Curators of Sweden project will fall silent at end of month after 200,000 tweets by 365 citizens
Tag: silo quits
👓 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 [...]
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
👓 It’s time to say goodbye to Twitter | sonniesedge
I remember those old days and miss the feel it used to have as well. The regrowing blogosphere around the IndieWeb and Micro.blog are the closest thing I’ve seen to that original feel since ADN or smaller networks like 10 Centuries and pnut. I enjoy finding that as I wean myself away from Twitter, I do quite like going back to some of the peace and tranquility of reading and thinking my way through longer posts (and replies as well). Sometimes I wonder if it doesn’t take more than ten minutes of thought and work, it’s probably not worth putting on the internet at all, and even then it’s probably questionable… I’m half tempted to register the domain squirrels.social and spin up a Mastodon instance–fortunately it would take less than the ten minute time limit and there are enough animal related social silos out there already.
As an aside, I love the way you’ve laid out your webmentions–quite beautiful!
👓 I’m joining the campaign to deactivate my Twitter account on August 17 | BoingBoing
I deleted my Facebook account a few months ago and am not sorry I did. For the last couple of months, I've been thinking about deleting my Twitter account, too. It has become a creepy, toxic place. I'm stunned that Twitter has no problem with people who want to inflict additional misery on the parents of murdered children. It's not about the first Amendment. Twitter is a company -- it can choose whomever it wants to be on its platform. As my friend Sean Bonner posted, Twitter "didn’t start as an open forum for free speech, it started as a way for people to see what their friends were doing. Enforcing the same rules for everyone to promote civil discourse isn’t censorship. Bots spewing hate and attacking people isn’t fun." He's right. I'm joining Sean and others on August 17 by deactivating my Twitter account. The hashtag for this action is #DeactiDay. If Twitter doesn't fix its hate enabler problem in 30 days, I won't reactivate my account, after which it will be permanently deleted. It's very likely it will be deleted, because Twitter has demonstrated that it badly wants Alex Jones and his ilk on its platform. When CNN reported that Jones violated at least a dozen of Twitter's rules after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Jones hadn't and therefore couldn't be kicked off, Twitter didn't do a thing about it. Then Twitter admitted that Jones had indeed violated rules that had resulted in bans for other people, but said it wouldn't ban Jones. Twitter can have Jones, and I'll be happy to be the hell away from the place.
After 12 years, I’ve decided to hang it up on Twitter. I started using the site in 2006, when it was all texts sent to your phone, and I remember my first experience was actually kind of awfu…
👓 Why I’m Deleting All My Old Tweets | Wired
If you want to delete yours too, here's how.
👓 Farewell Social Media | James Shelley
I recently purged the data from my Facebook account. This effort was shockingly labour intensive: it took a browser script all weekend to crunch, and still many aspects of the process required manual execution. Torching years and years of old Facebook activity felt so liberating that I found another...
👓 Why I Needed to Pull Back From Twitter | Maggie Haberman
The viciousness, toxic partisan anger and intellectual dishonesty are at all-time highs.
Reply to 50cent tweet about Instagram abuse
#silosgonnasilo #ownyourdata
🎧 Episode 3: Freedom from Facebook | Clevercast

This time on clevercast, I discuss my departure from Facebook, including an overview of how I liberated my data from the social giant, and moved it to my own website.
Here are some of the tools that I mention in today’s episode:
Also check out my On This Day page and my Subscribe page, which includes my daily email syndication of my website activity.
An IndieWeb Podcast: Episode 1 “Leaving Facebook”
It’s been reported that Cambridge Analytica has improperly taken and used data from Facebook users in an improper manner, an event which has called into question the way that Facebook handles data. David Shanske and I discuss some of the implications from an IndieWeb perspective and where you might go if you decide to leave Facebook.
Show Notes
Articles
The originating articles that kicked off the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica issue:
- 3/16/18: Facebook’s Newsroom: Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook by Paul Grewal
- “Protecting people’s information is at the heart of everything we do.”
