NEW BLOG POST:

The social ad-networks, the Fediverse, and my Live is back

Read it on my website (recommended):

tiotrom.com/2020/10/the-social…

Or read it here:

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, now TikTok, the world is eaten alive by a few websites that pretend to want to “connect” people. They even call themselves “social” networks. In fact they are ad networks. We have a few such accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Youtube (TIFY) and I am sick of them. So sick I created a TROM Live page where I started to post directly on the tromsite, forgetting about these ad-networks. But even when I was posting on TROM Live, we kept those TIFY adcounts updated through Hootsuite (a tool for which we pay) that allows us to schedule posts on all of those networks. It is like our livestock industry today. Just put more stuff out there, else the world seems to collapse.

This craze of nonstop eating nothingness has transformed the eaters and the feeders into untamed animals that seem to be unable to stop. I post, you watch. I post, you watch, I post, you watch. If I do not post, the TIFY AI will forget about me and not notify you. I cease to exist.

Thing is, if we stop posting on TIFY, then we go even deeper into the hole of silence, because TIFY wants something from you (data, attention, money), so they have created a cattle industry, where the milked cattle are people, and if you do not feed the cattle (as a “creator”) then no more cattle, and your ideas and projects will sink. Both of you are actually the cattle for TIFY, who milks you both, while you the creator milks others…endless fuckery.

I never wanted any of this, but when we released a new book for example, I liked to break it into “memes”. Images that I made with the bits of text I would grab from the new book. I saw it as an educational thingy. So I would make lots of them, and schedule them via Hootsuite on all of these networks. I NEVER duplicated any image/post. For the past year or so, we did not release any new book, so no more new memes. I kinda gave up to this posting-memes idea for educational purposes, especially since I feel it stronger and stronger that people who are on TIFY are too bombarded with shit to even make a difference if you try to post scientific and well made content. So what’s the point!?

Sasha kept these TIFY alive by reposting a lot of memes and videos for the past year or so, and she still wants to keep them alive. In the end, I agree, if is not much work and others can help with it…lets shoot in the dark and keep on posting there too. But I hate TIFY as much as I hate any company and charlatan. I don’t even want to type their url into any text field, that’s how much I hate these charlatans that are selling delusional ideas of “connectivity” and “sociability”, while the cattle are eating their vomit.

WHAT. TO. DO. !.?.

We have a bunch of projects: tromjaro.com, tromsite.com, videoneat.com, trade-free.org/directory, tromland.org. Except tromland and tromsite, the rest are very active. We post new stuff there. Plus, when we make a new video, or book, or have TROMcast….we need to let people know about these.

So. How to let people know about these things in a sane way and still keep the TIFY cancer fed, while not feeling disastrously depressed by using these tumors?

WELCOME TO THE FEDIVERSE.

Posting updates on TROMsite.com/live via an improvised chat, felt cozy, at home, but not at all interactive for anyone in case they wanted to reply, share, follow. It was mainly me going to my balcony and giving some updates to the empty town. At least that’s how I felt, which is cozy to me. But I get it…some people want to interact a bit, not in a TIFY way, but in a sane way. The answer is: THE FEEEEEEEEEEDIVEEEEEEEEEEEEEERSEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

It is difficult for me to explain what this is, and a mighty task to make you (the reader) as excited as I am. I will try to explain in the most simple way possible. So. Let’s use the Facebook example. Let’s imagine we make Facebook trade-free. That means, Facebook doesn’t ask anything in return (no trade) for the service that they provide. So, no more ads, no more data collection, no more making money from paid advertising. Nothing of that. Basically imagine a Facebook without 90% of its current content. It is like wanting to remove a tumor from a patient, but you realize that the tumor is a lot bigger than the patient. So you end up removing the patient. A tumor with a human.

