Your Twitter “Go Bag”

In all the great spy and heist movies and a number of gangster films, characters in the stories that may need to drop everything at a moments notice and disappear “in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner” often have a “go bag” typically filled with jewelry, bundles of cash, and a variety of passports and associated identification.

The Heat’s Around the Corner

Given the seismic shifts in the social media space these past weeks since Elon Musk took over at Twitter, it looks like some people will wish they had their proverbial Twitter go bags ready. 

After reports of an ultimatum and mass exodus tonight at Twitter Headquarters and Musk posting some not so funny remarks, some people are preparing for Twitter’s addition to the IndieWeb wiki’s Site Deaths page.

But after sharecropping content for them for up to 16 years and creating networks of friends on the platform, how can your retain as much value from the dying site as possible? What would you put in your go bag and how can you do it quickly? 

Obviously, doing a full data export would be a wise move, but recent reports are that it is taking three or more days for those to process and get sent out. (What if it doesn’t last that long?) Worse, it’s not always the sort of usable data you’d want to have when moving somewhere else. What can you do to save as much usable data as quickly as possible?

Below are some quick and dirty tools for stocking your go bag:

https://listfollowers.com/ will access the Twitter API to pull out your followers, followees, and mutuals (people you’re following who follow you back). You can save these as a .csv or .json files for use or import to other tools.

 https://opml.glitch.me/ will query Twitter and provide you with the web pages and feeds of your friends so that you can follow them in a feed reader. It also provides you with an .opml file which many feed readers can import so that you can automatically follow all your friends by other methods.

https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ is a tool for tracking where your friends have decamped within the Fediverse. It will allow you to extract the Fediverse handles (where available) of your Twitter followings or list members and import them into Mastodon to follow them all at once. If this is your exit strategy, be sure to add your own Mastodon address to your Twitter profile or bio to help others find you as you all orderly file to the exit while the building burns down behind you.

https://pruvisto.org/debirdify/ is another tool for moving some of your Twitter data over to Mastodon or other parts of the Fediverse.

https://bridge.birb.space/ is an instance for helping to bridge the move from Twitter to an ActivityPub-based site (like Mastodon).

https://twitodon.com/ is yet another tool to help you find your Twitter friends on Mastodon.

One Last Heist

Of course if things continue to devolve, but you have some extra time for one last go, consider carefully your exit strategy and why and what you hope to get out of the experience. 

Many have left to go to Mastodon. I’ve been collecting some rough notes under the tag “Twitter Migration” which may be helpful here. While Mastodon represents a step up in terms of choice, freedom and flexibility over Twitter, I know we can still do better for both user interface as well as a more humane social media experience.

My personal suggestion for a quick and dirty escape is to go IndieWeb and have and use your own domain name and website to become your personal home on the web. If you’ve got the technical chops, our friends at IndieWebCamp have some help and pointers waiting for you. If you’re stuck and have some means, Micro.blog is a great way to go IndieWeb and own all your content while still being able to interact with a large number of other IndieWeb sites as well as Twitter and Mastodon if you choose. Plans there are $5 a month and are an exceptional deal. 

Other options are to move to other blogging platforms like Tumblr, which has shown interest in adding IndieWeb building blocks, WordPress.com, and Blogger.  

Other options?

What export options have I missed? (Keep in mind that we all know there are lots of command line options that dovetail with APIs and require advanced knowledge of programming. We’re specifically looking for quick and dirty options that are immediately usable by the masses, preferably with directions or suggests as to what can be done with the outputs.) 

What other options are there for easy migration that still allow people to stay connected with their friends and family? Hopefully it’s obvious that suggestions for moving to other corporate social silos that practice surveillance capitalism where this viscous cycle will happen again within a decade are now moot. 

👓 I’m trying to modify @benbalter’s WordPress Jekyll Export plugin to extract serialzed data from post_meta values | Miklb Mindless Ramblings

Read a post by Michael BishopMichael Bishop (Miklb Mindless Ramblings)
Instead of rubber ducking, I’m writing it out here… I’m trying to modify @benbalter’s WordPress Jekyll Export plugin to extract serialzed data from post_meta values. It seems most (all?) of the IndieWeb WordPress plugins use serialized values so it’s necessary to migrate. Otherwise I wind ...

👓 Medium import for Micro.blog | Manton Reece

Read Medium import for Micro.blog by Manton ReeceManton Reece (manton.org)
Micro.blog can now import blog posts from Medium. You can request a .zip archive of your content from Medium.com, then go to Posts → Import on Micro.blog to upload the file. Because Medium no longer supports custom domain names, we don’t think it’s a good long-term solution for blogging. If yo...
This is some awesome news, particularly for all the people fleeing Medium. Now they can own their own data on their own domain a whole lot easier. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of the crowd joining Micro.blog as an option too.

👓 Moving photos from Flickr to WordPress | Chris Hardie

Read Moving photos from Flickr to WordPress by Chris Hardie (Chris Hardie)
If you're ready to move your own Flickr photo collection to WordPress and feel comfortable on the command line, you can go straight to the Flickr to WordPress tool I built and get started. Here's some backstory: I used to love Flickr as a place to store photos, and as a community for sharing and dis...
Though he could have gone a few additional miles here to create a full-on plugin, there’s a tremendous amount of awesome work here to help people download all of their Flickr content and put it into their own WordPress website to have and own it all on their own domain.

I hope that people will use his excellent instructions to test things out. Finding the small handful of potential bugs and troubleshooting them could help push this down the path to making it a more robust solution that could become a plugin.

And as a bonus for those who do use it, you might also consider taking a look at some of the IndieWeb related technology like Webmention and Brid.gy which can help you not only continue syndicating your photos into Flickr to interact there, but also get the comments on your content on Flickr to come back to your website as well. Then you can have the best of both worlds!

