Alternatives to Twitter
Feb. 6th, 2016 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
artsyhonkerThere's a flap going around Twitter at the moment about the possibility of "algorithmic", which is to say, non-chronological, timelines.
People are unhappy and upset about this because it takes away from them, the users, control over who they interact with. That has a pretty disruptive effect on the community; it's a bit like going to a pub where the landlord tries to guess which sentences people say that you will like, and somehow only lets you hear those.
It isn't an exaggeration to say this will change the way the community operates, and further atomise people. It will amplify echo chamber effects and it will make collective activism harder. It will make it harder to form new friendships online, and make the maintenance of existing friendships harder.
In some ways I think it's just a revenue grab. Twitter hasn't figured out an acceptable way of making money from its users (I think ad-supported networks are approaching the end of the road: look at news media), and this is a way to try to do more. And it's also, perhaps, a response to some of the other problems Twitter has: the increasingly low signal-to-noise ratio, the ease of trolling people, and so on.
I am sad, but not surprised, that this is being suggested. But I think it's also part of a wider trend with social networks online. They start small, too small to have any traction maybe, but you can have a good conversation and meet people you wouldn't otherwise meet; as they grow they become quite a bit more socially powerful. It feels as if everyone is on Twitter. It becomes possible to organise real-world events in real places using online networks, surprisingly quickly (see Flash Evensong if you don't believe me). But with that, there comes an unwieldiness. I can't possibly have meaningful personal interactions with all 1550-ish of the people I follow, or the 2500-ish who follow me: there isn't time in the day. When someone re-tweets something I see it not once or twice but several times as it turns up again and again and again from different directions -- but only if I read everything, which I can't, because there is so much of it. Yes, it's still a community, it's still possible to form new friendships, but it's also a lot harder to get anything done because even people who don't follow very many are inundated with RTs all the time. So to organise anything, to get yourself heard, you have to tweet it not once, not three times, but maybe ten or eleven times -- per day. I'm not sure I could organise Flash Evensong now. Even without explicit atomisation, the 'community' is much more atomised.
I've been thinking about this for a few years now, which is part of why I'm not really mourning Twitter much: I feel as if I've already done that. Twitter isn't community-run or community-led, so I don't think there's much we as users can do about it: even if we could stop the change to an algorithmic timeline, or whatever other fresh hell Twitter will come up with to try and get some money out of the people who use the service without paying a penny for it, we wouldn't be able to stop the deterioration of the signal:noise ratio.
And this is happening, not when everyone is on Twitter, but when a few people are. At my day job, I think there are two of us on my cluster of desks who use Twitter; at church out of about a hundred people, I know of about six or seven people who use Twitter, but only three of those post frequently. I don't expect to know the Twitter username of anyone living on my street but I am not going to kid myself that the majority of them are there. Twitter is both powerful enough that if your business or political party doesn't have a Twitter account it may as well not exist, and small enough that if you put something on Twitter you can't expect to reach all that many people.
So far, so theoretical. What are we supposed to do to help our social networks survive, to maintain viability (with some kind of convenience) for those relationships we treasure and continue having access to new relationships online?
There isn't, I'm afraid, an easy, convenient answer: no matter what you do, some people you'd desperately like to stay in touch with are probably not going to stay in touch, because using some other means of communication is more effort than they want to put into the friendship. I remember when this happened to me on a small scale: someone I had been conversing with a lot via Gmail Chat (remember that? Before the whole Google+ thing) stopped using it, and... it turns out that e-mail isn't a good way for that person and me to converse, and they don't have that much time for Twitter these days either. I still feel abandoned and forlorn about it, but the truth is, if the person really wanted to keep in touch with me at the level we were in touch, they would have taken the time to do it. And yes, that does hurt, even though I know there's no ill-will, just not enough hours in the day.
Losing a platform, either suddenly or gradually, will highlight a lot of that. It's going to hurt. There's a lot we can do to mitigate the effects, though, so that when (not if) Twitter (or some other network) becomes unusable, it feels more like "one of the local pubs is closing, that's sad" than "the only pub I could ever go to has become uninhabitable and I have no other way of contacting my friends".
Step 1: Have another point of contact. That might be here on Dreamwidth, it might be giving your e-mail address to people, it might be the Book of Face (yuck), it might be somewhere else. But have it, and make sure people you want to stay in touch with know about it.
Step 2: Seek out and maintain other networks. This always feels a bit like a betrayal, and it requires a change in habits, but maintaining some kind of a presence -- even a post once or twice a week -- is probably a good idea.
