I guess that makes what BigTom said about blogs make sense, as I was wondering how mass blogging could have replaced a unified information site connected to an international group of those sites. I appear to have become some sort of old, dithering grandad. Perhaps Indymedia wasn't as great as I thought, as if it wasn't broke, surely it wouldn't have been fixed, right?
Indymedia doesn't, probably never, had the reach or functionality of FB/Twitter + Blog. When it started (or at least when I first found it, I want to say around 99?) it was more or less the only place that you could self-publish without having techie knowledge and it was connected deeply with the anti-globalisation movement which gave you the audience. Now the audience is elsewhere and the younger activists have grown up using fb/tw and it's their natural social home on the internet. Old fuddy duddy's like us still use forums and the like because that's what we first started using to socialise and organise using the internet.
Indymedia has had it's time imo, we'll never have the privacy we used to, if we ever did, but that's not just because of fb, it's because of security services generally. It was great though, a real step forward in it's time. Needed more $$$ than it would ever be able to have to keep up I guess. Possibly some people on here are involved, I know there was a big schism a couple of years back as a couple of local people I vaguely know are/were involved in the technical side of indymedia uk, but I can't remember any details.
Twitter is amazing for live events, it really comes into it's own as a platform for reporting events as they happen, short commentary like snippet + photo + hashtag. Then readers use the hashtag to find others tweeting from an event, and that way you get to see lots of different perspectives of what is happening, as it's happening, with far less filtering than if you are reading about it the next day in the newspaper. It doesn't ask you for any personal information (except maybe location) and you are allowed to use pseudonyms, they were also
not included in the PRISM NSA spying project so I think they are better than fb in terms of privacy. They are still selling you for advertising but I guess they feel they can get the metrics they need from who you follow and what you tweet about without wanting to find out your whole life story. It's not private though, not at all, and it's a system that is intended to be used to talk to people you don't know (fb is/was intended for you to talk to people you already know), so it's pretty different to fb and you can only stop people seeing what you are saying by blocking them or having a private account. Lots of people seem surprised when someone they don't know finds their tweet and starts talking to them.
