read | Chris Aldrich

👓 Facebook is deleting timeline posts that users cross-published from Twitter | The Verge

Read Twitter posts on Facebook temporarily disappeared by Nick Statt (The Verge)

Oops

👓 Social.coop | Discours.es

I deleted my account on the Mastodon instance social.coop yesterday. I still don't fully understand what went down, but here's some details from [...]

Just goes to show you that a social media silo doesn’t need to be a big platform run by a corporation.

Reminds me of Kevin Marks’ tweet the other day:

Pearl-clutching twitter users: but what if the hobbyist sysadmin gives up on my mastodon instance?
Me: have you met venture funded social sites? https://t.co/RK483sl1yX

— Kevin Marks (@kevinmarks) August 19, 2018

👓 Custom Domains service deprecation | Medium

Read Custom Domains service deprecation (Medium Support)

Medium is no longer offering new custom domains as a feature. Instead, you can create a publication on Medium that will live on a medium.com/publication-name URL. Existing publications on custom do...

The amount of work required to support this feature should be exceedingly low. It’s probably a good indication that Medium won’t be around within a year or so.

This definitely signals the fact that Medium has moved toward the more silo end of the spectrum from a data ownership standpoint. While I might have recommended it with reservations as a potential IndieWeb solution, this change means I can’t recommend it at all.

👓 An open letter | Social.Coop

Read An open letter by Michele Kipiel (loomio.org)

Dear fellow members, the events that unfolded over the past few days have put our cooperative to the test, and we failed miserably. Many voices calling for change were silenced in the past, be it by negligence or by sheer lack of commitment by those, whose position of privilege allowed to disregard such calls. By failing to listen, we became the people MLK warned us about: the white moderates who are more devoted to order than to justice. We wasted precious time and energy in endless debates about trivial details, calling for the creation of ever new committees and processes, and we eventually lost sight of the only true reason our cooperative came to existence: to wrestle control of our social media out of the hands of the rich, white, capitalist elite.

Nice to hear that this Mastodon instance seems to be doing the right thing, but the idea of temporarily shutting down an instance makes me glad I didn’t join and that I have my own personal website instead. It’s nice not to be beholden to outsiders in cases like this or other corporate interests.

👓 Another scenario for higher education’s future: the triumph of open | Bryan Alexander

Read Another scenario for higher education’s future: the triumph of open by Bryan Alexander (Bryan Alexander)

Let me offer another scenario for academia’s future. As is usual with the scenario forecasting methodology, this is based on extrapolating from several present-day trends – here, several trends around open.

In the past I’ve called this “The Fall of the Silos.” It’s a sign of our urban- and suburban-centric era that this rural metaphor doesn’t get a lot of traction. It’s also possible that contemporary American politics leads many to embrace silos. So I’ve renamed the scenario “The Triumph of Open.”

tl;dr version – In this future the open paradigm has succeeded in shaping the way we use and access most digital information, with powerful implications for higher education.