Step 3: Cultivate closer ties with a smaller group of people. There are people I try to see regularly offline if I can. There are people I e-mail regularly. I'm a lot choosier about who gets to see my locked Twitter account and my not-this-username Dreamwidth account than I am about the public, artsyhonker-associated accounts.
I think where a lot of people are falling down is at Step 2: if you've mostly only used Twitter and Twitter is easy to use from your phone and Facebook is terrible, where do you go?
Here are some suggestions:
GNUsocial: This is an open-source federation of servers ("instances" or "nodes") that are a lot like Twitter. There's a 140-character limit. The protocol they use is called Ostatus. I use it as @artsyhonker on the quitter.se server, the public timeline of which is a bit scary to see at the moment. All of the whack-a-mole problems with abuse and spambots and unwanted porn exist here, but one strength is that you can set it up so that it cross-posts to Twitter: if I post a 'queet' or notice or whatever it is, it also appears on my Twitter timeline. So there's a bit of continuity there, at least. I know of two Android clients that support it: &Status (or AndStatus) and Mustard. Neither of them are amazing, but there may well be others in existence.
The main weakness of GNUSocial, other than just not having the critical mass of Twitter, seems to be a lack of coherence of things like direct messages and private groups over instance/node borders. I don't use DMs a lot on Twitter so I'm not sure this is a huge problem. And there's other stuff that's different on different instances... apparently the Rainbow Dash instance has no character limit, but I don't know how that works with displaying things on, say, quitter.se. If you're looking to keep a close-knit group together it might make sense to all migrate to the same instance. If you're sure you'll keep in touch with one another in other ways anyway, you might want to each check out an instance and find out which one will work best for your needs.
Dreamwidth: You're reading this post on Dreamwidth. It's an online journal system that sort of forked off of Livejournal several years ago. As you can see, it doesn't have a 140-character limit! It does allow for the use of cut tags for longer posts, though. And you get a 'reading page' (see the public posts on mine here) which is... in reverse chronological order! Hurrah! Comments on entries are threaded nicely and don't turn up as entries/posts in their own right, so it's a little bit harder to join in unless you want to, but also easier to not get bogged down in conversations you don't really want to be part of. And -- get this -- you can decide on a post by post basis which posts are public, which are access locked to just people you've granted access to, and which are only visible to people on particular filters. You can decide whether to allow comments from anonymous users or just people with Dreamwidth accounts. You can also use it as an RSS reader, so if you're still kindof missing Google Reader from your life, this is a really good thing. It's community-led and community-funded: the revenue model is that you can have a paid account, which has more bells and whistles. But the free accounts are definitely very much enough to be getting on with.
The main weakness of Dreamwidth is the lack of a mobile client. The Android client 'EllJay' will post to Dreamwidth, but it's pretty limited. I understand thatmarnanel is working on an Android client with more functionality.
Streetbank: This isn't so much an online social network as an online way of meeting your geographical neighbours, a cross between Freecycle, skillsharing sites and a tool library. The idea is that you can loan people actual things, or given them away. You can tell it how far away you want to see requests from (I think the radius can be 1 to 4 miles) and your own address is kept private. I'm including it here because I think getting to know some neighbours can be a good thing.
Weaknesses/unknowns: I have no idea if there's a mobile app and I have no idea how to get it up to a critical mass in a local area; it almost needs deliberate, strategic adoption by a small group of people in an area to work, I think. As things stand, I don't get reminder e-mails often enough that it's a big part of my life, but if everyone within a one-mile radius of me posted three things per week (for lending or give-away) it would probably get spammy (there are 134 of us). I'm not sure what the revenue model is, which makes me a bit uneasy.
None of these are a replacement for Twitter; all of them are worth checking out. Other suggestions are welcome.
I'll see you around.
People are unhappy and upset about this because it takes away from them, the users, control over who they interact with. That has a pretty disruptive effect on the community; it's a bit like going to a pub where the landlord tries to guess which sentences people say that you will like, and somehow only lets you hear those.
It isn't an exaggeration to say this will change the way the community operates, and further atomise people. It will amplify echo chamber effects and it will make collective activism harder. It will make it harder to form new friendships online, and make the maintenance of existing friendships harder.
In some ways I think it's just a revenue grab. Twitter hasn't figured out an acceptable way of making money from its users (I think ad-supported networks are approaching the end of the road: look at news media), and this is a way to try to do more. And it's also, perhaps, a response to some of the other problems Twitter has: the increasingly low signal-to-noise ratio, the ease of trolling people, and so on.
