Category: Twitter

Going Indie on Social Media

Social media is like the weather: everyone likes to complain about it, but nobody does anything to change it. Of course, you can do something about it, and some have — namely, by deleting your social media accounts. But the vast majority of people, even those who see serious flaws with our social media landscape continue to use it, in many cases avidly.

As someone who is naturally social but who has found social media like Twitter increasingly unpleasant and lacking in what drew me to these services in the first place — the ability to meet new and interesting people, encounter and discuss new ideas and digital resources, and make a few bad puns on the side — deletion is not a great option, for a number of reasons.

Some of those reasons are undoubtedly selfish. Having a large number of followers on a social media platform is a kind of super power, as John Gruber has said. With over 18,000 followers, accreted over 10 years on Twitter, I can ask for help or advice and usually get a number of very useful responses, spread the word widely about new projects and initiatives, find new staffers for my organization, and highlight good, innovative work by others.

I will also admit to liking the feeling of ambient humanity online, although the experience of social media in the last two years has tempered that feeling.

So what to do? I’ve tried alternatives to Twitter before, such as App.net, a Twitter clone that launched in 2012. It went nowhere and shut down. I have considered Mastodon, a somewhat better thought-out Twitter replacement that is decentralized — you join an instance of the platform and can even host one yourself, and yet you can connect across these nodes in a very webby way.

Most of these Twitter replacements unfortunately have frictions that slow widespread adoption. It’s often hard to find people to follow, including your friends and colleagues. The technology can be janky, with posts not showing up as quickly as on Twitter. New services are largely populated in the early days by young white dudes (I am fully aware that I am not helping with this diversity problem, although I’m no longer so young). It’s unclear if they’ve truly solved the “I’d rather not be hounded by Nazis” problem, especially since they all have less than a million users, a tiny population in social media terms.

Nevertheless, I’ve continued to prospect for a post-Twitter life over the years, and spurred on by some friends, I think I’ve finally reached a solution that works for me.

My new social media setup is this:

  • Just as I have done with my personal email address, website, and blog, my social media presence will be tied to my own domain: dancohen.org. I’ve chosen social.dancohen.org because it has a nice ring to it and it doesn’t define my social media presence as text, images, or any other single item type. Indeed, it can be all of the above and in the long run replace multiple centralized social media services, including Twitter and Instagram.
  • Even though the root domain is dancohen.org, I can have someone else host my social media, but in an ownership structure I feel good about, and with the possibility of changing that host at any time in the future. I should be fully in charge of my social media, as I am with this blog. My new social domain, social.dancohen.org, thus acts as front end, but just as I’ve changed web hosts and email services over two decades, my addresses for those services have not and will never change. I’m not tied forever to a Gmail address or a service that bonds me to notmywebsite.com/dancohen.
  • I’ve chosen Micro.blog as my new hosted social media platform, because I like how Manton Reece and the early community of users is thoughtful and conservative about features, so as not to replicate the worst of Twitter, Instagram, etc. (See, e.g., this conversation about whether there should be “likes” on the service, and whether they should be public or private, temporary or permanent.) There are also good clients for Micro.blog, including from third-party developers. There are no ads. It has a good clean design that you can change if you like. And you can leave the service with all of your social media at any point for a new host.
  • Micro.blog, in turn, can connect with Twitter, so posts from social.dancohen.org will show up as posts on Twitter, so my followers there can still see what I’m tweeting…or…tooting, about.
  • Although I’ve focused on Twitter in this post, Micro.blog actually has terrific Instagram-like functionality, with none of the annoying algorithmic sorting of your feed and no ads, so I’m moving my photo posting there. (I left Facebook a long time ago, with few repercussions and zero regret.) Instagram does not allow cross-posting from Micro.blog.
  • My domain registrar (Hover) has a great, simple way to connect a subdomain to Micro.blog to create something like social.dancohen.org. This normally involves futzing with a DNS record (which has the geeky and off-putting moniker CNAME). I want my setup to be replicable, and no one should ever have to edit one’s DNS records to create a personal social media hub. Everyone should be able to do this with one click. Get on it, domain registrars.

