👉 It’s Friday, and it is time for another quick experiment. For the next few days, I will cross-post from the Micro.blog to my Mastodon account and see how it goes. I’m unsure if I will add more confusion than anything else.

👉🏻 Day One, now available on the web. Woah! This is cool.

I’m a big fan of Day One. I use it 99% of time for documenting my numeric life (details here if you are curious). When Automattic bought them a while back, I was curious to see how it would influence its future. Now we get a much better idea. The web access maybe was an obvious “next step”, but they did a superb job of transposing most of the Day One experience on the web.

What could be the next step for Day One? Well, what about being able to blog from Day One? A dedicated “public” journal could be created and any entry saved into that journal would go online. Boom.

Now, if only I could spend more time writing personal thoughts in it.😒

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? 🧐

Thanks for Paying Attention

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 have a few possible explanations.

First, Twitter is full of bots. Twitter is a dumpster. I suspect many people or organizations are simply cross-posting stuff on Twitter without real human beings behind the content. I did exactly that myself via Buffer for a few years. Optimizing exposure by scheduling posts at the “right” time was the idea. A bot worked for me.

Second, and this is probably the most probable reason: algorithmic timeline. The Twitter engine is tuned to generate higher engagement. The more you engage, the higher the probability that your content will appear on people’s timelines. If you’re well-known, again, the higher the likelihood that you will make it to the timeline of others.

I’m not well-known. I didn’t engage that much with others. Both made me a near-nobody on Twitter. So I didn’t get exposure, hence the lack of engagement with my content.

Third, there is just too much noise on Twitter to get noticed. My content competes against the rest of the Twittosphere. My context was noise for others, hence the lack of feedback, comments, and interactions.

Here on Micro.blog? Night and day. I’m not a star, far from it. But I get a sense that some people are paying attention.

Thanks for that anyway. 🤗

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. 🤔