I am sad, but not surprised, that this is being suggested. But I think it's also part of a wider trend with social networks online. They start small, too small to have any traction maybe, but you can have a good conversation and meet people you wouldn't otherwise meet; as they grow they become quite a bit more socially powerful. It feels as if everyone is on Twitter. It becomes possible to organise real-world events in real places using online networks, surprisingly quickly (see Flash Evensong if you don't believe me). But with that, there comes an unwieldiness. I can't possibly have meaningful personal interactions with all 1550-ish of the people I follow, or the 2500-ish who follow me: there isn't time in the day. When someone re-tweets something I see it not once or twice but several times as it turns up again and again and again from different directions -- but only if I read everything, which I can't, because there is so much of it. Yes, it's still a community, it's still possible to form new friendships, but it's also a lot harder to get anything done because even people who don't follow very many are inundated with RTs all the time. So to organise anything, to get yourself heard, you have to tweet it not once, not three times, but maybe ten or eleven times -- per day. I'm not sure I could organise Flash Evensong now. Even without explicit atomisation, the 'community' is much more atomised.
I've been thinking about this for a few years now, which is part of why I'm not really mourning Twitter much: I feel as if I've already done that. Twitter isn't community-run or community-led, so I don't think there's much we as users can do about it: even if we could stop the change to an algorithmic timeline, or whatever other fresh hell Twitter will come up with to try and get some money out of the people who use the service without paying a penny for it, we wouldn't be able to stop the deterioration of the signal:noise ratio.
And this is happening, not when everyone is on Twitter, but when a few people are. At my day job, I think there are two of us on my cluster of desks who use Twitter; at church out of about a hundred people, I know of about six or seven people who use Twitter, but only three of those post frequently. I don't expect to know the Twitter username of anyone living on my street but I am not going to kid myself that the majority of them are there. Twitter is both powerful enough that if your business or political party doesn't have a Twitter account it may as well not exist, and small enough that if you put something on Twitter you can't expect to reach all that many people.
So far, so theoretical. What are we supposed to do to help our social networks survive, to maintain viability (with some kind of convenience) for those relationships we treasure and continue having access to new relationships online?
There isn't, I'm afraid, an easy, convenient answer: no matter what you do, some people you'd desperately like to stay in touch with are probably not going to stay in touch, because using some other means of communication is more effort than they want to put into the friendship. I remember when this happened to me on a small scale: someone I had been conversing with a lot via Gmail Chat (remember that? Before the whole Google+ thing) stopped using it, and... it turns out that e-mail isn't a good way for that person and me to converse, and they don't have that much time for Twitter these days either. I still feel abandoned and forlorn about it, but the truth is, if the person really wanted to keep in touch with me at the level we were in touch, they would have taken the time to do it. And yes, that does hurt, even though I know there's no ill-will, just not enough hours in the day.
Losing a platform, either suddenly or gradually, will highlight a lot of that. It's going to hurt. There's a lot we can do to mitigate the effects, though, so that when (not if) Twitter (or some other network) becomes unusable, it feels more like "one of the local pubs is closing, that's sad" than "the only pub I could ever go to has become uninhabitable and I have no other way of contacting my friends".
Step 1: Have another point of contact. That might be here on Dreamwidth, it might be giving your e-mail address to people, it might be the Book of Face (yuck), it might be somewhere else. But have it, and make sure people you want to stay in touch with know about it.
Step 2: Seek out and maintain other networks. This always feels a bit like a betrayal, and it requires a change in habits, but maintaining some kind of a presence -- even a post once or twice a week -- is probably a good idea.
Step 3: Cultivate closer ties with a smaller group of people. There are people I try to see regularly offline if I can. There are people I e-mail regularly. I'm a lot choosier about who gets to see my locked Twitter account and my not-this-username Dreamwidth account than I am about the public, artsyhonker-associated accounts.
I think where a lot of people are falling down is at Step 2: if you've mostly only used Twitter and Twitter is easy to use from your phone and Facebook is terrible, where do you go?
Here are some suggestions:
GNUsocial: This is an open-source federation of servers ("instances" or "nodes") that are a lot like Twitter. There's a 140-character limit. The protocol they use is called Ostatus. I use it as @artsyhonker on the quitter.se server, the public timeline of which is a bit scary to see at the moment. All of the whack-a-mole problems with abuse and spambots and unwanted porn exist here, but one strength is that you can set it up so that it cross-posts to Twitter: if I post a 'queet' or notice or whatever it is, it also appears on my Twitter timeline. So there's a bit of continuity there, at least. I know of two Android clients that support it: &Status (or AndStatus) and Mustard. Neither of them are amazing, but there may well be others in existence.
