Sticking with the fail whale... for now

 

A lot of digital ink has been used up in the past few days with Elon's purchase of the big blue bird, both in blogs and Twitter itself, and news outlets (not that I think of it) To be fair, it is a little concerning when your social network changes hands, but then again other things are concerning in the land of social media (where "you're the product"), like most social media ownership, privacy, uptime, and what companies are doing with user data.  However, is this most recent panic enough of a cause to move over to another platform (or protocol) like Mastodon?🤔 Perhaps...or perhaps not.  Earlier this year I created an account on Scholar.social (based on where colleagues seemed to be moving)- which took forever to verify - because their servers were kneeling under the weight of the many people who were "leaving" Twitter after the last Elon scare. I see today that Scholar.social no longer accepts new members.  Just for giggles I also created a mastodon.social identity because I was having issues logging into Scholar after months of not logging in. I did end up logging into scholar eventually, but I haven't really "tooted" much. What to does one say when creating an identity on new network? "Hello, world?  I am eating a ham sandwich!"😜

Migrating is a such pain...😕

Having multiple social media accounts isn't the issue. What is the issue is the ability to follow conversations and have an opportunity to be part of the community. Accounts are easy to create, after all, I still maintain accounts on discord (which I rarely use), several slacks (which I also rarely use), Facebook (mostly for family), Instagram (just for photos...although that's been changing lately thanks to Meta🙄), Swarm (for location-based stuff), Untappd and TV Time (to keep track of things), and two Twitter accounts (one of which isn't as active).  Heck...I am still on Plurk (not that I use it...😂)! 

The social platform is just a means to an end. The biggest thing about social media is the social, and it's where your communities are available to connect and share.  The nice thing about Twitter is that the main timeline has everything from edtech, learning, higher ed, VR/AR, language and linguistics, and even silly pet videos. I don't need to go into separate communities to get different sorts of content. I know, that in theory the Fediverse (the mastodon protocol) allows for bringing together such various communities, but only if your communities are part of a service that uses this federated connection. The other thing about Twitter (as it stands) is that I don't get sucked into it the same way Discord and Slack tend to drain your time. There are no "unread messages" on Twitter. Just jump in and engage from whatever point.

In any case, over the years I've experienced a few migrations of the various communities I am (or was) a member of.  Every migration hop is a chance to lose connections, and every connection lost basically makes the new tool less useful.  Sure, some connections are more valuable than others based on your rate and quality of interaction with them, but every so often a connection surprises you (in good or bad ways), Here are three personal examples of migrations from the last 20 years:

MacOS Forums: Back in ye olde days, before social media... at least as we know it and understand it today,  there was a time when the public beta for MacOS X came out (ca. 2000).  At this time, there was a forum that sprung up for enthusiasts and professionals to discuss the next big thing from Apple. The community had a lot of members, and along with technology, software, hardware, and other geeky discussions, there were off-topic forums that hosted general discussions.  These kinds of phpBB-based forums still exist today for various communities around the web. This forum was basically the Twitter/discord/slack of its day because in addition to all the tech news discussions we ended up making friends online over the years. One year the owner of the forum was vocal about something that was non-tech related (something politically conservative if I remember correctly). People got temp-banned for voicing concerns about this (you know, the "owner" exercising power over the community to promote their views), and ultimately it made a lot of members jump ship and join another apple-focused community. The owner of the community did change his tune and members came back, but I did see a breakup of the discussions across two or more online forums at the time, which really changed the tune and feel of the community. The community has rebounded, it seems, over the last 20 years, and the forums are still going strong, but much of my own network seems to have moved on (and from visiting today, I see that some people have passed onto the next realm of existence). While I still maintain my logon info there, it's not a place I frequent much.  It's fun, and nostalgic, to see that some threads that started 20 years ago are still active! To be fair, around this time I also changed jobs, so the forum was less relevant in my day-to-day work life, but I would have stuck around for the off-topic threads if the vibe of the community was different 🤷‍♂️.

RSS & Google Reader: The third big wave (yes third, I skipped #1) of migrations really came when Google Reader was killed off, and more and more social sites (like Facebook and Twitter) entered the scene. The social web brought together individual authors/publishers via their blogs and RSS. I used to read a lot of Greek blogs back in the day, left comments on the author's posts (and some left comments for me), and discussions were had over distributed means and digital places.  In Google Reader, you were also able to follow others and see the items that they shared with others from their RSS feeds. In this way, you were able to discover the blogs they were reading, get an opportunity to subscribe to those blogs yourself, and have a kind of serendipity in content discovery.  This made Google Reader more than just an RSS reader, it was also a social network in its own right.  When microblogs came out (Twittr, Pownce, Jaiku, Plurk, etc.) I do still remember the discussions questioning why one would use a microblogging service to post something that was 140 characters long.  Their regular blog (Blogger, Wordpress, LiveJournal, etc...) would handle 140 characters just as well 1000 characters. Of course, we know how that ended. Many people did gravitate to services like Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku.  While they maintained blogs, the quicker discussion was happening on microblogs. With the loss of Google Reader, however, I ended up following a small subset of the people I followed on Reader on Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook). I still use RSS, but that social component is lacking in Feedly, and The Old Reader replicates google reader's look and feel, but the paywall means that my community isn't there.

Dead Socials, Abandoned Socials, & Various Messengers: There's no dearth of digital tumbleweed and social tombstones. Like any self-respecting techie, I've tried a lot of services over the years.  Some that come to mind over the past 20 years of social: MySpace, Friendster, Hi5, Orkut, Jaiku, ICQ, Google Allo, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, Apple iChat, AIM, Google+, Whrrl, GoWalla, Raptr, Pownce, StumbleUpon, Vox blogs, Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Chat, Edmodo, HelloTxt, Path, Meerkat, Del.icio.us, Ning, SocialGO, various IRC channels, and the list goes on... Sometimes platforms just go away, I guess that's the nature of things. Sometimes people migrate platforms.  That's also the nature of things. The one thing that seems different now, compared to then, is that there is a lack of discoverability when switching platforms.  Over the past 20 years, the way to find your contacts had been their email (or in some cases their phone number) in your contacts list. So, when you joined a new service, it was fairly easy for that service to harvest your contacts and point you to who's using their service (yes, I know, there are issues with this).  These days, I have no idea what people's emails are any longer (never mind their phone numbers).  Perhaps for some colleagues that I connect with on a regular basis by email - sure, I have that - but for the most part, people's digital identities are their Twitter or Instagram handles. When switching services, there's no way to link up one identity with another. Switching services for the sake of making a point about a rich dude's purchase of the company seems counterproductive.  My network is here...at least for now. A network developed through conference backchannel tweets, MOOCs, and serendipitous discoveries.

Looking back, I don't fret too much about my lost connections on ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, iChat, or any of those other platforms that shut down. The same goes for social networks and forums that I stopped using, and blogs that I used to read that have since gone dark and whose author's real names I never knew. Ultimately, for me, the big blue bird is about one thing: discussion and discovery. So long as it fulfills those functions and the majority of my community remains there, I'll most likely stick around. After all, there is little use in spending a lot of time migrating and trying to rediscover people on the new platform who might just end up remaining on the old platform anyway.  If and when Twitter becomes a ghost town (or has a spectacular implosion), then it would be worthwhile to expend the effort to find other spots to hang, sip my real life coffee, and engage in discussion over the next MOOC or whatnot.

Just my 2c.  What about you?