- 3/17/18: The Guardian: Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach
- 3/17/18: New York Times: How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook data of Millions
Related articles and pages
- 3/21/18 Anil Dash: The Missing Building Blocks of the Web, an article bringing the Facebook issue back around to regaining the good parts of the “old web”
- How To Change Your Facebook Settings To Opt Out of Platform API Sharing from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
- 3/24/18: Ars Technica: Facebook scraped call, text message data for years from Android phones
- 3/18/18: The Guardian: Facebook employs psychologist whose firm sold data to Cambridge Analytica
- Sebastian Greger’s Privacy policy
- Mastodon not supporting Webmention specification
- Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil
Recent Documented Facebook Quitters
Jonathan LaCour, Eddie Hinkle, Natalie Wolchover, Cher, Tea Leoni, Adam McKay, Leo Laporte,and Jim Carrey
New York Times Profile of multiple quitters: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/technology/users-abandon-facebook.html
IndieWeb Wiki related pages of interest
- https://indieweb.org/why
- https://indieweb.org/principles
- https://indieweb.org/Facebook
- https://indieweb.org/silo-quits
- https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started
Potential places to move to when leaving Facebook
You’ve made the decision to leave Facebook? Your next question is likely to be: to move where? Along with the links above, we’ve compiled a short list of IndieWeb-related places that might make solid options.
- Micro.blog for $5/month (or bring your own web site for free)
- WordPress.com
- Tumblr.com
- WithKnown (Paid service or host your own)
- WordPress.org (self-hosted or managed)
- Mastodon (doesn’t necessarily provide ownership of domain name unless you’re self-hosting an instance)
- Other possible projects/options: https://indieweb.org/projects
There’s lots more I could advise doing, but if you’re only using Facebook for reading content you want to get out of Facebook, then lock the whole thing down as best as you can (privacywise) and then use https://facebook-atom.appspot.com/ to suck the data you want out as a feed and pipe it into a feed reader.
You can unsubscribe or unfollow folks to limit your feeds to the bare minimum. The atom feed the appspot tool gives you will be everything and it will be reverse chronological. Good feed readers like Feed.ly and Inoreader will allow you to filter out posts you don’t want to see using a variety of keyword filters.
If you need specific help in setting it up or the instructions are unclear, let me know; I’m happy to help.
If you want to set up and run your own custom private system/server for close family, I can make some suggestions for doing that too.
Getting data out of Medium
Controlling my data is important to me. It’s also important that my students (and the faculty that I support) have the ability to control their own data, as well. That doesn’t mean that everything needs to live on a Domain of One’s Own. But it does mean that I want my data to be as flexible as possible, and as easy to move around as possible.
It’s really easy to download an archive of your Medium posts. Like your Twitter archive, you can just unzip the archive and upload it to your domain, and you’ve got it up and running.
However, if you want to incorporate those posts into a different platform — like WordPress, Jekyll, Known, etc. — it is more of a challenge.
I wrote my posts on the Medium API directly in Medium. Partly as an experiment, and partly because I love the Medium post editor. (It’s why I incorporated a Medium editor clone into Peasy.) But after writing three posts — complete with feature images, inline images, and code blocks — in Medium, I decided to import them into my Jekyll/GitHub Pages site. That’s turned out to be a challenge. Not an insurmountable one, but one that I’d rather avoid going through.
I downloaded my Medium archive, used Pandoc to convert the posts from HTML to MarkDown, and then copied and pasted the MarkDown into new posts on my Jekyll site. There was more post-processing than I anticipated, or would like. And it doesn’t look as easy to automate the cleanup as I would like.
Even more frustrating was my discovery a couple weeks ago that the Medium API supports posting to Medium, but not retrieving posts from Medium. It is easy to write code that cross-posts from another platform to Medium, but Medium makes it more difficult to go the other way.
Why?
My guess is that their focus is on content. They want to be the place where we go to find ALL THE CONTENT. So they make it really easy to get content in. Harder to get content out. And by making a beautiful, easy-to-use editor, the temptation is strong to just use Medium from the start.