Anyways. Trade-Free (TF) Facebook. Honest. No more bad incentives to make you stay on their platform. Why would they want to trap you into their world if they do not get anything back from you? So this TF Facebook allows you to create posts (text), share images, make albums, add videos, crate groups, pages, comment, share, etc.. And instead of being on Facebook.com, a copy of its software is installed on Facebook.net, Facebook.org, Facebook.free, and 50 more domains. Let’s call these “instances”. All run the same software, like imagine a barebone FB without any users, on multiple such websites. We start freshly new. GO.

You, the user (not a cattle this time), can choose whichever “instance” suits you best, because each instance is run by different people/organizations, and they can tweak their version of FB the way they want to. Of course, they are mainly the same, but some may not accept people who post their dick photos, while some do. Now, the user (not the cattle, again!), can choose which FB they want, and register an account there. There is no competition between these instances, mind you, since there is no incentive for that. If my instance has too many users and puts a toll on my server, I can tell people to go to other instances so that we disperse the load. The other instances are my friends.

BUT TIO, that means I LOSE my friends. I register here, to show my dick picks, but my friends register there…I can’t there…they don’t want here…we NEED TO STAY IN TOUCH.

I HEAR YOU. CALM DOWN. JIZAS. ACTUALLY THIS IS WHAT FEDIVERSE IS ALL ABOUT.

Now that we have many instances, we connect them with each other by default. User A registers on FB.ORG, user B on FB.PENIS. But if user A searches for user B in their FB search, they find him. They can follow him, comment on his posts, and all that. As if user B is on FB.ORG, even tho is not. How is that possible? Don’t ask me, ask the Fediverse God.

So now we have multiple instances, each instance is a TF FB, each instance has some users (different from other instances), and all of them are connected. I, on this instance, can instantly communicate with you and others on any instances. This way, the power of FB is distributed. If I do not like one instance, I pack my bags and move to another one. Export -> Import. My contacts, messages, posts. All that. Like magic.

WELCOME TO

THE FEDIVERSE

But there is a downside to this right? I mean….it has to be. It is slow. Unreliable. UWGLY…. ???

Actually no. And even if it may be a few minutes behind reality, it is still hardly noticeable from my experience. And guess what? There is more to this!

Imagine we do the same with Youtube. De-tradiffy it. Federate it. Many Youtubes, many domains. All communicating with each other. We do the same with Twitter and Instagram. Now, we have hundreds of websites (instances) of TIFY. TF-TIFY. Best part? Since they all use the same protocol (fancy word that means nothing for normal people, and a lot for programmers), they can communicate with each other. Me on Facebook can follow a Youtube channel and see its posts in my newsfeed. Even comment on it, reshare it, like it, and all that. Twitter users can communicate with Facebook users too. And instagram is useless anyways so probably they don’t care to communicate with neither, even tho is possible. A world where we connect all of these platforms.

WE'VE REACHED NIRVANA!

If you think about it, this is how the Internet should work. Back in the days most, if not all websites had another “protocol” embedded underneath their skin: RSS. That was a “text” file that each website generated automatically, and it contained all of your latest posts or comments. So, if you wanted to stay up to date with what bigbunnyforgood.soemthing website was posting, you would grab its RSS feed (usually by adding the word “feed” after the url), and paste that into an RSS Reader. This program will then grab the latest posts from the bunny. You could choose any RSS Reader for the job. And add as many such websites to the mix.

Nowadays RSS is still alive, although youngsters probably think that’s a pornhub category like Rubber Sex Slaves or a subreddit, Racist Skinny Sluts. Not sure which one is which…. Anyhow, RSS is still an important protocol. Email is another such protocol. I can communicate with you via email even if your email is on gmail.com, and mine is on tromsite.com. It does not matter. Fediverse is like combining RSS with Email, and feed it magic mushrooms.

Examples of Fediverse tools: Friendica, Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfed. Mix them up and we have PPFM, MFPP, PMFP…whatever. They are the TF and Federated versions of TIFY.

