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Bryan Alexander provides an overview and interesting analysis of his current social media presences and what they mean and have meant for him, his work and interaction. His summing up of the various platforms that used to be and currently are online places he frequents reminded me of how I talked about my online presences around 2007. What they did for me, and what I shared through these platforms. I called it the Long List of My Distributed Self.

It read:

Blog, what I think about Jaiku, what I am doing Twitter, what I say I am doing Plazes, where I am and where I was Dopplr, where I will be Flickr, what I see delicious, what I read Wakoopa, what software I use Slideshare, what I talk about Upcoming, where I will attend Last.fm, what I listen to and then there is my LinkedIn, my Facebook, my Xing, my Hyves, my NING, and my collaborative tools MindMeister, Thinkfold, and Googledocs.

That list these days is much shorter.

The utility of social software and web2.0 as we called it then, not social media, is that of leaving longer traces. Traces for others to stumble across, so that interaction can happen. As a way of ‘finding the others’, creating conversations and emergent networks of connections.

Bryan Alexander is the only blogger I never met in person and yet see as part of my inner circle of bloggers I’m in touch with through my feedreader. That interaction goes back 20 years. Talking about leaving longer traces.

All that in a context where the number of users on these platforms was smaller and, most importantly, well before the currently remaining of those platforms turned on them and started manipulating what everyone saw. Which ultimately moved them completely away of enabling longer traces, and made it harder to find the others. That affordance having been replaced by shoving those (and things) that are already highly visible in everyone’s face, without anyone seeking those out intentionally. And now adding the still denser fog of generated slop.

The change in those platforms, replacing lengthened human traces with adtech’s engagement optimising masquerading as such, has shortened that 2007 long list of my distributed self.

A range of services on that list shut down or were acquired and then subsumed, Jaiku, Plazes, Dopplr, delicious, Wakoopa, Hyves, NING, Thinkfold. Some of those in terms of functionality I still miss, especially delicious, Plazes and Dopplr. Others showed themselves less capable of / suited for the type of longer traces and finding of others I was interested in, such as Upcoming, Last.fm, Xing. Those that survived became toxic, Facebook, Twitter, Slideshare, Foursquare. My use of collaboration tools moved to less public environments although open source and self-hosted.

The current list of my distributed self is short, much shorter than in 2007.

• Blog, this place here, still the main element, and across all of these service past and present the most long lived one and the one under my own full control. It generates conversations, although less in the comment section. Regularly through people, also first time commentes, respond using email.
• Flickr, still in use, for 20 years now too, but it’s not much of a social space these days, more a convenient archive that I automatically add to from my phone. I have removed (almost) all embeddings of Flickr photos in this site and replaced them with a local copy of the image and a link to their location on Flickr, preempting any tracking unless one clicks the link. While I may still decide to do away with Flickr too at some point, currently its utility as a searchable and chronological archive of 43k of my photos is still high for me.
• Hypothesis, a new entrant in the list, is a very useful annotation tool, that functions somewhat like an alternative for delicious, the bookmarking tool of old. It has a social aspect, centered around the annotated text, and while ‘finding the others’ through it doesn’t happen often it happens often enough to be delightful.
• Mastodon, which does Twitter like it’s 2006, which I use from a single person instance, avoiding the scaling that led Twitter et al astray. I cut the ‘longer traces’ aspect short on Mastodon, deleting entries after a few days. Born out of practicality (Mastodon bloats the needed database volume at astonishing rates), it is also a recognition of those messages being ephemera, conversations in passing. Finding the others is still very possible through it, and messages I don’t want to treat as transient originate in my blog (which I then automatically cross post to my separate Mastodon profile), and resulting conversation comes back to my blog as well.
• LinkedIn, which I can barely tolerate these days, since its timeline degenerated substantially early on in the pandemic. Mostly still there because I completely ditched that timeline (by unfollowing all contacts) and am treating LinkedIn as a self-updating rolodex. It means that I don’t regard or experience it as a social software tool for interaction or finding the others any more.

I shift my behavior as a given system changes how it operates, Bryan writes. True. Those system changes have over time tended to making one’s online traces harder to stumble across (by reducing interoperability, closing off, and eroding the very building block of the web, the link), and making finding the others harder (even the strongly diminishing quality of web search itself is part of that). A likely answer to that is more distributed approaches, with your self at the core, and navigating widening circles of contacts found through other contacts. The triangulation for that still works but it does take more attention and effort. The trouble is that for most of us it’s not within our agency to do that technologically ourselves. A balancing between that and the avoiding the centralised silos is to be sought. Here be dragons, not unicorns.

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