If we just want to write, get our writings read, and have a permanent record of what we wrote. Medium can be great. But if we want to write content that we keep coming back to, content that keeps evolving, content that’s part of a long-term project … and if we don’t want that long-term project to be locked into a single platform … then Medium may be a problem.
I say as I write this post on Medium.
Because I just can’t resist this editor.
Time to go add some code to Peasy so I can get it ready for prime-time sooner.
Featured image by paul bica (CC BY).
My new social media POSSE |
Several of my friends and colleagues have been critical of their social media experience recently — Twitter in particular. One friend left Twitter altogether last week. I’m sympathetic. I’m a serial Facebook quitter, and in the fall, I wrote a few blog posts about my disillusionment with relying on Twitter for social and professional conversations. I even took some time off . . . and enjoyed it.
And then there were conferences. Twitter is such an assett at professional conferences, adding a layer of depth to the presentations and conversations. Then came #moocmooc. And so Twitter dragged me back in.
For all of its benefits, Twitter still has a signal-to-noise ratio problem. And a harassment problem. It facilitates the antisocial and the parasocial alongside the social. Creative, and promiscuous, blocking helps the anti-/parasocial problem. But it’s still noisy, and even the good is under the control of the Twitter company. However, I’ve started trying two things this past week that are helping with these issues.
First, I’m largely ignoring my Twitter timeline, and instead, I’m following a few lists I’ve created, each of which have, at most, a few dozen people. This targeted reading, loosely by topic, means that I read less tweets, and that I can choose a topic to focus on at a given moment. (My lists include topics like critical pedagogy, music scholarship, digital humanities, social justice, Christianity, etc. I also follow hashtags like #mtped and #moocmooc.) The topical division is messy, of course, as individuals tend to tweet about more than one topic. But there is more signal and less noise on these lists, and less topic-jumping while reading one of these lists, than while reading my timeline. Since I’m following less people this way, I might miss something. But most of the good stuff I really need to see will be retweeted by someone in a list eventually. (And people retweeted often get added to the list.) And at some point, I have to resign myself to the fact that there will always be more good stuff out there than I have time to engage . . . and that’s okay.
The other change I’ve made is installing Known on my server (sketches.shaffermusic.com). Known is a blog-like, social-media-like platform designed with POSSE in mind: Publish on your Own Site and Syndicate Elsewhere — a growing trend on the IndieWeb. Known double-publishes on Tiwtter (and other platforms) and uses webmentions to collect the ensuing conversations onto the original Known site. (Bridgy helps, too.) It also differentiates Tweet-like status updates from Facebook-like mini-blog entires without imposing character limits. It also integrates with social media conversations and @-replies pretty well. In short, it’s a pretty smooth way to own and control your content while connecting on proprietary social media networks.
I’ve found that more targeted reading makes me happier, and more targeted Twitter use means more time for longer-form reading and writing. Further, I really want to control my own content, and doing so makes me more excited about writing (as does having a new publishing toy . . . er . . . platform).
I’m liking this setup, at least for now. Targeted, meaningful engagement on Twitter, more time to read the longer-form pieces I find there, an easier and more “indie” way to engage, and more motivation to dig in and really write. Good stuff. And no need to leave Twitter just yet.
Kris Shaffer
Kris Shaffer, Ph.D. (Yale University, 2011), is an Instructional Technology Specialist and adjunct instructor in Computer Science and Digital Studies at the University of Mary Washington and Contributing Editor for Hybrid Pedagogy. He is also the lead author of Open Music Theory.
Header image by Jared Tarbell.
The Seattle Review of Books – Sherman Alexie, Lindy West, and Ta-Nehisi Coates all quit Twitter this week
Sooner or later, enough people I like are going to abandon the service, and the pain-to-pleasure ratio will tip unfavorably. I don't know how Twitter will survive 2017 without making some drastic changes to its service. Maybe it's already too late.