A little while ago Elon Musk took over Twitter. If you were paying attention, you knew it was coming. Though I don’t doubt he did try to get out of it. His mouth got ahead of him and when he finally woke up, he realized maybe it wasn’t a good idea. But then he was going to be forced to do it or pay a big penalty. At this point I don’t have anything good to say about the person. However, the doom that it has spread is having some interesting side effects.
I am still, for now, on Twitter and I have seen the notices of the people that are leaving and where they are moving to. I have also setup an account where some are moving to and I’ll post a connection so you can follow me there. What I find as I read the posts on the alternate social site I’m participating in is a feeling of ‘the old internet’. The internet of two decades ago, maybe a little more. Yes, folks it’s been around long enough to use the word decades in conversation about it. I know stop a moment. Catch your breath.
“Back then”. Lots of things were more experimental. Not everything was all gloss and shiny and the big companies were the browser developers. Yes, I did buy books online to be delivered from both Amazon and Barnes & Nobel back then, but I didn’t do a lot of online shopping. It wasn’t the norm. We were still leery of putting our credit card numbers in online. Or at least I was.
But there was also the sense of the possibilities. I studied VR for my college degree. Yes, it was around even back then. And there was always this sense of the cool and the possible and what would come next. I think more of us wanted a Jarvis and a KITT than wanted the dystopian world of rampant capitalism and data mining that are Amazon and Google. And though Apple is one of the big names in the FAAMG group of companies, back then they were still counterculture. Google said, ‘don’t be evil’. We were all for it.
With the exodus of people from Twitter or at least the sudden interest in finding other options, it feels a little like the internet of old. When you found out about something from someone you were chatting with in a chat room or on a bulletin board. Or you came across something on a webpage that was about some niche something you happen to be into. There weren’t influencers out there telling you that if you want the shiniest hair to do this or if you want perfect abs do that. Yeah, they had ads and affiliate links but the pressure to monetize your onlineness wasn’t there. You could just be there and share the cool stuff you learned. Or find the cool stuff other people learned. And you could usually tell the fake/troll sites from the genuine ones because, well, they weren’t into making them look legit to fool everyone. They were there trying to look like they were sharing real secrets, and the sites looked like it.
All of this was brought to mind recently as I was scrolling through the posts on the new social site I’m starting to participate in and a conversation with a friend whose daughter wants to build a robot that she can program in python because she wants to learn python and doesn’t like block coding. Ok. She’s in fifth grade.
As I was trying to help my friend understand and navigate what she was looking for and might need for the various robot kits, and then explaining the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino to her and why one wasn’t the same as the other and that there are different models, I also realized this is much like having a computer or wanting to upgrade a computer two or three decades ago. You had to know more about what you had then in order to get the right parts.
Much like going online then, you kind of had to have an idea of where you wanted to go, what you wanted to do or see and sometimes finding it wasn’t easy. But we did have a plethora of search engines. Yeah, some were better than others and some more specialized. But you had choices. And their ads were along the side of the page, not boosted in the results.
I’m not a luddite and I’m not saying that was the best of times for the internet and I want to go back. I do think that the shakeup has been a good thing. I don’t know that that many of your average internet denizen will be searching out the alternative services because many of the people I’m seeing there are already proponents of open source and FOSS software, which in the world of capitalism is revolutionary and to some scandalous. But maybe. Maybe a few more of the average person will give an open source, option a try, and find a new way of participating in our ever expanding, encompassing, and devouring digital world.
So, while I am still on Twitter, I have never been very active there, I am also participating on Mastodon which is part of the Fediverse? Anyway, at the moment you can find me at: @susangasong@mastodon.social. I’ll add a link to the sidebar soon so you can use that. I think it will work. I guess I’ll find out. It’s new, and old again.