No. Is that it? Pretty much. If you have done even basic thinking about the issue, that ought to be the answer. Can you explain this in graphical form? Sort of – there’s a flow diagram here in the post.
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Twitter tipping points
Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo has today announced she is leaving Twitter/X (her announcement in Le Monde here, news story from Politico here). I think she rather overdoes the rhetoric, but that’s not the central point – she is an
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We’ve got a broken social web (or at least the bits of it I liked are broken) – and I don’t know what to do
I somehow stumbled across this 2016 piece by Giles Wilkes last week. The economic blogosphere, he writes, is like “eavesdropping on clever people arguing”. Those words are perfect, and if you can get past the paywall, the whole piece is
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Ursula von der Leyen on Bluesky – and how institutions need to think about verification on new social networks
NOTE: this post has been superseded by this one. However the post below has been left unedited – it is as it was on 11 October 2023! Yesterday a post popped up on my timeline on Twitter alternative Bluesky purporting
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From The Who to The Rolling Stones – or why I will not trust Bluesky just yet
Change, it had to come We knew it all along We were liberated from the fold, that’s all And the world looks just the same And history ain’t changed […] We don’t get fooled again So the classic lines by
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In a conversation? Or being talked about? Social or parasocial? We’re at cross purposes when thinking about Twitter alternatives
15 years ago The Common Craft Show did this little explainer about Twitter: What strikes me above all is how personal all of this is. The essence of this has been on my mind for the past few weeks, as
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To tweet, to skeet, to toot? Vocabulary for Twitter and its rivals
When I was growing up you didn’t vacuum clean the house, you hoovered it. More recently, to google something was synonymous with the internet search engine. And – like it or not – Twitter had its whole own vocabulary synonymous
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It is ease of use, and ease of search, that’s going to make or break a Twitter alternative. Not the ethics.
For years I have been fighting a losing battle with friends – trying to make them see that the choices of the tech they use should be similar to how they choose what food to buy, or how to travel
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From #UKriots on Twitter, to Bluesky and Mastodon – it’s only once we lose something that we are conscious of why it mattered
Back in the summer of 2011 I had a bit a tricky conundrum. I needed to get from Bow in East London to Camden in North London avoiding the riots that were happening at that time. And ideally I needed
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How Twitter’s role as pre-eminent social media in EU politics ends
When Twitter pulled out of the EU’s voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation, European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton of course took to Twitter to respond: https://x.com/ThierryBreton/status/1662194595755704321 Breton has a presence on open source, decentralised rival Mastodon –
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The demise of Twitter: don’t whine, organise!
Out of the window of the train just north of Brussels you can see the poster pictured here – Niet panikeren, organiseren it says. Don’t panic, organise in English. The past few days a slightly alternative slogan has been on my mind. Don’t whine,
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German coalition squabbles reach Brussels – but it’s Scholz who’s deficient here, not really the Greens or the FDP
Within a couple of days of each other The Economist and the FT have written pieces about how tensions in the governing coalition in Berlin are having an impact on EU policymaking. The central topic is Germany’s decision to oppose
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