's change of management, and I'm determined to keep working on my small part in building it.
That's where the "ownership matters" thing got started. But this morning someone in my timeline linked to Cory Doctorow's thoughts from August on, as he puts it, the "difference between federatable and federated." The new corporate-managed Twitter replacements are claiming the capacity to federate, but we have yet to see much evidence of what some eventual federation might look like, including whether that federation will be built on an open standard or whether it will take the more typical "embrace, extend, extinguish" route to building a distributed but still proprietary network.
Cory makes two key points that help me understand both my heartbreak in the face of the migration to Bluesky and my determination to continue supporting an open alternative.
On the former, he notes the time and energy and brilliance and creativity that so many of us poured into Twitter, only to have it come to the ignominious end that it seems to be nearing: "The only thing worse than having wasted all that time and energy would be to have wasted it — and learned nothing."
On the latter, he reminds us that this sad tale of walled gardens and corporate collapse is not restricted to the particular characters involved in Twitter's end: "I don’t care how good the administration of Bluesky or Threads is today — I care about what happens if it sours tomorrow."
The point is partly about ownership, or perhaps governance, and ensuring that we have a say in the future of the plots of ground we choose to develop. But it's also about ensuring that those gardens aren't walled, that they don't just have a gate that management may one day decide to unlock, but that they are open from the start, open to connect and cultivate in the ways that we as a community decide.
As Cory notes, Mastodon is far from perfect, and hcommons.social is far from perfect. But we're doing our best to ensure that we're running it in the open: we're discussing issues that affect our community with the community, and we're committed to making use of open standards across our projects.