Bye Twitter

 Leaving Twitter for real this time. I tried last year but Mastodon was an epic fail with the first server crashing and me being unable to migrate data to launch a second instance. I'm willing to start over, but that was ridiculous. 

So, I spent the last year using it in small doses. And with the election outcome and X planning to use data in the site to train AI, I am really leaving. Just purged the Off Peak Productions account.

And am starting the purge process for cpd623. It's taken me two days so far to go through 700 of the accounts I followed to try to find them again. I've found a decent number but I'm sad. Not sure exactly how I'm going to delete 11.9K tweets, but I'll try to beat the 11/15 deadline. 

If you find this blog, you can find me most places as cpd623. I'd love to connect. 

Curating Twitter to "shut down"

Concerned about deleting my business Twitter account fully, so instead I'm parking it. I deleted all of my followers and stopped following everyone, and turned the account private. The I discovered that they created an "interests" section where they checked everything I ever tweeted about along with the current owner's name and his personal interests. I'm now unchecking all those boxes. In the process of deleting some old tweets I was reminded of all the ways I worked to start this business again in 2009. I took a class and started a website at http://offpeak DOT comxa DOT com/. It no longer exists, but I did one. I also brainstormed lots of ideas and wrote a lot of pitch letters. And 14 years later I continue to have a side hustle. Perseverance does pay off.

Saving cool stuff

Off Peak is leaving Twitter. There is so much spam on X now that it is not worth the time. And so many new followers I don't understand. 

Anyone remember Empire Avenue? I am starting to think somebody thought the gamification process was real. 

I learned the hard way with another job not to delete an account, but only to cleanse it and park it. That way no one can steal your handle.

As part of the curation process, I'm saving some cool things and wondering if I need a link tree :)

https://linktr.ee/efa_editors

https://linktr.ee/bels_editors

https://linktr.ee/Thewriterscoop

https://www.webemployed.com/

https://linktr.ee/mrdeadlier

https://linktr.ee/buffalofambase

https://www.upwork.com/

https://www.fiverr.com/

https://linktr.ee/fwj

I am also sad to see how hard it is to find people I already like on Mastodon and I already lost one iteration to a dead server farm and overwhelmed admin. Pinning my first account (@cpd623@masthead.social) in case it ever comes back. Launching new social feels much harder this time. 

Twitter is now X

 And all I can think is that the new owner is a quitter. Although the person who called it Xitter and pronounced the X like SH might have a point. 

Going to delete my Off Peak Twitter account this week. Currently running my archive and then I'll delete everything and make it private. I don't want someone else to take my handle, but I'm not going to engage over there anymore. 

Twitter was such an astounding place once it got going. Mastodon isn't quite there yet and I don't trust Meta.  

Where are you heading now to participate in a social space? 

Wow the landscape has shifted

My headline means two things to me today. First, the social media landscape. This was my post on Facebook this week. 

Social media is a mess right now. The new Facebook interface is convinced I want to be one of the groups I support all day long (and not myself) which completely confused a friend this morning. Twitter keeps changing its interface and asking me to give them money (no way, you should be grateful I'm still logging in and seeing any of the ads on the site). Instagram keeps sending me videos of strangers describing knitting hacks in languages I don't understand (and I'm not entirely sure why except for the one "how to crochet a penguin video" I did watch once about six months ago). I'm not job hunting so LinkedIn is not a destination and I prefer to read instead of watching videos so YouTube is not the best place for me either. 

But, I do like to know what you're all doing. Going to try to keep hanging in here to see the people I love doing the things that they love and chuckling about LOTR memes and Mariah Carey on her way.

It's getting worse. And now I see people going to Mastodon, Tumblr, Reddit and Discord. I'm in a few of those places, but I'm not sure that this business needs to reinvent itself again in social. I'll keep this blog going and I'll stay active on LinkedIn, but I think I'll be closing my Twitter account after I get my data. I don't use it enough and he doesn't get to count it. 

And now my second point.

The freelance world has changed since the pandemic. I used to see dozens of options available to connect with potential clients for reasonable rates and now FIVERR is advertising on TV, PhDs are taking editing jobs, and more people have jumped into the remote world. Many of the places where I used to find gig work at night (EST) are already finished by the time I can log in. I'm happy for the companies but sad my routine is broken. I will be honest I was hoping that my business model would last another 20 years, but the world changes constantly. 

I am fortunate to not be desperate enough to write for pennies. I am also fortunate that I am not homebound and can flex in different ways to support myself and my family. After a few months of frustration, I am moving forward again with a new part-time gig and it's exactly the bridge I needed. When it's time for me to leave my full-time job, I'll be able to focus more on Off Peak again.

How are you navigating this changing landscape? 

