Dave's List Vol 3 Issue 2 🧵

Untangling Threads

I’ve been banging on a bit recently about Twitter becoming more and more rubbish, and it’s been interesting how some people agree with me, but most kind of just don’t care. I suspect this is because Twitter is a weirdly personal bit of tech, and how people choose to use it tends to colour how they view it.

Here’s what I mean: I write, publish and share quite a lot of stuff. Not as much as many, but a lot more than most. But it isn’t my job to do so. Nobody pays me to do this. However, there’s a good argument that I wouldn’t get paid to do the stuff I do get paid to do if I didn’t do the writing, publishing and sharing (it might also be that I still would, but I don’t dare test the theory by stopping).

Since 2007, Twitter has been my most effective foghorn to get people to see, and sometimes engage with, my stuff. It isn’t any more. But nothing has really taken its place, which, if I am honest, leaves me feeling slightly anxious. Hence returning to some old school roots: regular daily blogging on my own website, rebooting this newsletter and building up my own community again.

The big news of last week was the launch of Threads, which sits on top of Instagram but basically is a kind of Twitter clone. I had a go, because I can’t help myself. Here’s my hot(ish) take:

• Technically it feels a lot more stable that Twitter. To be fair to Instagram/Facebook, they know how to scale a web service

• Piggy-backing on Instagram as well as the buzz meant lots of people signed up quickly

• It’s very usable (for those who don’t have accessibility requirements)

• The feed is a mix of people you follow and things the algorithm thinks you might like, which I didn’t like

• It’s only a phone app and doesn’t have a web interface, which doesn’t work for me. I’m old school, and desktop based!

In other words, Threads is not the Twitter replacement I was hoping it could be. Time will tell if I will add it to my list of places I copy and paste things into!

Here’s Jukesie’s take. He’s right about LinkedIn. John Gruber also nails it.

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This issue’s links

"Reviewing the Local Digital Declaration 5 years on: Update on the discovery project". On reflection, my honest view is that, 5 years in, councils that have signed the declaration really ought to be doing an awful lot more of the things they signed up to do. The declaration's content is fine. It just needs to be acted on.

Haringey Council have launched a new blog on my localgov.blog service, chatting about their website redevelopment project. Do check it out, and if your council wants a free blog, you know where to find me.

Jason Kitcat writes: “Perhaps we’ve been wrong to frame public service digital as a way to save money”. For a few years now, I have been advising councils not to seek savings through digital work, but to use digital to make the savings they were demanding from their services anyway tolerable for their service users and staff. This means being more creative about how to fund digital work, beyond simple invest to save capital spend.

I love this definition of ‘legacy’ from Coté: “Software you need to change, but are afraid to change”.

“10 years on – what’s changed for the 21st Century Public Servant?”

There’s now a thing called the “The Local Authority Data Explorer
for the Office for Local Government (Oflog)”. I had a quick squiz through some of the financial data, which shows how precarious a lot of councils are, money-wise.

This is infuriating: https://neal.fun/password-game/

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That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.

Until next time,

Dave ❤️