A few years ago, xw bought me a nice bathrobe. It’s warm and super comfortable, so I often wear it at home. Then I started working on Flux and often worked from home. This bathrobe became my signature “work attire” since I only needed to zoom with a handful of friends at Flux for the first year. It became a tradition. Every new member would soon learn “Wei usually shows up in a bathrobe on zoom.” And we did a few “bathrobe” zoom parties during the pandemic and even sent every team member a bathrobe with the Flux logo as a nice company swag.
A bathrobe is usually comfy but not meant to be durable, especially if you wear it day to day. After a few years, the elbows of my robe were all worn out. Wen bought two patches and patched the elbows. Then this year, the whole robe started falling apart. Big holes showed up all over the robe. Today I finally said goodbye to this robe and ordered a replacement.
I miss the days I felt comfortable to zoom with colleagues in a bathrobe. It was a high bar of how tightly knitted a team is.
大约一个月之前xw突然说一月初她要去以色列出差。虽然并不知道以色列有什么好玩的,本着在旅游地图上开疆扩土的目的我还是立马就订票了。之后忙忙叨叨去Turks and Caicos玩,只简单计划了前几天xw在特拉维夫上班我在那儿玩,后两天去耶路撒冷。我还开始读了一本厚达900页的耶路撒冷史书Jerusalem: The Biography,虽说是非虚构正史,但写得还是比较生动活泼的并且是2011年的畅销书,可以看得下去。出发之前读了三分之一刚刚读到穆罕穆德建立伊斯兰教,进度也还可以了吧,哈哈。
I’ve seen several friends who moved from Twitter to Mastodon do cross-posting. Then I saw this toot today https://mastodon.social/@dimillian/109619460197226069 It got me thinking more about the cross-posting practice.
When I started microblogging in 2008-ish, and when the options proliferated (Twitter and a bunch of Chinese clones), my first instinct was to have a tool to sync posts across all platforms I use. “Write once, post everywhere.” Looking back now, it was a bit funny. It was like standing on top of a rock and yelling at the top of my lungs, where only dozens of people were standing around.
It’s also worth noting that people do not cross-post in the even older blogging era because of RSS. People move from one blogging platform to another, and their readers can subscribe to a new RSS. Or the RSS feed doesn’t even need to change when a proxy such as FeedBurner is used.
I think of cross-posting as an “I do it because I can” move. Social networks have APIs, and connecting these APIs is not hard. My engineering friends do it because they know how to set it up. Pretty soon, there might be some websites that people can click around to set up cross-posting. Then more tech-savvy people will do it, just because they can. I’d like to think about whether I should cross-post, or why people should cross-post.
For marketers who want to reach more people, sure, professional cross-posting tools exist for this use case. For people who want to build a personal brand, the same thing, the more reach, the better. But I use social networks to socialize with people I know in real life or make acquaintances online and only look to expand my network slowly. Does it make sense to cross-post?
An obvious case is for my friends who are active on multiple networks, e.g. both Twitter and Mastodon, I don’t want them to see my posts repeatedly.
So it comes down to whether my social circles are spread across multiple networks or mostly present in one and whether I want to post the same content to all of them, and a tradeoff of different groups’ experiences. In my case:
I use four social networks now: Mastodon, Twitter, Instagram, and WeChat. A lot of my close friends are on several of them. The overlap is significant. “Close friends” means people I frequently interact with on social networks.
Between “make my close friends not see duplicated posts” and “make all my posts from Mastodon be seen by all my followers on Twitter,” I choose the former. This is because I care about close friends’ experiences more.
I use these social networks differently
Mastodon replaced Twitter and became my “random thoughts” main social network, including links to my blog and Instagram.
Instagram for pictures.
WeChat is a very digested version almost exclusively for travel photos and for my parents…
Twitter: I read Twitter. It’s still an info source. And I interact with friends who are still there as I don’t intend to cut off relationships. But I do not write new posts there as I want to lower my contribution to Twitter, and it’s not that important for my random thoughts to be seen by my Twitter followers.
Maybe I’m just getting older and leaning more towards cultivating relationships with people I already know than knowing new people.
这岛上其它的景点普遍不太值得去。我去了Chalk Sound这个scenic drive,bird rock hiking trail,还有个相当骗钱的种植园遗迹。还有个博物馆小到只有一间小屋和门口的几间小棚子,我们去的时候锁着门因为唯一的员工老太太在外面给另外几个游客讲解。。
我们去的第一天还去了一个Thursday Fish Fry的活动。大概就是个夜市,有浓浓的农村赶集风……吵吵嚷嚷的餐车,卖各种小玩意儿的小摊儿,各种看起来无所事事有点小流氓意思的本地小青年,还有个台子上有人在唱歌并且不停邀请醉醺醺的游客上台一起表演,还有个drone在台子前面飞着。总之土high土high的。