A nice surprise
Today’s top recommended story on Newsgator, one of my posts.
And in great style twitter is broken again and yet again they’ve found a new way in which for this to be evident. Today they’ve devided to block all ingoing tweets, no more posting for the next few hours I guess. They really should get a prize for this.
No warning, no status.twitter.com message, nothing.
The latest version of Seesmic was rolled out this evening during the Demo Presentation by Loic Lemeur and amongst it’s newest features are replies counters so that you can see how many people reacted, a latest tweet display and faster loading times for the pages. There is an active conversations tab in the lower right corner and the shows tab has been replaced by a replies tab.
The site is far slicker and easier to use. Great changes.
Let’s take a step back from today, and let’s remember the 2006 tech landscape. In 2006 we had Symbian phones, GPRS, text messages. We used the world wide web whilst sitting at computers usually via wifi. We would tweet until the moment we left home, and then we had to rely on SMS to keep in touch with people that we either wanted to meet or communicate with.
At the time phones were small, with just a few lines of text at a time, and little to no media content. We used Twitter and Jaiku because they allowed us, in a time of limited bandwidth, to have a conversation either, sitting at a computer, or by SMS.
Eventually bandwidth and data plans improved and increased, especially with the arrival of the iPhone, but blackberry users had lived in the future for years beforehand.
Twitter benefited from the iPhone, and it was favoured over Jaiku, so it won, but Jaiku offered everything that Twitter took years to offer, in turn.
That twitter has only a third of a million users tells you about the niche that it has, and the use cases that it fails to provide to its users. Medium was spun off from Twitter and others a blogging variant. Facebook, Reddit and two or three other solutions offer web forum style websites.
Twitter lost its niche back in 2007 when it went from being a network of friends of friends, who come across each other, and talk between each other to a hashtag driven, celebrity following mess. It’s when I read this vox article that I thought of the topic.
The web of today is mature. Everyone, or almost, has a smartphone and uses the web for information and staying in touch. Bandwidth is unlimited for many. What we need is not another twitter. What we need is a local, social web, where people that are in the same village, town or country, chat together. For too long the web has been about talking with people thousands of kilometres away. We need to progress towards a local social web.
As I left the University halls for the last time so it signalled the beginning of a new era in my life. No longer would I go to the student bar or the editing suites to chat with friends and see what they were doing. Now it was time to move to another part of London where new friendships would be made. Some of these friendships would be helped along by twitter. It’s like a chat room you can take with you anywhere.
At first this is a daunting chatroom. You see updates from thousands of people telling you of their latest thoughts and what they’re doing. It’s a blur and it’s hard to stick out. Over time, as you grow more familiar with the twitterverse so it becomes easier to understand. You see people living in your area so you add them and start following what they do. They add you and they know what you’re doing. Over time you get to know their daily habits, when they tend to start their day, how they organise their time and more. As a result of this it creates a feeling of communal living. That’s when you take it to the next step.
For me that next step was the twitter meetup. My experience was the following. Two people I had previously met, and many I had never met, met up in a restaurant for food and drinks and to talk about subjects they enjoy. As they did so it created a new sense of what twitter was about. It’s a technology that lets you get to know those on the other screen better than you would through traditional postings, comments and more. It’s alive and current rather than static and passive.
Twitter went even further to being an interesting technology at the Podcamp UK because at this event I got to know at least five or six more twitter users and added them to those I am following. As a result twitter is a link between a group of people interested in related industries and conversations. As a result of this there is a new level of community that forms via the medium of text. In effect conversations are taking place between people who are not in the same part of the world.
Funnily enough we are in the same part of the world, as you’d see from my “following” list on twitter. It’s a tool, an enhancement like many others that enables communities which are spread out, in nature, to communicate instantly as if across a garden fence or on their daily walk. It’s a great tool which, in this age, is essential to make people feel more involved. We’ll see how it progresses from here.
Someone asked Is decentralization the future of social media? and I’d take an extra leap. I believe that the Fediverse, made possible by ActivityPub, and the other one, made possible by the Authenticated Transfer Protocol both point to a different future
As we play with the fediverse, and we experiment with WordPress, ClassicPress and Firefish, among other instances or communities one thing becomes clear. The social media age could be over, replaced by something akin to the blogrings of the 90s. What I mean by this is that the fediverse is a gigantic web portal. We add photos via pixelfed, video via peertube, conversations by mastodon, notes via Firefish, and blog posts via WordPress and ClassicPress, among others. The point is we’re on niche platforms, talking with other niche platforms without logging in and out constantly. Log in, in one place, and we’re connected to everything within the fediverse. We’re on a community of communities.
That’s why we’re in a post social media age. In the 90s and the first half of the zeros (2000s) we were on websites for our niche interests. Eventually with Twitter, Facebook and the explosion of websites it was decided that oauth was useful to make logging into and out of websites almost instant. We didn’t need to think of a user name, password and all that crap. It was automatic, so we could surf between services more easily.
Remember in Twit podcasts of the mid zeroes Leo Laporte and others were speaking about signup burnout, about being tired of having to fill in forms for every single website they joined.
Now we’re beyond that. Twitter is x-tinct and Facebook sees that it needs to join the fediverse, not to be irrelevant. I would argue that it is idiotic of Facebook to join the fediverse because it already has four billion users, on a planet with 10 billion people. Everyone that is on the fediverse, probably quit Facebook years ago, because of the crimes that Facebook has commited, from helping fascists reach power, encouraging genocide, playing with making people depressed, and more.
In the age of the fediverse photo sharing is integral to the fediverse, video sharing is integral to the fediverse, blogging is integral to the fediverse, and conversations are integral to the fediverse. We can generate the content of our choice, and share it on the fediverse and everything is already integrated.
With Google reader, e-mail and feedreaders we could subscribe to RSS feeds to dozens, or even hundreds of feeds at a time, but every day you need to go through and mark things as read, either by scrolling through them, loading the post or other. It’s easy to have hundreds, or even thousands of unread posts. With the Fediverse we don’t have that problem, we jump in and out when we want, and we see what is recent, rather than what is recommended. We can see what is recommended, but in my eyes the people we “follow” are already recommending things for us to see.
“We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years,” he wrote shortly. “The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.”
When Jaiku and Twitter were competing I preferred Jaiku, and when Twitter and Identica were competing I preferred Identica. I loved Google + but it was destroyed. I liked Google Reader but it was destroyed. I liked Instagram but it was bought by Facebook and destroyed. Facebook destroyed itself, by encouraging people to see stuff by strangers, rather than their friends, forcing people to seak new groups. Some of those groups were toxic, so I dumped Facebook.
With the fediverse you can be on three, four or five instances and follow all the same people across each instance. You’re not stuck to a single instance. There is no single point of failure. You can bounce from instance to instance, and occasionaly look for replies and reactions.
One of the beautiful things about the Fediverse is that we don’t need to see ads anymore. We just see content, conversations and community. We don’t have to scroll down and see posts that look like posts, until you notice they’re selling cryptocurrency, magical cures, or other rubbish. Twitter was fun, but now we’re scrolling by an advert every fourth or fifth post, like it was with Instagram after Facebook bought it.
I like the Fediverse and what it represents.