Here’s my early sense of how this will work:

  • Starting last week, I began making my primary social media posts on social.dancohen.org rather than on Twitter.
  • For the vast majority of people who follow me, they will continue to see my posts on Twitter and interact with them there. Indeed, they probably haven’t even noticed the change unless they looked at my tweets’ metadata, which now includes “via micro.blog”.
  • When necessary, I will interact with replies on Twitter. One downside to my setup is that these Twitter replies do not ping back to social.dancohen.org. Or maybe that’s an upside. Time for me to consider how much humanity I really need to be ambient.

For those who would like to replicate what I’ve done, Micro.blog has good documentation on setting up a personal social media domain like social.dancohen.org, including for the majority of domain registrars who don’t have automated mechanisms, like Hover, for creating a proper DNS CNAME record. Kathleen Fitzpatrick has a more sophisticated setup using WordPress, where her posts of the type “micro” are ported to Micro.blog, and then over to Twitter. Chris Aldrich has a longer description about how to structure your WordPress site to be able to do what Kathleen did, separating brief social media posts from longer blog posts that remain on the root domain.

It feels good to have gone back to my blog and now to go indie on my social media as well. I hope my experience prods others to give it a try.

June 26, 2018 2 Comments

Back to the Blog

One of the most-read pieces I’ve written here remains my entreaty “Professors Start Your Blogs,” which is now 12 years old but might as well have been written in the Victorian age. It’s quaint. In 2006, many academics viewed blogs through the lens of LiveJournal and other teen-oriented, oversharing diary sites, and it seemed silly to put more serious words into that space. Of course, as I wrote that blog post encouraging blogging for more grown-up reasons, Facebook and Twitter were ramping up, and all of that teen expression would quickly move to social media.

Then the grown-ups went there, too. It was fun for a while. I met many people through Twitter who became and remain important collaborators and friends. But the salad days of “blog to reflect, tweet to connect” are gone. Long gone. Over the last year, especially, it has seemed much more like “blog to write, tweet to fight.” Moreover, the way that our writing and personal data has been used by social media companies has become more obviously problematic—not that it wasn’t problematic to begin with.

Which is why it’s once again a good time to blog, especially on one’s own domain. I’ve had this little domain of mine for 20 years, and have been writing on it for nearly 15 years. But like so many others, the pace of my blogging has slowed down considerably, from one post a week or more in 2005 to one post a month or less in 2017.

The reasons for this slowdown are many. If I am to cut myself some slack, I’ve taken on increasingly busy professional roles that have given me less time to write at length. I’ve always tried to write substantively on my blog, with posts often going over a thousand words. When I started blogging, I committed to that model of writing here—creating pieces that were more like short essays than informal quick takes.

Unfortunately this high bar made it more attractive to put quick thoughts on Twitter, and amassing a large following there over the last decade (this month marks my ten-year anniversary on Twitter) only made social media more attractive. My story is not uncommon; indeed, it is common, as my RSS reader’s weekly article count will attest.

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There has been a recent movement to “re-decentralize” the web, returning our activities to sites like this one. I am unsurprisingly sympathetic to this as an idealist, and this post is my commitment to renew that ideal. I plan to write more here from now on. However, I’m also a pragmatist, and I feel the re-decentralizers have underestimated what they are up against, which is partially about technology but mostly about human nature.

I’ve already mentioned the relative ease and short amount of time it takes to express oneself on centralized services. People are chronically stretched, and building and maintaining a site, and writing at greater length than one or two sentences seems like real work. When I started this site, I didn’t have two kids and two dogs and a rather busy administrative job. Overestimating the time regular people have to futz with technology was the downfall of desktop linux, and a key reason many people use Facebook as their main outlet for expression rather a personal site.

The technology for self-hosting has undoubtedly gotten much better. When I added a blog to dancohen.org, I wrote my own blogging software, which sounds impressive, but was just some hacked-together PHP and a MySQL database. This site now runs smoothly on WordPress, and there are many great services for hosting a WordPress site, like Reclaim Hosting. It’s much easier to set up and maintain these sites, and there are even decent mobile apps from which to post, roughly equivalent to what Twitter and Facebook provide. Platforms like WordPress also come with RSS built in, which is one of the critical, open standards that are at the heart of any successful version of the open web in an age of social media. Alas, at this point most people have invested a great deal in their online presence on closed services, and inertia holds them in place.

