Find Me Elsewhere

Farewell to Twitter, Hello Elsewhere: Keeping Up with My Threads and Research

You're leaving us? :'(

As you may know, I have decided to remove myself and my content from #Twitter.

I don't plan to stop producing threads of research, but simply migrate to a platform that I feel will be more stable moving forward.

I plan to update this blog entry as things change to keep people up to date as I transition off that platform. It is intended to help people find me on other locations around the internet moving forward.

On December 20th I wrote a longer piece explaining my reasoning if you would like to read some of my thoughts on this. But if you're just interested in staying in touch, it isn't necessary. You can find it here: “On Leaving Twitter”.

For quick access without much reading about them.

Social Media

I am in the middle of setting up a place on the “Fediverse” to use in place of my Twitter Memex (Mastodon/Pleroma). See the section titled “Self Hosting an ActivityPub capable social media server.” for more details on what I plan on doing here)

You can follow my current personal Mastodon Alt @ultimape@mastodon.social in the meantime, though it is not anywhere as insightful as my doings on Twitter. For most people I'd recommend waiting to follow my new one.

I will create separate blog entry that announce when a surrogate for my twitter threads and my alternate location is complete.

This Blog!

This blog (hosted with write.as) is also follow-able with ActivityPub, just type @ultimape@scat.wovensoup.com into your client's search or follow mechanism and you should be able to find it! You can subscribe to it by email as a letter on the homepage (subscription box is at the bottom).

My “Digital Garden”

I'm still working on getting it finalized, but I have a 'Digital Garden' where I plan to house lots of long form writing and notes that don't fit a standard blogging format.

I plan to eventually integrate it within a larger agora as I like the idea of having communal spaces to share ideas and work toward goals together. You can think of it like an attempt to build out a personal wiki in the style of Roam Research or Obsidian.

I've been using git + the Foam plugin for vscode and it works quite well for me. It is a bit nerdy of a process so I don't recommend it for everyone.

Discord

I setup a Discord for Patrons to join and follow along with some of my experiments. I'm also willing to let people in who ask. It is intended to be mostly obsessive nerds like me to share interests, so it may not be very interesting to everyone. I also I don't want the burden of policing a public discord server so I've been sending out individual links on demand. If you are interested in joining, send me a DM somewhere and let me know why you'd like to join.

Email

I am not very good at staying on top of email. I sent out an email address to people who asked for how to follow me on twitter, but that was primarily to send them a link to this post. At the time it was against twitter safety rules to share Mastodon accounts.

I'm much more responsive on other platforms than I am on email.

Are.na

I maintain a couple of groups on Are.na. That service is kind of like a mix between Pinterest and a link sharing platform like Del.icio.us. I mainly use it to house links to things I read as a sort of reference repository.

The most important one there is my collection of Self Research notes that covers my interests in health. I also keep one covering my explorations into nomadic living and homesteading ideas. And a corollary to that is a more ambitious one that covers ideas around maintaining civilization from first principles that I call Homeostatic Mechanisms.

Of course you can just follow my main account there, or any of the individual channels that interest you.

Other Systems

I have a Keybase account and actively use Signal Messenger to provide a relatively secure way to talk about health issues with others.

While I am mostly an open book, I prefer to keep health discussions relatively encrypted. The human condition is full of gross and uncomfortable things that can be embarrassing to leak in public.

I'm not a doctor by any means and I don't offer any services. I can really only share with you my own experiences, so I can't really give health advice. But I also have no filter, so if we're talking about health topics, I will often ask really personal questions due to my innate curiosity and obsession on all things health. So out of respect for other's privacy I don't like sharing intimate details over unsecured channels and recommend we chat in via one of these services.

I didn't trust twitter DMs before, and on the Fediverse DMs aren't much better, but I ultimately leave that decision up to you.

Self Hosting an ActivityPub capable social media server.

I decided I'm gonna run a self-hosted single-user social account off of a subdomain on WovenSoup[dot]com. You will be able to follow me from almost anywhere that speaks “ActivityPub”, which should include all the standard Mastodon hosts, as well as others in the Fediverse.

I haven't yet decided what the subdomain will be. But when it is set up and functional I will add a link to it here and make a separate blog post announcing it.

My hope is eventually to have my old tweets embedded into this system and back-dated somehow. Being able to run my own server will allow me to manipulate the database directly to insert them.

I am committed to doing this. Not only do I own the WovenSoup domain for the foreseeable future, I also bought 2 years of VPS hosting to run the server. I'm hoping to get something out the door by the end of the year. It will cost me about $100 a year to run.

I went with a Virtual Private Server on OVHcloud. This is a hosting service that provides servers to run applications on. I chose them because I've used them in the past and all the documentation from DigitalOcean seems to work on them just fine (and I like dedicated bandwidth).

What services will you be using?

I will be using Pleroma as my server because the founder says that Pleroma is the best. 😂

“Pleroma is the best ActivityPub software there is for general Twitter-style social media. Low on resource requirements and with several web frontends and mobile apps, it’ll work well for any kind of community you want to create without breaking the bank. It’s also perfect for self-hosters who want to run a one-person setup.” The Big Pleroma and Fediverse FAQ Part 1 – Beginner Questions

But in all seriousness... Pleroma is a lightweight hosting option that will let me eventually migrate to a Raspberry Pi should the need arise. While it is not the most widely used, I like it's modular nature and plan to make full use of it's search features for my own content. And it speaks ActivityPub, so it maintains compatibility with other servers on the Fediverse.

Support

Many people have requested ways to support me and my work. I am very happy to be having such an impact that people want to help me out financially.

But honestly, the best way you can support me is by talking with me about one of my interests. I learn so much from people sharing with me their own stories and sharing notes together. Comparing and contrasting differences and hearing what has worked for others is how I build up my own mental models. This is why I hope to continue my work other places than Twitter –> being able to be part of a larger network is what I care about.

I will continue to do what I do regardless, but having spare resources to go toward my experiments (or food) and pay for services like this blog or are.na has been very impactful on my life. So I appreciate when people do donate.

The easiest way to send me monetary support is via Paypal.me. If you would like, I also have a Patreon for reoccurring donations, but I've had donations paused until march(?) because of a grant that is covering my living expenses. I can also now receive cryptocurrency donations as we (Praetor Labs) had to get that set up for our grant.

All the stuff I do will be published and released for free where possible, so please don't feel like you have to pay to view stuff I produce.

What's happening to your Twitter?

I am not sure what I'm doing with my Twitter account. But I use Twitter in such a unique way that I need to take steps to protect what I've built.

I'm not writing it off entirely. I will likely keep a presence there if only to keep my username secure and continue to DM friends there. Maybe I'll even be able to rekindle my presence there in the future if I can build tools to let me stay in control of my external brain.

That being said, my tweets are intended to be removed once I have a way to search them (and look them up by ID) to read them elsewhere. I will make sure that a link to that is available from Twitter.

Thanks

Thanks for being part of my network. This is a really scary thing for me to do given how much I depend on my Twitter network, but it's thanks to people like you than I am able to keep moving forward.

Please stay in touch!