Saturday April 30, 2022; 11:00 AM EDT
People often ask if when I talk about having our own TWTRs that means Mastodon. It could, if that's your thing. But the center of this space will host all kinds of apps. Just like vehicles with wheels aren't all Chevies and Hondas. Some are buses, trucks, Teslas or eBikes. There will be a lot of variety in the middle. #- There was a time when all computers were basically the same. Big honkers in air conditioned rooms with raised floors. You had to have a degree to run one.#
- Then we got personal computers. Steve Jobs had a term for this. He called them "fractional horsepower" computers, to compare it to large mainframes.#
- I loved the idea of the Mac because it made the power of the mainframe usable by independent and free individuals. People who had ideas, and wanted to organize and share them. In the old centralized way of doing things it wasn't so easy to get a computer to do the kinds of things Macs did, because there was such a variety of software, and anyone could make software, ordinary people who were motivated. That's how the great stuff was made, by people. This was a form of freedom we don't enjoy so much these days because we all use big corporate mainframe-style software, like Twitter, Facebook etc. (I'm different, I've kept making software in a personal way, now for almost 50 years believe it or not.)#
- Back then freedom was a big part of what tech offered. And it worked. We wouldn't have Twitter today if it couldn't build on PCs. Twitter is made out of our freedom, captured and condensed into billions of dollars to make a few very rich people even richer. You and I how much do we get for our risk and creativity? Nothing. They've been really cheap in sharing the profits, and the credit, btw. #
- Tech goes in cycles, like everything else. Now that an oligarch owns Twitter, even though he knows how to tweet, and feels like a man of the people, he lives in a different world from you and I. He's cute but he owns us. He has freedom, don't believe for a minute that you do. Key point. This is how rich people trick us all the time. They get us to identify with them. That's why so many poor people vote Republican. This idea goes all the way back to slavery.#
- We have to think about what we really want to use -- we won't be able to use this TWTR forever. This was always true, but now a lot more people can see it.#
- The old owners of Twitter used their power to make Twitter be like they wanted it to be. If you were their friend you did better than if you weren't. This is a fact. That kept people from criticizing them. The same way the owners of the big media companies are immune from criticism, or even exposure. Who owns MSNBC. Think about it. I bet you don't know. (This dude.)#
- But the web doesn't work like that. So far no one owns the web, but Google is trying to. That's where we need to escape to. And while Mastodon is, I'm sure, a fine product, it will not be the only kind of fractional horsepower TWTR.#
- PS: My handle on CompuServe in the early 1980s was Mastodon. I've often wondered if this is a random coincidence or what?#
- PPS: My TWTR will of course be two-way RSS top-to-bottom.#