American Lit

So, I got into a discussion on twitter about American Lit (note, I work in higher ed, so intellectual discussions are possible 140 characters at a time). I hated American Lit in high school, managed to talk my teacher into letting me read War & Peace instead. Yes, Russian fiction in lieu of three American lit novels. The page count was greater and she was excited to be able to tell people one of her students read that book. I was excited to skip the whiny novels.

So, as an adult, when I could not contribute to the discussion about which American authors are better, I asked for suggestions of what to read. I was told these novels:

Invisible Man (already read)
Angle of Repose
Sound and Fury
Absalom, Absalom
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Slaughterhouse Five (already read)

My dad's favorite book of all time is the Old Man and the Sea (already read). Another suggestion outside of twitter was Of Mice and Men (already read).

Since the twitter exchange I have read two of the books (Angle of Repose and Death Comes for the Archbishop) and I discussed Slaughterhouse Five with my son.

I went and looked for a list of great American Novels, I've read 25 of them. Was surprised to have so many. 

I will go get the Faulkner novels from the library and attempt them. But I'll be honest. As beautiful as some of the descriptions of the wild west, I still find these novels whiny. My issue with American Lit 30 years ago and still today is that we don't have enough history here to claim any understanding of the world. We are only a few generations removed from people who believed in miracles and came here. The disappointment these authors report is inevitable. Reality is always harsh. I find that these characters are so busy being disappointed in their lives that they miss the beauty being described around them. And I want to shake them.

Do you feel differently about American Lit? Why? Help me see the other side. 

Follow Up: Change is Now

I rarely check my personal email anymore... in fact sometimes I go a few days without looking at it. Most of my friends are on facebook (so I "see" them daily) and my colleagues are on twitter or email me at work.

My workflow changed subtly... I used to check email at least three times a day... but now I need to set a tickler so I don't miss school stuff or emails from my folks. I much prefer the flow of info from the new social media channels.

The other major change is how I can avoid ads... at least a lot of the time. I've stopped turning on my radio in my car (mind you my commute is only 8 minutes now, but still) and we "tape" everything we watch so we can skip the commercials as we watch a show. Yesterday my youngest and I were looking at bird cams and were both annoyed by a "required" ad to see a nest. He dumped it from his list of cams to check.

How has your workflow/entertainment flow changed in the past year? Five years? Decade?

Changes

So, I'm sitting at my desk today monitoring the PSEWeb conference in Toronto... lots of good information coming from twitter (#pseweb).

What suddenly hit me was how I'm chatting and "listening" to people from all around the world on topics that are important to all of us. We're not in a vacuum, we're having a "global meeting."

I'll be honest, when I went to college, no internet - no web - no cell phones. That all changed at my first job where I got a cell phone, email and used a collegiate intranet.

So, how much more will the world change for my kids? If the past 20 years is any indication, the world will shrink further... how will we distinguish between work/family time? Will that matter? If everything is out on the web, how do we compensate people? For what tasks? Time will tell, but the only constant is change

Cloud Fails

So today, the unofficial day Skynet tried to terminate the human race (revised Terminator time line courtesy of the Sarah Connor Chronicles) Amazon's cloud failed. I find that somewhat funny.

I'm not in the cloud quite yet...here is a list of posts about it: (http://blog.hootsuite.com/notes-on-todays-outage/) I use twitter not hootsuite (although I like Social Oomph), I don't like foursquare(see my previous post on privacy and robberies) and I'm not in the other affected tools. I think Amazon has a great business model (scale up as you get bigger) but its failure today shows the weaknesses inherent in these tools.

I agree that the times are changing; I use twitter more than email, I use facebook more than the phone, I text to my kids instead of call them. But, I still remain firmly grounded with the understanding that stuff breaks, I need to know the basic tools and a sharpened pencil can still be useful.

Social Logins

The topic on twitter today (4-19-11) is the amount of personal data available via social log-in methods. Facebook seems to be leading the pack with the amount of personal data collected, but they are not alone.

My very first thought about this subject: don't share anything online you're not willing to share in public. You don't have to fill in all the boxes because they make them available. Use the privacy settings, check them often, update as needed.

My grandmother was always careful about what she said and to whom after her house was robbed when she told her hairdresser why she was getting a fancy updo "going out to dinner tonight for a family party." Well, the hairdresser's boyfriend was a thief. Similar issue in my life... family friend's son, who was watching our goldfish, told neighborhood troublemaker "they're not home this weekend and I'm watching their pets." We were robbed by the local juvenile delinquents.

Needless to say I don't tell people when I have tickets for any event or if I'm checking out the latest restaurant. I post after the fact if I want. I use different settings for friends-family and people I only know online. I'm teaching my kids to be paranoid. But avoiding social media is not the answer. Learning how to harness the beast is the trick.