🔖 Google+ Exporter

Bookmarked Get Google+ Exporter desktop app (gplus-exporter.friendsplus.me)
Export your Google+ feeds to Wordpress, Blogger and JSON. Simply choose your OS.
I haven’t tried it yet, but this is one of the first Google+ exporters I’ve seen.

hat tip:

👓 Bookmark: Migrate your WordPress site to ClassicPress – ClassicPress | Brad Enslen

Read Bookmark: Migrate your WordPress site to ClassicPress – ClassicPress by Brad Brad (Brad Enslen)
Migrating your WordPress website to ClassicPress is easy and only takes a few minutes. Follow the simple steps below to get started: Bookmark: Migrate your WordPress site to ClassicPress – ClassicPress The folks at Classic Press have created an easy migration plugin that works with WordPress 5.0.?...

👓 Viewing and exporting Hypothesis annotations | Jon Udell | Hypothesis

Read Viewing and exporting Hypothesis annotations by Jon Udell (Hypothes.is Blog)

We’re delighted to see Roderic Page and Kris Shaffer putting the Hypothesis API to work. For us, the API isn’t just a great way to integrate Hypothesis with other systems. It’s also a way to try out ideas that inform the development of Hypothesis.

Today I’ll share two of those ideas. One is a faceted viewer that displays sets of annotations by user, group, and tag. The other exports annotations to several formats. If you’re a Hypothesis user, you may find these helpful until proper implementations are built into the product (faceted viewer: soon, export: later). And your feedback will help us design and build those features. If you’re a developer, you can use these as examples to learn to form API queries, authenticate for access to private and group annotations, parse JSON responses, and navigate threaded conversations.

👓 Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter unite to simplify data transfers | Engadget

Read Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter unite to simplify data transfers (Engadget)
The open-source Data Transfer Project should make it easier to switch services.

👓 Instagram import in Micro.blog | Manton Reece

Read Instagram import in Micro.blog by Manton Reece (manton.org)
Micro.blog for Mac version 1.3 is now available. It features a brand new import feature for uploading an archive of Instagram photos to your blog.
This is an awesome development. I do wish it wasn’t so MacOS-centric, but hopefully its one of many export/import tools that shows up to improve peoples’ ownership and portability of their data.

🎧 Episode 3: Freedom from Facebook | Clevercast

Listened to Episode 3: Freedom from Facebook by Jonathan LaCourJonathan LaCour from cleverca.st

This time on clevercast, I discuss my departure from Facebook, including an overview of how I liberated my data from the social giant, and moved it to my own website.

Here are some of the tools that I mention in today’s episode:

Also check out my On This Day page and my Subscribe page, which includes my daily email syndication of my website activity.

There’s a lot going on here and a lot to unpack for such a short episode. This presents an outline at best of what I’m sure was 10 or more hours of work. One day soon, I hope, we’ll have some better automated tools for exporting data from Facebook and doing something actually useful with it.

Getting data out of Medium

Read Getting data out of Medium by Kris Shaffer (pushpullfork.com)

Controlling my data is important to me. It’s also important that my students (and the faculty that I support) have the ability to control their own data, as well. That doesn’t mean that everything needs to live on a Domain of One’s Own. But it does mean that I want my data to be as flexible as possible, and as easy to move around as possible.

It’s really easy to download an archive of your Medium posts. Like your Twitter archive, you can just unzip the archive and upload it to your domain, and you’ve got it up and running.

However, if you want to incorporate those posts into a different platform — like WordPress, Jekyll, Known, etc. — it is more of a challenge.

I wrote my posts on the Medium API directly in Medium. Partly as an experiment, and partly because I love the Medium post editor. (It’s why I incorporated a Medium editor clone into Peasy.) But after writing three posts —  complete with feature images, inline images, and code blocks — in Medium, I decided to import them into my Jekyll/GitHub Pages site. That’s turned out to be a challenge. Not an insurmountable one, but one that I’d rather avoid going through.

I downloaded my Medium archive, used Pandoc to convert the posts from HTML to MarkDown, and then copied and pasted the MarkDown into new posts on my Jekyll site. There was more post-processing than I anticipated, or would like. And it doesn’t look as easy to automate the cleanup as I would like.

Even more frustrating was my discovery a couple weeks ago that the Medium API supports posting to Medium, but not retrieving posts from Medium. It is easy to write code that cross-posts from another platform to Medium, but Medium makes it more difficult to go the other way.

Why?

My guess is that their focus is on content. They want to be the place where we go to find ALL THE CONTENT. So they make it really easy to get content in. Harder to get content out. And by making a beautiful, easy-to-use editor, the temptation is strong to just use Medium from the start.

If we just want to write, get our writings read, and have a permanent record of what we wrote. Medium can be great. But if we want to write content that we keep coming back to, content that keeps evolving, content that’s part of a long-term project … and if we don’t want that long-term project to be locked into a single platform … then Medium may be a problem.

I say as I write this post on Medium.

Because I just can’t resist this editor.

Time to go add some code to Peasy so I can get it ready for prime-time sooner.

Featured image by paul bica (CC BY).

A prescient article written last fall before the news that Medium was downsizing significantly this week.

Owning my old Delicious Bookmarks… Sadly not today.

I thought I’d take a few minutes to go back and “own” the bookmarks I had put into Delicious since I joined on July 5, 2009, so I could have them on my own website. Sadly I ran into the following message:

We’re sorry, but due to heavy load on our database we are no longer able to offer an export function. Our engineers are working on this and we will restore it as soon as possible.

Hopefully they get things working properly so I can export them one of these days without resorting to more arcane methods to get the data back.