Peertube is a Federated Youtube, Piixelfed is a Federated Instagram, Mastodon is a Federated Twitter, and Friendica is a Federated Facebook. Of course, they are more than that, They are their own thing. They look different, work different. But, they are meant to be replacements for those ugly ones. I will mainly talk about Friedica since it is what we use to deal with our Social Dilemma.

Can’t help but notice that while writing for this blog, our latest post from Friendica is this documentary from VideoNeat, that’s about these big online companies taking over the world.

Friendica is so awesome I don’t even know where to start. For one the design is modern and so clean. Here’s how TROM’s pages look like on FB vs Friendica:

A very simple post composer, yet good enough to create long posts with some basic text editing. You can add multiple images, format the text, add links, location, add a post into a category, add tags or even mention friends or pages. You can create a full-blown post with this. Sure, with a simple design. What’ya’want’more?

Basic photo albums. You can comment on any photo, add tags and mentions, captions, or rotate them. Depends on the Instance, but from my tests you can’t add videos. Only from external sources in posts. Videos are images. But BIGGER. So ya’ need a BIGGER server for the job.

Events. We can use this for our TROM-Cast for sure. When we go live, and what hour. Add to the calendar. Share it. Tag, mention. Simple.

And for your page profile you can add as many fields as you want, with multiple websites, descriptions and such.

In the Settings you have great control over who to follow, how to see or not posts, how to post and where, export your data and all that. I won’t go into details, I’ll only highlight some of the features I love.

Your profile can be a page, a personal stream, an organization, a forum….different types, depending on your needs.

You can choose between several themes, or customize any of them. Colors, background image, opacity, and stuff like that. It is a minimal-based theming, but definitely a cool thing to have access to.

You can also choose between infinite scroll or pagination, you can disable the dislike buttons, or ban posts containing certain URLs or words.

You can connect to some social networks and cross post to them or from them to your Friendica, automatically or manually. For example, you can set up your WordPress website so that when you post to Friendica, it will create a post on your website.

You can even add “moderators” or “admins” to your pages, which is handy.

But all of this is not like “whoa”. It’s more like, yah….I’ve seen this before…remember MySpace? Hi5? What’s so cool about Friendica? Well, here’s where the amazing part comes, and it is because of the Federation.

CONTACTS.

These 3 contacts come from 3 different platforms. One is from Mstodon (a Twitter alternative), one from PeerTube (the good Youtube), and one from Friendica. The way I added them as friends is by copying their URLs or “handles” into the search box in my Friendica page. Friendica finds them, and I can follow them. I can send them private messages or see their posts in my newsfeed. As simply as it is on Facebook to search for contacts. Here is how posts from all of these contacts look like on my Friendica homepage (stream):

This is how a post from someone on Friendica looks like:

This is how a post from someone on Mastodon looks like:

This is how a post from someone on PeerTube looks like:

This is how a post from someone on Twitter looks like:

Aham. I said Twitter, because you can connect with Twitter if you have a Twitter account (in seconds) and you can see the posts in your feed and reply and all that from your Friendica. How to add a Twitter contact? Same as you add any, put the URL of a Twitter account in the search field and then click follow. Done.

So, you can follow and interact with people from the entire Fediverse, even from the non-federated Twitter, but there is one more neat thing about Friendica. Take any website, say videoneat.com, and paste that URL into the same search field. Guess what? If the website has an RSS feed (remember the Rare Skinny Sluts?), then you can follow that too. Here’s how an RSS post looks like:

Yah…same as any other posts…and if the website has a full RSS feed, then you can read the entire post in your news feed.

So, contacts from any Fediverse accounts, plus Twitter, plus RSS sources. All look the same. And you can interact with all just like you would do with any contact.

I will bore you for 3-4 minutes. bare with me tho, I need to vent this….

And the best feature for me, is this: in the settings of any user, you can opt in to automatically grab their posts and either reshare them, or post as your own. Why is this so cool? Because we have several websites that produce content daily, and I’ve set it up so that the RSS feed from these websites, is grabbed and posted as our page posts, automatically. This is so so cool. Federation + RSS is bliss. You can even contact people over Email through Friendica, but I won’t even mention that 😀 – it’s too much awesomness.

