Indeed. And that message tends to get lost during those periods of transition. Especially given the current diversity in Mastodon instances.
Which reminds me of ActivityStreams, OStatus, etc. Sure, everyone’s talking about PeerTube, Diaspora+, Matrix, and Nextcloud. Does anyone remember the other platforms based on open protocols?
As a Yulblog member, I remember when Evan Prodromou was telling us about Laconica. If I get this right, Identi.ca (which now operates pump.io) was the basis of GNU Social.
Of course, Ward Cunningham and others have been working on federated services for quite a while. I’m just thing about the “microblogging” and social network services aspects.
For even more personal context… (Not that anybody should care. It’s just to tie things in.)
I briefly lived in ATX in 2007-8 (Keep Austin Weird!). And got a chance to participate in BarCamp Austin III, during SXSWi. This is where I really started using Twitter, which had made a big splash the previous year. I distinctly remember Kevin Marks giving a talk about the Open Graph. To this day, it’s a big part of what we’re missing, from commercial social networking services. For instance, LinkedIn doesn’t even allow you to export your graph, anymore. And with all the work we’ve been doing on Linked Open Data, these proprietary graphs remain a missing piece which could really bring us to another phase in the Semantic Web.
What does this have to do with OE as a movement? Quite a bit, actually. Yes, mapping the “usual suspects” we notice on multiple sites… and identifying blind spots in our networks (often based on language divides). It’s also about connecting people, knowledge, competencies, and resources.
All of which brings us back to Dougiamas’s work with OpenEd Tech Global. As we keep saying, it’s not about the tech. Yet working on the tech in the open, implementing the features which ensure learner agency, we can open up learning beyond no-cost versions of standard textbooks.