Starting again, 20 years after my first microblog post

I tried Twitter and then gave up, unable to get my head around retweets and hashtags. I was a reporter for the Nine Network at the time and journalist @latikambourke.com insisted I try again.

I did log back in to Twitter in late 2008. I was immersed in a new medium where people could have a voice, share an opinion, and it lowered barriers between news makers and news consumers.

Nine News sent me to Canberra to report with the great Laurie Oakes. I was soaking up the experience of politics coverage while also growing a new community on Twitter. I was gripped by new and exciting concepts in Clay Shirky's book, Here Comes Everybody. He wrote about the falling costs of production and distribution in media, allowing groups to form and influence quickly.

I remember engaging with new peers in communication such as @julieposetti.bsky.social @grogsgamut.bsky.social and Flip Prior who shared a hope that these spaces would make civic debate better.

Wasn't that a world away? Over the years we learned the 'town square' that Twitter promised was not a free and public space but a treacherous amusement park with onerous terms and conditions.

Social and digital communication became my professional work. I'm no longer a reporter (you never really let go) yet I remain hopeful that online tools will help more people tell more stories. The experiment called the AT Protocol @atproto.com has caught my attention via @bsky.app of course. Here's a social network built on an open protocol.

And it feels new.

When I paused my Twitter account a few years ago, I tried Mastodon. The principles of a federated social network are hard to grasp for people without a technical understanding or, to be honest, an interest in them.

While Mastadon and its server rules and conversation intricacies proved to be a high barrier to entry for me, along came BlueSky. Its onboarding has been relatively seamless and features have continued to roll out.

I'm interested in trying to understand the AT Protocol which acts as the open source framework on which BlueSky is built. Because the social network isn't another Twitter.

@danabra.mov recently published an explainer that is well worth reading. Check it out here https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/

Dan's post is compelling, and for a non techy like me, it makes sense most of the way. He repeats, with a more detailed argument, the BlueSky pitch: A social media post should operate more like an email, in so far as it lives on a network where it can be shared and consumed but you are the owner of the post. You did a much better job than me, Dan.

So here I am, nearly 20 years later, learning again. Micro blogging is surfacing new content and voices again. I'm writing this piece on a document and blogger platform called @leaflet.pub built on the AT Protocol.

And I'm using my BlueSky account to do it. My TikTok alternative is called @skylight.social and, yep, the data remains associated with my one presence on the social web.

And best of all, I'm old school. I understand the hashtags.