It’s a casual throwaway line. You can listen to us anywhere that you get your podcasts… It is a radical statement. It is a political statement. It is a technical architectural statement. Because what it represents is a system that was designed to let anybody run their own podcast, and to be able to consume it without regard to one company controlling it… I have a friend who is a journalist who moved his podcast from one publisher to another. The reason that was possible was a technological architecture that enabled that level of control, agency, autonomy, freedom. You can design systems that have those traits, and they look like the other stuff… On TikTok you have a For You page that has a completely opaque algorithm that shows you what it shows you. But nobody says ‘why am I listening to this podcast?’ They made a choice.

Anil Dash was talking to Nora Young on the 600th episode of Spark. And he managed to capture the essence of my frustration with the current online landscape for collaboration and personal learning.

Last year, Twitter self-destructed, and most of the people who were looking for anything more than memes and hate speech moved away to other things. I’ve been struggling with what the other thing is for the better part of a year now, and I still haven’t found it. It’s not Mastodon or Blue Sky or Threads. Does that leave LinkedIn? Several people have suggested Google Groups or Slack. But all of these are closed communities.

When I started using the Internet to connect with other people working in educational technology, I quickly realized that the people I learn from and the people who learn from me are two different groups of people. Sure, they overlap. But just because I find what you say online to be valuable, that doesn’t mean that my words have any meaning for you. I’ve never been offended when someone doesn’t follow me back on Twitter, and I’ve never cared whether people get upset if I don’t follow them back. There’s an abundance of content out there. Everyone has to be very picky about who they listen to. If you’re not adding value, I’m going to mute you. Or, at least, I did back when I had control over what I actually see on social media.

But in the current landscape, connections are synchronous. If I’m friends with you on Facebook, you’re also friends with me. We can both be members of the same Google group focused on using AI in education, but that means we’re opting in to the noise / chatter / awesomeness / misplaced enthusiasm of everyone in the group. And no one outside the group can benefit from those conversations.

Dash also highlights the issue with private companies controlling the ecosystems. They want everyone to stay on their platforms. For a long time, I connected my social media together. I’d write a blog post, and it would push out a tweet automatically. My Twitter feed was cross-posted to Facebook. At various times, I connected other tools in there too. But as the companies realized that eyeballs were following links to other places and taking their advertising revenue with them, those avenues for cross-pollination dried up. Linking to another social networking platform on Twitter these days is a sure-fire way to make sure that no one will ever see your tweet. The algorithms don’t look kindly on competition.

I may just be the grumpy old man here, but we’ve lost the soul of what the Internet was designed to me. Interoperability is what makes all of this possible. What would have happened if AOL had remained a closed system? What if you could only email other people who were on the AOL platform? Microsoft tried really hard to do this, too. I spent a lot of time dealing with “winmail.dat” problems, and their stance was that everyone should just use Outlook. And don’t get me started on the green / blue contacts thing in iMessage. That was Apple’s attempt to force everyone into their closed ecosystem (and it worked).

I once predicted that learning management systems were a stepping stone. I reasoned that schools would eventually stop forcing students to adapt to the teacher’s online ecosystem, and that they would be able to bring their learning into the tools and networks they were already using. That was the philosophy behind Schoology, which tried to look as much like a social network as possible. This was also how the original cMOOCs worked, where everyone could participate using the tools, resources, and technologies that were most comfortable for them. Content was aggregated through tags and RSS. It was messy and disorganized, but it was very good at giving each person the experience that worked best for them.

I’m still looking for the best way to curate my personal learning network. I’m fortunate to have a lot of connections with people I respect and trust, and I can find them when I want their perspectives. In the meantime, I’m also much more liberal about using the “mute”, “block”, “stop showing me stuff like this” features in the tools we have. That’s ultimately a losing battle, but it makes me feel better, and it might help a little. The part I’m most concerned about is missing out on the new voices. I have to find a way to engage with them.

Maybe RSS really is the way to go. Maybe microblogging will make a comeback. I wonder if there are any decent feed readers still around.