In my Blog Reboot post I talked about blogging being a fading pastime. Over at Irreal, JCS responded that his experience says otherwise and that his RSS feeds in fact experiencing a rebirth.

Both can be true. I've also seen an increase in what are essentially blogs - more people on Substack and the like - I regularly read Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's substack as well as others. On the other hand, there's clearly been a dropoff in CS Education related blogging and also less dialog on the blogs that are around.

Part of what led me to my blogging is dying side comment is something that I've been thinking about a lot recently which is our choice of platforms.

The most active CS Ed communities I'm aware of live on Facebook. I've always felt that Facebook was a problematic platform. It's a closed silo. I'm not talking about the fact that groups are controlled by their respective admins. The CS Ed groups, by and large seem to have reasonable ones. I'm talking about the Facebook platform. The groups are not discoverable from the outside and while searchable, only from within each individal group. If Meta decides to change policies, the group or groups might go away, all data is lost and all membership is lost.

Contrast that with what I use for my StuyCS family (or Mafia as some call it). That's just a mailing list. The entire email archive is stored online but can be downloaded at any time and even if the provider closes up shop, I've got all the email addresses and can restart elsewhere. Of course, a mailing list has it's own limitations but that's another discussion.

While I've been concerned about Facebook for a while, Zuck's most current actions makes me even more disturbed about using it. While I can't speak for the entire CS Ed community, certainly the subset on the Facebook platform seem pretty concerned with DEI, equity, and the like. Well, we know what Zuck did there. Then there's also the fact checking.

Maybe as a community we should walk the walk and not just talk the talk.

Personally I've been spending less time on Facebook in general. Other than the CS Ed and a couple of other communities I'm finding it less useful. It used to be great to keep in touch with a subset of former students. The ones that I might not be close enough with to have an ongoing connection but still enough to care to see updates and send a hello now and the. Well, more and more, those people are opting off the platform, or at least the algorihtm isn't sharing there stuff as much and just giving me algorithm generated garbage.

Of course, one needs alternatives. It would be great to see a CS Ed blogging rennaisance but that's dependent on both creaters to create and readers to comment.

CSTA has forums but their platform is slow and clunky and I think it might only be for CSTA+ members. If that's true, I don't like the exclusivity. Reddit's a much better platform technically but is also its own silo.

Oh for the days of usenet news. a set of cs.education.* newsgroups would be just perfect.

SIGCSE has some mailing lists and those are easy to set up but I just don't think another mailing list would gain traction.

To be consistent I want to point out that I'm not just down on Facebook. I'm also looking to de-google. Their capitulating on The Gulf of America so quickly might have been my last straw with them.

I'm heading to Savannah next week for a little vacation but when I get back I'll probably switch over to Fastmail.

Then for me there's also GitHub. I've already moved most of my git based work to GitLab but this blog still lives at github.io. When I get back from down south, I'll also probably move that to another domain.

Of course everyone has to keep their own concience but I do really think that as a community of educators, particularly one that claims that equity and diversity is important, we should be thinking long and hard about the platforms we use and the products we support.