‘Shut up!’ screamed Toad.
— Frog and Toad Bot (@FrogandToadbot) January 11, 2022
The whole point of that post is to show that og hasn’t solved it. There are too many flavors of metacrap and no standards. And worse og is not only not “open” it’s a DRY violation.
If you want to spelunk a bit, Cory Doctorow approached the idea back in 2001: Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia
It’s reminiscent of the system 1 (fast) and system2 (slow) ideas behind Kahneman and Tversky’s work in behavioral economics. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow)
It’s also interesting in light of this tweet which came up recently:
I very much miss the back and forth with blog posts responding to blog posts, a slow moving argument where we had time to think.
— Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) August 22, 2017
Because the Tweet was shared out of context several years later, someone (accidentally?) replied to it as if it were contemporaneous. When called out for not watching the date of the post, their reply was “you do slow web your way…”#
This gets one thinking. Perhaps it would help more people’s contextual thinking if more sites specifically labeled their posts as fast and slow (or gave a 1-10 rating)? Sometimes the length of a response is an indicator of the thought put into it, thought not always as there’s also the oft-quoted aphorism: “If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter”.
The ease of use of the UI on Twitter seems to broadly make it a platform for “fast” posting which can too often cause ruffled feathers, sour feelings, anger, and poor communication.
What if there were posting UIs (or micropub clients) that would hold onto your responses for a few hours, days, or even a week and then remind you about them after that time had past to see if they were still worth posting? This is a feature based on Abraham Lincoln’s idea of a “hot letter” or angry letter, which he advised people to write often, but never send.
Where is the social media service for hot posts that save all your vituperation, but don’t show them to anyone? Or which maybe posts them anonymously?
The opposite of some of this are the partially baked or even fully thought out posts that one hears about anecdotally, but which the authors say they felt weren’t finish and thus didn’t publish them. Wouldn’t it be better to hit publish on these than those nasty quick replies? How can we create better UI to solve for this?
I saw a sitcom a few years ago where a girl admonished her friend (an oblivious boy) for liking really old Instagram posts of a girl he was interested in. She said that deep-liking old photos was an obvious and overt sign of flirting.
If this is the case then there’s obviously a social standard of sorts for this, so why not hold your tongue in the meanwhile, and come up with something more thought out to send your digital love to someone instead of providing a (knee-)jerk reaction?
Of course now I can’t help but think of the annotations I’ve been making in my copy of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things. Do you suppose that Lucretius knows I’m in love?
They are also embedded below:
For some fun context, it popped up when I pressed the “+” button to create a Twitter thread.
So apparently if you’re going to bother to write more than 280 characters you definitely need a newsletter…
There is a space for an open source thread viewer though. Perhaps something along the lines of what Dave Winer has been experimenting with? Though his also has functionality for posting to his website too.
It’s just too toxic on Twitter. The continued trolling was hurting our team, our hosts, and our business, so we decided, as a team, to pack up and move out. I don’t know about you, but I always found Twitter mildly disturbing. I won’t miss it (any more than I miss Facebook).
Corporate social platforms extract a heavy and often hidden price from teachers and students. Lack of privacy, encouraging abuse, context collapse, and surveillance capitalism are a few of the harms we face. They also expose us to a wider variety of publics than we would choose in which to practice and share our learning.
We must take back ownership and control of our content and interactions online (Çelik 2019). This hands-on workshop will help those with domains of their own expand them into healthier and safer communication tools.
This session will be code-free. It’s presented at the level of a person who is able to log into their site, write a post, and publish it.
We’ll outline and install WordPress* plugins (IndieWeb 2021) to allow participants to make the open web their learning network. Participants can use their extended domains in classrooms, with personal and professional learning networks, or in their daily lives. We encourage more technical participants to partner with others for help. Community-based support is available following the conference.
When we’re done, participants should be able to:
– subscribe to each others’ websites;
– read subscriptions in a social reader (Parecki 2018);
– reply to posts by publishing on their domains using open standards (Parecki 2017a);
– send notifications to each other (Aldrich 2018) using open standards (Parecki 2017b).
The session will end with questions and discussion. We’ll focus on how to use our domains in ethical ways that enable an atmosphere of care. We want to ensure this system and its use don’t re-create the toxicity of the platforms it replaces.
Participants will leave with resources for how they might extend their independent network. Our domains can also interact with other social media using these new tools.
* This session will focus on WordPress as an example platform. We’ll provide resources for people using other content management systems. Everyone should be able to follow along, ask questions, and take part, either in real time or with follow up after-the-fact.
To the extent possible, the materials, resources, and video generated will be shared on the author’s domain with a CC0 license. Syndicated copies will be available on the IndieWeb.org community wiki and the Internet Archive.
Aldrich, C. (2018) “Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet.” A List Apart. https://alistapart.com/article/webmentions-enabling-better-communication-on-the-internet/.
Çelik, T. (2019) Take Back Your Web. Beyond Tellerrand 2019. https://vimeo.com/336343886.
IndieWeb. (2021) “Getting Started on WordPress – IndieWeb.” Wiki. [online] Accessed February 9, 2021. https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started_on_WordPress.
Parecki, A. (2018) “An IndieWeb Reader: My New Home on the Internet.” [online] Aaron Parecki (blog). https://aaronparecki.com/2018/04/20/46/indieweb-reader-my-new-home-on-the-internet.
———. (2017a) “Micropub.” The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [online] https://www.w3.org/TR/micropub/.
———. (2017b) “Webmention.” The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). [online] https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/.
To the extent possible under law, Chris Aldrich has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to A Twitter of Our Own: A workshop proposal for the Domains Track of OERxDomains21 Conference in April 2021. This work is published from: United States.
I'm building a little thing to turn Tweets into an SVG.
— Terence Eden (@edent) February 6, 2021
Here's the first result. What do you think?
It isn't intended to *completely* replicate the Twitter experience - but to be a lightweight way to embed content.
Thoughts? pic.twitter.com/1tCv3gvDRE
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