I hadn’t planned it this way, but apparently today is the day that the Elon-verse removed the legacy authentication blue check-marks from accounts not willing to pay the $8 a month ransom. I’m not sure how driving away journalists and influencers is supposed to help Twitter become the online-town-center, but then I’m clearly not a genius (even in the Apple sense). 

I’ve been doing social media since 2007, hence having the short Twitter handle, @jbb. Back before FaceBook it was a good way to get info from around the world and interact with like-minded individuals that I would have not otherwise met. It also went down all of the time and was a pretty small group of mostly nerds, such as myself. Back then I’d already been in the habit of having an instant-message client running all the time (anybody remember AIM?), so that if I needed to drop a message or if someone needed to message me, it was all just one click away. That’s how I used Twitter back in the day, as a virtual water-cooler or speed-dial to information. Later when living in Florida, I’d get news of earthquakes in my native Southern California long before it’d pop up in the news (IF it popped up in the news). Then FaceBook showed up and sucked up all of the interaction with no character-limit posts and multiple emoticons. So, it’s been a very long time since Twitter has been anything other than a largely ignored bulletin board that I occasionally walk by on my way to posting links to my blog posts. 

  • An Introduction to Mastodon with Newmark J-School Professor Jeff Jarvis
    An Introduction to Mastodon with Newmark J-School Professor Jeff Jarvis
  • An Introduction to Mastodon with Newmark J-School Professor Jeff Jarvis
    An Introduction to Mastodon with Newmark J-School Professor Jeff Jarvis
  • An Introduction to Mastodon with Newmark J-School Professor Jeff Jarvis
    An Introduction to Mastodon with Newmark J-School Professor Jeff Jarvis

All of this to say that I’m hopeful that switching to Mastodon will be a better experience and result in  actual online-community interaction and less culture-wars sniping. The Jeff Jarvis video is a very long instructional video tutorial about the ins and outs of the Mastodon protocol. I’ve heard that it’s still very nerdy and hard to use and maybe that’s the best thing of all. As an online content producer, the notion that I needed to pay a platform money so that they can “promote” my work is so counter to my journalism training and smelled too much like old school vanity publishing, The actual outcome from everyone I’ve heard who has used this pay-to-promote option has been poor. The platform gets richer, undermines actual journalism, overthrows democracies, and I remain as obscure as ever. Sadly, we’ve known for decades what’s needed to create thriving online communities.  Check out Harold Rheingold’s The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution for a non-let’s-get-rich-scam approach to creating and maintaining social networking and online communities.

On the anniversary of Elon’s 420 bid to buy Twitter, maybe we can be thankful that his impulsive joke might result in the demise of his platform in order to make room for something more beneficial to humanity and society. I’ll keep my Twitter handle for its potential museum status. But, I’ve taken the plunge and can now be found at jbb@newsie.social. I’m very interested in how I can post on my WordPress blog and have it show up in my social feed… Enjoy (and join me on Mastodon). 

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