Now, more than ever, it’s critical to own your data. Really own it. Like, on your hard drive and hosted on your website.
Is taking control of your content less convenient? Yeah–of course. That’s how we got in this mess to begin with. It can be a downright pain in the ass. But it’s your pain in the ass. And that’s the point.
Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren’t immune to any of this—the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.
I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram.
This rhymes nicely with Mandy’s recent piece on POSSE:
Despite its challenges, POSSE is extremely empowering for those of us who wish to cultivate our own corners of the web outside of the walled gardens of the major tech platforms, without necessarily eschewing them entirely. I can maintain a presence on the platforms I enjoy and the connections I value with the people there, while still retaining primary control over the things that I write and freedom from those platforms’ limitations.
While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context. Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.
Mandy’s writing positively soars and sings in this beautiful piece!
Obviously I’m biased, but I very much agree with Sophie.
I like this framing:
If you’ve ever corrected a typo in an Open Source readme, or added alt-text to an image, or tidied up some broken references in Wikipedia - you’re doing Digital Litter Picking. You’re cleaning up after others. And I think that’s a marvellous way to spend a little time.
Craig and Jason are walking the walk here:
- Build your own damn platform.
- Treat social media like the tool it is.
- Build your technical skills.
This is a wonderful service! Pop your Mastodon handle into this form and you can see which of your followers have websites with RSS feeds you can subscribe to.
Posting in a space I control isn’t just about the principle anymore. It’s a kind of self-preservation. I want to preserve my attention and my autonomy. I accept that I’m addicted, and I would like to curb that addiction. We all only have so much time to spend; we only have one face to maintain ownership of. Independence is the most productive, least invasive way forward.
This looks like a handy RSS-to-Mastodon service.
If you care about the indie web growing, by all means write, by all means create, by all means curate. But most of all, just read. Or listen, or experience. Spend an afternoon clicking around, like everybody used to. The more people who do that, the more everything else will slot into place without even having to think much about it.
Anil says the glass is half full:
Across today’s internet, the stores that deliver all the apps on our phones are cracking open, the walls between social media platforms are coming down as the old networks fail, the headlong rush towards AI is making our search engines and work apps weirder (and often worse!). But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent. We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before.
In the past few years, there’s been an accelerating swing back toward decentralization. Users are fed up with the concentration of power, and the prevalence of privacy and free expression violations, and many users are fleeing to smaller, independently operated projects.
At this point, if you’re still on Twitter, it might be time to accept a hard fact about yourself: there’s not a single thing that its leadership could do that would push you off the site.
I try not be judgy, but if you’re still posting to Twitter, I’m definitely judging you.
Maybe you feel like you have a megaphone. That it’s hard to walk away from a big number, even if you know the place sucks and the people listening now are mostly desperate blue-tick assholes. That’s a choice you can make, I guess! But if you have a follower count in the thousands and have ever complained that rich people aren’t pulling their weight, or that elites acting in their self-interest is bad for society at large, you should probably take a long hard look in the mirror tonight.
I had around 150,000 followers on Twitter. I’ve left Twitter. So can you.
A good overview of syndicating from your own website to social network silos:
The platform era is ending. Rather than build new Twitters and Facebooks, we can create a stuff-posting system that works better for everybody.
References and contributors include Cory Doctorow, Manton Reece, Matt Mullenweg and, of course, Tantek.
We’re in a rare moment when a shift just may be possible; the previously intractable and permanent-seeming systems and platforms are showing that they can be changed and moved, and something new could actually grow.
The fix for the internet isn’t to shut down Facebook or log off or go outside and touch grass. The solution to the internet is more internet: more apps, more spaces to go, more money sloshing around to fund more good things in more variety, more people engaging thoughtfully in places they like. More utility, more voices, more joy.
I realized why I hadn’t yet added any rules to my
robots.txt: I have zero faith in it.
The last few times I’ve seen Phil, I’ve really enjoyed chatting to him about the joy of singing together with others. I’m glad he’s written it all down here. It reminds me of Brian Eno’s philosophy on group singing.
After nearly two decades of fighting for this vision of the internet, the people who believed in federation feel like they’re finally going to win. The change they imagine still requires a lot of user education — and a lot of work to make this stuff work for users. But the fundamental shift, from platforms to protocols, appears to have momentum in a way it never has before.