@kfitz i really don’t understand the whole dh-to-jack thing either
Open Matters
When I set out to write my last post I had a different thought in mind than where I ended up. I'm still thinking about questions of ownership, and in particular want to return to the leap John Maxwell pointed out between "academy owned" and "serving the public good," because there's quite a lot of terrain to consider.
But this morning I want to back up to where my thinking originally began, which is social networking after Twitter.
If you're reading this, you likely already know that my colleagues and I over at Humanities Commons launched a Hometown-flavored Mastodon instance at hcommons.social a little less than a year ago. We started this process once it became clear that Twitter was going to have new ownership, and very likely a form of management that we weren't going to like, and that it was time to get out.
Lots of folks joined us in that exodus, but many haven't stuck around Mastodon, finding it too complex, too scoldy, too unwelcoming, and no doubt other things besides. We've been working on trying to make it friendlier, and trying to make clear the benefits of having your social media presence on a platform that you have some real voice in -- on which you can reach out to your admins and say, "dude, this is a problem," and actually get listened to.
Nevertheless, a bunch of folks have moved on. And that's fine! People should be where they like! But I've been a tiny bit broken-hearted by the apparent re-settling of DH Twitter, a community that really mattered to me once upon a time, on Bluesky. And I've been trying to figure out why, and whether there's anything to be done about it.
One thing that might be done about it would be to say "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," and use the platform folks have settled on. But as I told Roxanne Shirazi a couple of weeks back, every so often I have cause to remember how miserable I was on Jack Dorsey's Twitter, and it steels my resolve not to be part of Jack Dorsey's anything else ever again. Which is to say that we needed a better alternative long before last year's change of management, and I'm determined to keep working on my small part in building it.
That's where the "ownership matters" thing got started. But this morning someone in my timeline linked to Cory Doctorow's thoughts from August on, as he puts it, the "difference between federatable and federated." The new corporate-managed Twitter replacements are claiming the capacity to federate, but we have yet to see much evidence of what some eventual federation might look like, including whether that federation will be built on an open standard or whether it will take the more typical "embrace, extend, extinguish" route to building a distributed but still proprietary network.
Cory makes two key points that help me understand both my heartbreak in the face of the migration to Bluesky and my determination to continue supporting an open alternative.
On the former, he notes the time and energy and brilliance and creativity that so many of us poured into Twitter, only to have it come to the ignominious end that it seems to be nearing: "The only thing worse than having wasted all that time and energy would be to have wasted it — and learned nothing."
On the latter, he reminds us that this sad tale of walled gardens and corporate collapse is not restricted to the particular characters involved in Twitter's end: "I don’t care how good the administration of Bluesky or Threads is today — I care about what happens if it sours tomorrow."
The point is partly about ownership, or perhaps governance, and ensuring that we have a say in the future of the plots of ground we choose to develop. But it's also about ensuring that those gardens aren't walled, that they don't just have a gate that management may one day decide to unlock, but that they are open from the start, open to connect and cultivate in the ways that we as a community decide.
As Cory notes, Mastodon is far from perfect, and hcommons.social is far from perfect. But we're doing our best to ensure that we're running it in the open: we're discussing issues that affect our community with the community, and we're committed to making use of open standards across our projects.
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Mary Cappello, Lecture
Webmentions
12 Replies
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@electricarchaeo I would have expected a more principled commitment to exploring other options. I don't mean to be snotty when I say that, or at least not too snotty. I just think of that exploration as a key component of the work we do.
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@electricarchaeo @kfitz I'm also feeling that deep confusion with library / archive / museum folks.
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@ryanrandall @electricarchaeo I mean, I get that when it comes to social networking 99% of folks just want to use a platform rather than having to be involved in the building of it. And closed platforms can sure be user-friendly. But… it just makes me sad.
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@kfitz Tomorrow, I'm running a pre-conference workshop on open web technologies before SUNY's OER Summit.I want to keep making the argument that the open infrastructure matters without falling into the open education trope of purity tests. I feel like I'm walking a tightrope and this helped.
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@kfitz @ryanrandall @electricarchaeo I admit to cross-posting, but (borrowing Doctorow's term) it seems self-evident that it will soon be enshittified, and I'm not sure if folks ended up there out of 1) FOMO, 2) lack of consideration, 3) willful ignorance, or 4) resigned this-to-shall-pass-ism. I guess I'm a bit of 1 and 4, but really none feel justified, having learn what we've learned.
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@ed_beck It does feel like a tightrope! I don't want open infrastructure to turn into some kind of purity test -- I don't judge anyone for making the decisions they make -- but it is important to make sure we're as conscious as possible of the dangers of walled gardens.
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@tillgrallert @kfitz @electricarchaeo I am not all that surprised, because academia is an institution that rewards self-centeredness and self-promotion rather than community worksince that's what the academy values, that's what people who make a living in these institutions tend to do, because they're in situations of economic precarityand this means that a lot of academics crit colonialism while (fairly obliviously) re-enacting itthe whole deal is sad
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@kfitz Thanks so much for thinking so much--and for being here and committing to a "here" that isn't a bad place. I haven't switched over the hcommons, but I am 100% in support of it and really wish other academics and orgs would give it another go. They are what's missing & can make it less scoldy and other adjectives just by being here too.
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@VCP Thank you for this! I hope that we can gradually persuade more folks that there's a place here for them.
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@kfitz – Obviously agree with all of these points, and likewise a bit heart-broken (also on behalf of #Fedihum / @admin) that the DH community appears to be only partially getting the point of Mastodon and investing their time for community building here. – I have posted the pieces by @pluralistic and @kfitz over on Bluesky but no reaction yet other than a single lone like. Because I'm not active there, my reach is of course very limited so it doesn't mean much. fedihum
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@kfitz I'm currently maintaining 3 networks as a result. Not really compatible with getting work done, but hey
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Ed Beck
Sara
Exhaust_Fumes
24 Likes
25 Reposts
