Own your personal platform

If there is one, loud, lesson from the train wreck that is currently happening in the social media space, it is this – Own your personal platform!

I am going to keep this article short on words and heavy on links and pointers for you to check out.

If you are an individual, entrepreneur or startup that is currently contributing long form content that is not resident on your own web property, but is resident on sites like Medium, LinkedIn etc., I would urge you to read some of the linked articles below for a different perspective.

Two things to keep in mind:

1. Anchor your presence, brand, and voice on a platform you own and control - which in today’s world means your own web domain
2. Be mindful and judicious in contributing your valuable content and insights to social platforms whose first priority is to monetize engagement, and not expand your reach

newRecently: Rise of the fediverse

It is fascinating for me to listen to the many refugees from the Bird Site that have arrived on Fediverse/Mastodon who do not seem to realize that the platform they found refuge in came about because of a group of folks who worked on the ActivityPub standard at W3C, and because of public sector funding to support a “technology commons” by the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet Intiative.

The Fediverse's foundation is a standard called [W3C] ActivityPub, which was designed by weirdos who wanted to make a durably open, interoperable substrate that could support nearly any application. This was something that large corporations were both uninterested in building and which they arrogantly dismissed as a pipe dream. This means that Activitypub is actually as good as its architects could make it, free from boobytraps laid by scheming monopolists.

The best-known Fediverse application is Mastodon ...

Cory Doctorow

For this and more, “What the fediverse (does/n’t) solve” by Cory Doctorow is a compelling read to understand much of the competition and market dynamics that play out within and between standards development organizations and vendor dominated foundations that seek to produce standards.

Needless to say, if you care about a competitive ecosystem built on openly developed standards, make a point of supporting the standards development organizations where work on the “Internet Commons” can take place.

cyberLinks: random and relevant

• Digital Sharecropping: The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Content Marketing Strategy - “It’s called digital sharecropping, and it means you’re building your business on someone else’s land. And it’s a recipe for heartbreak and failure.”

• Your words are wasted - “You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control - and sometimes ownership - of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail.”

• EU/EC NGI ActivityPub for Administrators Workshop and Webinars - Workshop and presentations about the interest of European Commission for decentralized online communication and how ActivityPub can bridge to other decentralizing communities (Linked Data, SOLID, etc.)

• Use your own domain for Mastodon discoverability - Use your own user @ domain for Mastodon discoverability with the WebFinger Protocol without hosting a server

• Notes on running a Mastodon server on AWS - “I’ve been pretty Mastodon-curious for a couple weeks now, and after spending some time tinkering with an account I set up back in 2018 on mastodon.social, I decided to explore setting up my own instance. These are my notes.”