Seeing google docs pop everywhere, used both as a writing and publication tools, makes me feel we have completely failed at designing open, usable, accessible web-writing and writing-on-the-web tools. More than how it felt back when I was working on digital publishing circa 2012.

A big issue back then was implementing standards - epub is still as much, if not more, of a mess now than it was then.

The development of graphics and video tools since then has been pretty impressive, but I'm not sure we've developed anything comparable to what flash enabled - direct interactions with images and videos.

I had high hopes for block-based writing interfaces back then (<3 @twinethreads), but none of the current, largely used, implementations are satisfying. That includes Medium, Wordpress Gutenberg editor, Behance...

It's still incredibly difficult to this day for a novice to deploy and custome a proper cms. I like Perch and Grav a lot, but they're not as easy to collaborate on. Surely there should be more tools enabling to write and publish specifically structured text and data.

I've been closely following notebooks initiatives, like @ProjectJupyter, but again barriers to entry are * high *

Beyond using google docs as both writing tool and reading interface, GDrive has been used as de facto CMS for lots of other cool projects ( @OKFNLabs timemapper, @line_graphics) - and I can't say I don't understand why.

There's lots of great open source projects out there - starting with @paged_js ( @julieblancfr has a great timeline here > http://recherche.julie-blanc.fr/timeline-publishing/), but nothing that fundamentally changes what I'm saying above.

I recognise the irony of writing this on Twitter, yet another close, proprietary platform, implementing a rigid but nice block-based writing logic, allowing the type of paragraph annotations and comments I've long hoped to see open and widely used (> @hypothes_is).

Now, I love @ScrivenerApp and @RoamResearch, but the price is a huge barrier to entry for bottom-up writing collaboration.

I've used everything from shared pinterest boards to @AREdotNA to @WordPress to NetlifyCMS to Webflow to markdown based tools to write and publish with others, and I still come back to google documents after a while, and this is honestly terrifying.

That's relying way too much on a single set of tools, which is NOT accessible, and I know from experience it's hard to get away from it, even using open source alternatives like @framasoft. I've tried

I'll keep trying but the truth is, someone always goes "why not switch to google docs?", and everybody follows. And that's not even getting into the matter of the difficulties many, many people experience using these tools.

Again, from experience, it's virtually impossible to get most of my colleagues to use collaborative documents consistently - thinking about the structure of the writing at the same time as writing. I've tried @NotionHQ 's templates, but that's not been a success.

Hell I've even tried using @zotero libraries as a collaborative writing tool.

Anyhow - this was the lament of the open-source believer using way too many google docs, brought to you by another day of long distance collaborative writing. #AcademicChatter

Returning to this thread to say that if you want to write and publish with your students of all ages, give do-doc by @latelier_cherch a try - it's a great project. Also someone is replying from a private account, so I can't see the comments

Addendum 2: google documents have to be looked at considering the sheer size of Google and Alphabet, well phrased by @shannonmattern in a different context that also has a lot to do with controlling our means of writing https://placesjournal.org/article/post-it-note-city/