There is a myth. Cue the string section.
That there was once a place for all to gather, share, be festive, develop new connections, every course a hashtag, topple a few governments, people power.
Then came an evil billionaire who ruined it all, those who gathered were cast out, a diaspora.
No end.
Yes the Musky One was/is a horrible scourge, but all he did was hasten a decline. The birdhouse he bought was already uwinding in the mid 2010s with more algorithim cruft, more ads, more malfeasents. In my 2016 year end post, having been one of the world’s stupefied witness to the script of a reaility show election right out of the Black Mirror
My primary social space, Twitter, for many of my friends is now a place to avoid, or quit. People are huddling in other new spaces or just poising to exit.
“This is beginning to be the end of Twitter for me. Nothing we
say here matters and it is all a waste of time.— Intrepidteacher (@intrepidteacher) December 21, 2016
https://cogdogblog.com/2016/12/year-of-the-d-o-g/
It’s too simple, too convenient to scapegoat it all on that smelly tyrant, the reason for the dispersion is we dispersed. And it’s not a platform thing, it’s that thing in our hands.
Think of all the messaging places your attention goes into. It’s not a criticism, I am there too.
There’s no turning it back. I did make my best attempt at the OER24 conference, in my end of conference Gasta session. Heck I sported a nifty t-shirt. I was serious!
Get Federated Got Gasta-Ed
Still, it’s not really an answer, there are no technical solutions. I did see a that conference when people would put their contact slides up,”You can find me on X, Threads, Mastodon, Blusky, Purple Onion Peel” (okay I wen to far).
Frankly for me, I am not interested in being in all the spaces. One is enough. I can accept a good amount OMO.
Accept the distributed, disaggregated ness of it all. And really stop looking external for the place, and get back, get back, jojo, to that place you used to blog.
Of course, my advice is just for me, go seek the One Tent to Rule Them All. There never was a single place and there sure as heck will not be.
(swoon of the string section here)
Reprise / Coda / Forgotten StuffI left many things out that were in my brain at one point. One is that what we have here is a classic Pogo problem, a reference I guess few know, and I won’t ask ChadGPT to barf out flowery text to elucidate. I made this long ago for maybe a presentation or likely just to make bird noises in the bird place that once had another name:
With apologies– no thanks to Walt Kelly, most likely a violation, but I cling to my rught to do parody.But more, I left out a large bit of my own part in this, plus seeing a decline o almos evaporation of views and comments here on the old blog. I get a fraction of the former and a fraction of a fraction of the latter. It’s no surprise that people have taken their publishing to the newsletter format, where i gets shoved into inboxes.
Not that attention is my purpose or goal, but really, there is so much more stuff out there, that we are swimming in it. But heck, a small but of validation goes a long way, and I don’t see much by some heart click icon. I was not just bird thing, but the et al, that have pulled attention to other places (do people still talk about an “attention economy”?).
Also rare, yet treasured even more thes days, are comments in my flickr stream. I forget this has been noy only an outlet for my photographic habit, still noting that composing a photograph is an act of deletion of everything in the world outside the frame. Whereas spitting at a GenAI image is an act of dumping the soup of everything into a frame.
I digress.
And thus, in the next fill in the blank span of ime, I’m rethinking where I spend my attention budget.
Featured Image: My photo of a conference venue in Canberra, Australia, 2007. At the time, I was raving about the potential of a silly networking app named after birds. Lecture Hall flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)