The main weakness of GNUSocial, other than just not having the critical mass of Twitter, seems to be a lack of coherence of things like direct messages and private groups over instance/node borders. I don't use DMs a lot on Twitter so I'm not sure this is a huge problem. And there's other stuff that's different on different instances... apparently the Rainbow Dash instance has no character limit, but I don't know how that works with displaying things on, say, quitter.se. If you're looking to keep a close-knit group together it might make sense to all migrate to the same instance. If you're sure you'll keep in touch with one another in other ways anyway, you might want to each check out an instance and find out which one will work best for your needs.
Dreamwidth: You're reading this post on Dreamwidth. It's an online journal system that sort of forked off of Livejournal several years ago. As you can see, it doesn't have a 140-character limit! It does allow for the use of cut tags for longer posts, though. And you get a 'reading page' (see the public posts on mine here) which is... in reverse chronological order! Hurrah! Comments on entries are threaded nicely and don't turn up as entries/posts in their own right, so it's a little bit harder to join in unless you want to, but also easier to not get bogged down in conversations you don't really want to be part of. And -- get this -- you can decide on a post by post basis which posts are public, which are access locked to just people you've granted access to, and which are only visible to people on particular filters. You can decide whether to allow comments from anonymous users or just people with Dreamwidth accounts. You can also use it as an RSS reader, so if you're still kindof missing Google Reader from your life, this is a really good thing. It's community-led and community-funded: the revenue model is that you can have a paid account, which has more bells and whistles. But the free accounts are definitely very much enough to be getting on with.
The main weakness of Dreamwidth is the lack of a mobile client. The Android client 'EllJay' will post to Dreamwidth, but it's pretty limited. I understand that
marnanel is working on an Android client with more functionality. Streetbank: This isn't so much an online social network as an online way of meeting your geographical neighbours, a cross between Freecycle, skillsharing sites and a tool library. The idea is that you can loan people actual things, or given them away. You can tell it how far away you want to see requests from (I think the radius can be 1 to 4 miles) and your own address is kept private. I'm including it here because I think getting to know some neighbours can be a good thing.
Weaknesses/unknowns: I have no idea if there's a mobile app and I have no idea how to get it up to a critical mass in a local area; it almost needs deliberate, strategic adoption by a small group of people in an area to work, I think. As things stand, I don't get reminder e-mails often enough that it's a big part of my life, but if everyone within a one-mile radius of me posted three things per week (for lending or give-away) it would probably get spammy (there are 134 of us). I'm not sure what the revenue model is, which makes me a bit uneasy.
None of these are a replacement for Twitter; all of them are worth checking out. Other suggestions are welcome.
I'll see you around.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-06 01:53 pm (UTC)I don't think people are saying 'help, I need a social network, any social network, to keep in touch with these specific people I am in a community with' - it's that Twitter does specific things that mean people use it a lot, and make connections with new people in certain ways, and there isn't currently a smooth way to do those things without Twitter.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-06 02:33 pm (UTC)Sure: I said none of my suggestions are a replacement for Twitter. I don't think there currently exists a viable replacement for Twitter; even if one existed it wouldn't have the necessary critical mass to have the effect that Twitter does. But the first two platforms I mentioned, at least, are community-led. That means there's a lot more chance of being able to do something about their problems, even if only in a small way, rather than being passively dependent on a commercial organisation that doesn't have to care about user experience because it knows it has a monopoly. Alternately we can continue to treat Twitter as the only game in town and it will continue to be the only game in town.
I'm not saying "do these things and it will be just as if Twitter were not falling apart." I'm not even saying it isn't sad that things are changing. I do believe in playing the hand we're dealt, though, so I'm suggesting that given the evidence so far, it might be a good idea to explore other options now rather than in another 3 months when it's that much harder to make contact. And yes, I did see a number of tweets from people specifically complaining about what the changes would mean for their community, personally. The only alternative platform I've seen anyone else talk about on my own timeline is Facebook, and that generally in a negative context.
I agree Dreamwidth is a massive pain for mobile use, though I find this more true for commenting than reading. I think it's a lot more likely to be usable in a year's time than Twitter is.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-06 03:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-07 01:44 pm (UTC)