Jim CliffordReasons for historians to be concerned about Threads winning and killing Twitter: Twitter provides access for the Internet Archive and allowed my project full access to download up to 10 million Tweets a month related to COVID and Saskatchewan. Facebook and Instagram block the Internet Archive and don’t provide access to academics. Twitter owned by Musk is terrible and not currently providing access for new Academic projects, but Meta is also really bad for archiving.
Mastodon might have fewer total users and no algorithm (which seems like a big limitation), but today it is best place to talk with people about the future of history in the age of social media.
Daniel Brotherston@jburnford I mean...Twitter has clearly locked down their content (and any staff who worked to open things up are almost certainly fired)
So I actually don't think that's a reason to be concerned....they are equally bad...they might not have been equally bad in the past...but you know as well as anyone...the past is the past.
@danbrotherston I still have api access to Twitter. It looks like it is in a tail spin, so who know how long it will last, but I’m not ready to welcome Meta’s shit policy just because Twitter is getting worse.
@jburnford I wouldn't tweet that you still have access...probably just because Elon Musk is a moron and hasn't noticed or been reminded yet.
And I'm not saying I welcome meta...I'm saying it's no different. I mourn the loss of twitter, but it isn't meta that's killing it.
@danbrotherston totally agree
EcoEcclesia@jburnford I fear good social media falling into the hands of either existing billionaires, or those who social media make into billionaires, is a death knell for those social media. Ie. Twitter under Musk, or FB/Meta as it has become under Zuckerberg. In 2013 , I was hopeful and excited about the Facebook we had them. Now, that original vision and continued creativity has stopped in its tracks with regard to social media tech and ecosystem.
Tobias@jburnford That is very interesting.
I also thought about similar things, in particular regarding a lot of mastodon instances whose users *really* don't want their posts to be (a) searchable nor (b) archived.
It seems parts of the fediverse (that Threads more or less is/wants to be/... part of) consider it a kind-of semi-private party that is not to be looked at by strangers.
That sure seems like truly hampering historic studys.
@krono if people want private network discussions, that is valid. I just hope it isn’t all we end up with. I don’t want a handful of billionaires owning the archive of the public discussion and then deleting it when they lose interest or stop profiting.
Ian Littman@jburnford Assuming Threads starts speaking ActivityPub soon, that might be a decent stand-in. It's not the full firehose per se, but better than the API lockdown Twitter now has.