Author: Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
Replied to #FeedReaderFriday 2 by john john (John's World Wide Wall Display)
Back around 2005 I was learning to blog with my class and exploring blogging. I was on a train with Ewan Mcintosh going to a conference or training event. Ewan was using NetNewWire and showed me how he us...
I’ll second following Open Culture. Caught by the River looks fascinating, and from reading and appreciating the nature-related posts in your feed John, it’s an easy add for me. Thanks, both for sharing and for your own posts!
#FeedReaderFriday Wonder what I’m reading? Here’s my own following list:
https://boffosocko.com/about/following/

A central list I control with associated RSS feeds & OPML files makes it portable for use in various kinds of feed/social readers.

Listened to Howard Rheingold on Tools for Thought | Episode 94 • August 14, 2022 by Jorge Arango from The Informed Life
“We’re extremely powerful when it comes to making sense and finding connections, doing it visually instead of with a page.” Howard Rheingold is an eminent author, maker, and educator. His work has explored and defined key aspects of digital culture, including the use of computers as tools for mind augmentation, virtual communities, and social media literacy. In this conversation, we discuss computers as extensions for our minds, Douglas Engelbart’s unfinished revolution, basic literacies for interacting in information environments, and the resurgence of Tools for Thought.

Interesting and some useful base material here on literacies, but one can’t get very deep in 30 minutes with Rheingold on this topic. I would have rather this been 6 hours long and then multiple times that.
Replied to a post by Michelle Moore (@tmichellemoore@mastodon.social)Michelle Moore (@tmichellemoore@mastodon.social) (Mastodon)
Hello @chrisaldrich I ran across @jasontucker@simian.rodeo ’s post and joked about adding native ActivityPub support. But then remembered PESOS. And found this plugin - https://wordpress.org/plugins/dsgnwrks-twitter-importer/. I know your site does a lot, so do you import Twitter posts?
@tmichellemoore @jasontucker@simian.rodeo My Tweets are almost always syndicated via POSSE from my site to Twitter, but for those prior to circa 2015, I do have an archive if someone comes up with a simple tool to do that sort of direct import. I’d probably want to pick and choose which ones were public however. I haven’t used that particular Twitter importer, but have used Sternberg’s Instagram tool as Instagram doesn’t have an official API for crossposting.

If you really want native ActivityPub mirroring of your site on Mastodon, you might try @pfefferle’s ActivityPub plugin (along with his NodeInfo and Webfinger plugins). I still need to tinker with my own set up for better formatting, but you could follow my WordPress site @chrisaldrich@boffosocko.com

A while back I did set up a system that uses IFTTT to target my micropub endpoint for syndicating some content from silos that don’t have good/easy APIs or methods into my website. Generally I do this as private posts so I have the data and selectively post it as necessary. These days I primarily do this with my Hypothes.is annotations to my site, though only a tiny fraction of the 12,000+ is publicly available: https://boffosocko.com/kind/annotation/. Currently only about 1/3 of my 45,000+ posts are publicly viewable on my site.

Eventually someone might build Micropub as a Service so you can sign up and give it social silo accounts to have the service PESOS copies of your content to your website. 

#FeedReaderFriday People I love following and learning from on the web:

Kimberly Hirsh – https://kimberlyhirsh.com/ a fascinating reader, writer, educator, and fandom expert

Tom Critchlow – https://tomcritchlow.com/ – consultant, digital experimenter and bricoleur, networked writing and education

Aaron Davis – https://collect.readwriterespond.com/ – educator, edtech innovation and implementation 

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. 

Replied to Finding a new home for the WordPress community by Mike McAlisterMike McAlister (Ollie)
The recent turmoil at Twitter has a lot of WordPress community members looking for alternatives. What if we used WordPress to power our community?
This is a brilliant idea and is broadly what underpins the mission of the IndieWeb space for the past decade. The difference is that it isn’t platform specific and a large portion of it is already built and working! Of course it’s in different stages and forms of usability for various platforms, but most of the building blocks already exist for a broad variety of platforms, including (and especially for) WordPress. 

Because of the base level design, I can post on my site and syndicate content almost anywhere while often times getting replies and responses back from a number of platforms. Because it’s all built on open specs it means that people on WordPress can communicate directly with those on Drupal, Craft, Hugo, Kirby, Django, a variety of static site generators, Twitter, Mastodon, and almost any platform that chooses to support the broad standards. (Matt Mullenweg has already started down the road to having Tumblr support these building blocks.)

WordPress already has support for all of the major building blocks and works with a variety of social readers which make reading content and replying to it pretty simple and straightforward. Of course this doesn’t mean that there still isn’t work left to perfect it, smooth the corners, and lower the technical bars, and the costs for a wider diversity of people. For those that don’t want to deal with the hassle and maintenance, there are also several services that support most of the specs out of the box. Micro.blog in particular has a great user interface and does all the heavy lifting for $5/month. Without any cost, you can create an account and join that community using your own WordPress site today. 

If you’re into the idea, stop by the IndieWeb chat, ask questions, and join the party. I’ve got a collection of posts with a variety of resources, descriptions, how-tos, and videos if you need them: https://boffosocko.com/research/indieweb/

Here’s a short preview of what some of it looks like in practice: 

Aside: David Shanske, perhaps we ought to run one of our WordPress IndieWeb install fests one one of these coming weekends to help onboard people?