It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site. Facebook has a whole team of Ph.D.s in social psychology finding ways to increase that feeling of ambient humanity and thus increase your usage of their service.

When I left Facebook eight years ago, it showed me five photos of my friends, some with their newborn babies, and asked if I was really sure. It is unclear to me if the re-decentralizers are willing to be, or even should be, as ruthless as this. It’s easier to work on interoperable technology than social psychology, and yet it is on the latter battlefield that the war for the open web will likely be won or lost.

* * *

Meanwhile, thinking globally but acting locally is the little bit that we can personally do. Teaching young people how to set up sites and maintain their own identities is one good way to increase and reinforce the open web. And for those of us who are no longer young, writing more under our own banner may model a better way for those who are to come.

March 21, 2018 39 Comments

The Significance of the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress

It started with some techies casually joking around, and ended with the President of the United States being its most avid user. In between, it became the site of comedy and protest, several hundred million human users and countless bots, the occasional exchange of ideas and a constant stream of outrage.

All along, the Library of Congress was preserving it all. Billions of tweets, saved over 12 years, now rub shoulders with books, manuscripts, recordings, and film among the Library’s extensive holdings.

On December 31, however, this archiving will end. The day after Christmas, the Library announced that it would no longer save all tweets after that date, but instead will choose tweets to preserve “on a very selective basis,” for major events, elections, and political import. The rest of Twitter’s giant stream will flow by, untapped and ephemeral.

The Twitter archive may not be the record of our humanity that we wanted, but it’s the record we have. Due to Twitter’s original terms of service and the public availability of most tweets, which stand in contrast to many other social media platforms, such as Facebook and Snapchat, we are unlikely to preserve anything else like it from our digital age.

Undoubtedly many would consider that a good thing, and that the Twitter archive deserves the kind of mockery that flourishes on the platform itself. What can we possibly learn from the unchecked ramblings and ravings of so many, condensed to so few characters?

Yet it’s precisely this offhandedness and enforced brevity that makes the Twitter archive intriguing. Researchers have precious few sources for the plain-spoken language and everyday activities and thought of a large swath of society.

Most of what is archived is indeed done so on a very selective basis, assessed for historical significance at the time of preservation. Until the rise of digital documents and communications, the idea of “saving it all” seemed ridiculous, and even now it seems like a poor strategy given limited resources. Archives have always had to make tough choices about what to preserve and what to discard.

However, it is also true that we cannot always anticipate what future historians will want to see and read from our era. Much of what is now studied from the past are materials that somehow, fortunately, escaped the trash bin. Cookbooks give us a sense of what our ancestors ate and celebrated. Pamphlets and more recently zines document ideas and cultures outside the mainstream.

Historians have also used records in unanticipated ways. Researchers have come to realize that the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, transcriptions from London’s central criminal court, are the only record we have of the spoken words of many people who lived centuries ago but were not in the educated or elite classes. That we have them talking about the theft of a pig rather than the thought of Aristotle only gives us greater insight into the lived experience of their time.

The Twitter archive will have similar uses for researchers of the future, especially given its tremendous scale and the unique properties of the platform behind the short messages we see on it. Preserved with each tweet, but hidden from view, is additional information about tweeters and their followers. Using sophisticated computational methods, it is possible to visualize large-scale connections within the mass of users that will provide a good sense of our social interactions, communities, and divisions.

Since Twitter launched a year before the release of the iPhone, and flourished along with the smartphone, the archive is also a record of what happened when computers evolved from desktop to laptop to the much more personal embrace of our hands.

Since so many of us now worry about the impact of these devices and social media on our lives and mental health, this story and its lessons may ultimately be depressing. As we are all aware, of course, history and human expression are not always sweetness and light.

We should feel satisfied rather than dismissive that we will have a dozen years of our collective human expression to look back on, the amusing and the ugly, the trivial and, perhaps buried deep within the archive, the profound.

December 29, 2017 1 Comment