Micro.blog things I like:

• No ads
• No likes
• No brands
• No metrics
• No algorithms
• No influencers
• No follower count
• No suggested/sponsored posts
• Reverse chrono social timeline
• Bookshelves feature
• Simple, clean, UI
• Customizability
• Photos feature
• Friendly folks
• Blog hosting
• iPhone app

Better late than never. As a content creator, these are goals for 2023. More in my Digital Garden.

A few people here probably already know that I’m a big fan and power user of Craft, the document creation app. Over the years, I created and shared many documents online for different purposes. Today, I’m sharing an index of all the published documents. My goal is to showcase many of Craft’s capabilities. If you are curious, you can ask me questions about these. I’ll be more than happy to respond.

I don’t have many subscribers to my Ghost-hosted website. I always find it sad when someone unsubscribes the very same day I send out a new edition of my newsletter. If I had hundreds of thousands of subscribers, I wouldn’t notice.

What did I do wrong? Was the content not worth reading? These are the questions that come to my mind every time.

I shouldn’t pay attention to that. 😔

Sometimes I’m reminded that I wish I had picked out “Digital Citizen” instead of “Numeric Citizen” as my “nom de plume”. In English, Digital has a better significance than Numeric. Am I correct? 🧐

There’s this question that keeps popping up in my mind all the time since I’m being more active on Micro.blog. Why am I getting way more interactions with others on Micro.blog compared to Twitter? What am I doing differently? I write about the same subjects, albeit maybe more frequently. I think I … read more

So, I started the cleanup of numericcitizen.me. Each day, on WordPress.com, I look at my past posts and select the ones that won’t make the cut. Most of them are simply deleted. However, some posts get exported in markdown files before being deleted. Those exported posts, in turn, are imported in Craft for archival purposes. It’s a tedious process.

Before moving to Ghost, I want to bring the most valuable content. But, what is valuable content, actually? I realize that I have put a lot of time and effort into writing in the past several years. Some posts are short and very time or context-specific. Today, they no longer sport any value except for giving a glimpse of what was. Then what? Nothing. It’s probably more of a value to me than to my readers. I probably should be writing in a personal journal instead, right?

Anyhow, it’s time to move on. I know what I want numericcitizen.me to become. But, in its current form and content, it’s off. There is too much noise, I want it to be more focused. Deleted old, insignificant posts will help, but at the cost of time and losing some of my memories.

I was searching for something in one of my past posts here on Micro.blog, using the built-in search option. Searching is swift. Looking at the search results, It's funny to see all the different writing strategies I used over time. I count four of them that I name like this: the newbie, the teaser, the titled and the balanced.

The newbie strategy was to write and don't pay too much attention. It was in my early days here on Micro.blog. Then came the teaser strategy era. Taking advantage of Micro.blog cross-posting feature, all my posts had to be cross-posted on Twitter and made sure to systematically add hashtags to the post's title to get attention. People on Twitter using hashtags for search could potentially hit my posts. That was total nonsense. Then, the "titled strategy" came in where all my posts would get a title. Readers would then need to expand my post to read the content. Lastly, the current strategy, the best IMO, is to use the title for longer posts only. Otherwise, I leave the title field empty, hoping readers will hit the link to read the rest of the post.

Maybe I should have set the title for this one. 🤔

Interesting (and sadly valid point) from Om Malik:

Regardless of age, the big elephant in the room is that we are certified addicts to attention.

It doesn’t matter whether it is Twitter, Instagram, or Mastodon. Everyone is playing to an audience. The social Internet is a performance theater praying at the altar of attention. Journalists need attention to be relevant, and experts need to signal their expertise. And others want to be influencers. For now, Twitter, Instagram, and their ilk give the biggest bang for the blast. It is why those vocal and active about Mastodon are still posting away on Musk’s Twitter.

If we didn’t care for attention, we wouldn’t be doing anything at all. We wouldn’t broadcast.

We care. I certainly care that you care about my content, my words, and my thoughts.

