I love Dave Winer’s vision of textcasting—write anywhere you want, using any tools, and read anywhere you want, using any tools.
Today, I take advantage of micro.blog’s great cross-posting tools and ActivityPub support, but that doesn’t get me everywhere I need to be. I have to cut-and-paste to post on Facebook, for example.
Here, blogger Tim Carmody responds to some of Dave’s ideas.
… Dave’s right: this worked for podcasts (the phrase “anywhere you get your podcasts!” is a great advertisement for interoperability breaking any single platform’s dominance), it worked for blogs, and it can work for this strange multimodal thing we’ve created called social media. It worked for the world wide web! And I will be ride or die for the open web until my life comes to an end.
One reason to seek out alternatives to silos like Facebook and X is because when we use those platforms, we’re volunteering our labor to further enrich billionaires. I need the money more than they do. And much as I like Tumblr, the same goes for them. I’m happy to do volunteer work, but not for the enrichment of people who already have far more money than me.