Instead, we would socialize privately in communication with friends and peers.

Even in this social scenario, we are broadcasting and expecting that people are listening. This is how we are programmed. This is why social networks, and the web in general, are so addictive.

Source: Why internet silos win – On my Om

Did you know I’m writing a newsletter named “Friday Notes” on Ghost? It’s free and probably more personal than what I’m writing here. Here’s the link. I also publish a monthly newsletter called “Numeric Citizen Introspection”, but that one takes longer to produce, so It’s not exactly on a monthly basis. Here’s the link. Of course, if RSS is your thing, both are available too. Shameless plug /end.

Up until now, the Mastodon ecosystem felt like some sort of black magic to me. Today I spent a few minutes explaining to my wife what Mastodon is. As someone who already knows about Twitter and its subtleties, she got it pretty quickly. I couldn’t have done it a few weeks ago, but now, I could. I always thought that when you can explain something to someone, it is probably because you know enough about the subject. I think my explanation made sense to her, and for me! It was only then that the magic and the profound nature of the social and decentralized network became so clear to me. It was an enlightening moment, for sure. Better late than never. I instantly felt convinced that my awakening to the open web and Mastodon, a form of open web instantiation, would be a game-changer for me.

This is a fucking blog, and it’s wonderful. It’s perfect. It allows you to share your words, in your own voice, with no corporate fuckery to fuck it up for you.

Source: Start a Fucking Blog

I’m still fucking laughing!

I don’t know what’s wrong with me. When posting content on Micro.blog, sometimes I’ll do it directly from the Micro.blog website, sometimes from the “native” Micro.blog client on the Mac, sometimes using MarsEdit, sometimes using Ulysses. What the hell? Why can't I settle on one way of doing things as simple as posting on Micro.blog? The pattern seems to be that the longer the post is expected, the more sophisticated the tool I select. Sometimes I’ll start on the web, then copy and paste in MarsEdit (rarely on Ulysses).

This blog post was first started on the web, then copy & pasted in MarsEdit. 🤣🤦🏻‍♂️

Thought of the Saturday morning: I like the principle of logging my digital life activities, especially my actions leading to content publishing. The Logbook in Things 3 and Dayone and IFTTT greatly help here. [Rewind](https://www.rewind.ai) would be fantastic on the Mac, but it is way too expensive. 

PS. What you are seeing in the screenshot is my actual logbook in Things 3. 

I still can’t believe how different the interaction I get here, on Micro.blog, compared to what I used to (not) get on Twitter. It is night and day, literally. I’m blown away 🤯 by the quality of responses I got to some of my posts and the discussion that this sometimes triggers. I do get in touch with people here that I never thought was possible on Twitter, even thought we were following each other over there, thanks to Mastodon and Micro.blog “talking to each other.” I’m so appreciative of this digital community. 😃

Dear @manton, please consider adding share sheet support on MB client on iOS so we can easily create link posts. What should be included: source link, options for quoting text and a comment. Thanks. 👋🏻🙏🏻

I recently wondered if I should put a title to a Microblog post or not (see my post). I finally came up with an easy decision process.

Most of the time, my post won’t include a title. Much longer and feature posts will get a title. I don’t expect many of them here, though.

Can you imagine that at some point in the past, I included #hashtag in the title because MB would cross-post my content to Twitter, hoping to get traction from those on Twitter searching with #hashtag? It was a bad idea in retrospect.

This post had no title. 🤣

This is my current content creator workflow and tools. I recognize that it is more focused on the tools but not the flow between them could be better explained.

I wish I had prepared a year in review post. Not this year. Maybe next year.

As we get closer and closer to 2023, with announcements surrounding Mastodon ecosystem, the latest being the creation of an instance by the creators of Mammoth, a Mastodon client, my challenge will be to not succumb and get my own account. I want to focus in 2023, that’s why it is a challenge. That said, creating an instance to ease the adoption of Mastodon with a simple setup and sign up procedure is clever.