With all that in mind, this is how I am now managing all of these social networks, most of which are adcounts.

1. I created 2 Freindica accounts. One is my personal account and one is the TROM page. Both are managed by one single account. These are “identities” actually. One login. Two identities.

2. I setup tromjaro.com, videoneat.com, and trade-free.org/directory to mirror the RSS Feeds as our Friendica TROM’s page posts. So, whenever there is a new post on these, our Friendica TROM page will post about it.

3. Since there is no easy way to schedule posts on Friendica + we also have to keep the TIFY tumor alive (at least for now), I came up with a solution. We are still using Hootsuite to schedule posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Now, with the help of the amazing trade-free piece of software called RSS-Bridge, and our own TROMland instance. I can create an RSS feed for our Facebook page, and add it as a contact to our Friendica TROM page, and as above, mirror the posts as Friendica TROM posts. Now, our Friendica TROM page automatically pulls posts from our websites + our Facebook page RSS (scheduled posts). And, of course, whenever we need to post something directly there.

So, right now, if Sasha keeps on scheduling on Hootsuite, and I keep those websites updated, we will have an active TROM Friendica page.

Last cool thing. I’ll bore you a bit more.

Using our RSS Reader from tromsite.com, that is responsible for our curated news, videos, and such tromsite.com/tools/news/, I created a news feed for the Fediverse to use it as our TROM Live. It pulls posts from my personal Friendica and TROM’s Friendica + the TROM people I’ll add there. And, whenever I tag a post with #tromlive, or anyone from TROM does that, or our TROM Friendica page does it, it will go to tromsite.com/live/. And to any tromsite.com page (click the top TROM logo).

Imagine this: I work on something for TROM and I post about my work on my personal Friendica profile. I tag it with #tromlive, and it goes to our tromsite.com/live page. Aaron uses Mastodon and when he does something for TROM and wants to share, again tags his post with #tromlive and it goes to the same place. Alexio, who is on Friendica, can do the same. And you can see on TROM Live who posts what and click our names to go to our Fediverse profiles and you can even follow us there. As cool as that. New TROM-Cast? Create a Friendica event, tag with #tromlive. Goes on Friendica + TROM Live. Schedule something on Hootsuite that you also want to go to TROM Live? Just tag it with #tromlive. Easy! And, for my own personal Live, because YES, IT IS BACK ->>>> tiotrom.com/live/, it is the same system only that all of what I post on my Friendica goes to my live. At times, I post stuff that is personal, so I would want only #tromlive posts to go to TROM Live.

Basically we “manually” post on Hootsuite (mostly scheduled posts), to our websites (normal work for us), and to our Fediverse accounts. Seems like a lot, but I for one will 95% post on my Friendica account. That’s all. It is in fact a very simple and easy to manage “mess”. I move away from TIF, and I create a mega stream of content on TROM’s Friendica page. A Trade-Free place. A Trade-Free Social Network. Plus, keep our TROM Live updated + my Live. So you can either follow the hand or the jesus jump. Or both. And that’s all. No need to go anywhere else to see updates from us.

The technical part of the maze. Damn this will bore you to death, but may be useful for some.

a. I am using the Flow Flow paid plugin as our RSS Reader for tromsite.com and this website. I bought this one many years ago so I might as well use it. Download it from here for free. I set up a stream of TROM's Friendica and my personal Friendica with Flow Flow + other Fediverse sources. Say Aaron is on Mastodon, so I grab the RSS feed for Aaron's Mastodon because yes, Fediverse sources also have an RSS feed. How to find that? Ask around is easy.

b. I grab TROM's and my Friendica RSS. This is actually an Atom Feed, similar to RSS. Looks something like this https://instanceurl/feed/username/posts.

c. Because the Flow Flow plugin doesn't work with Atom Feeds, I need to convert it into an RSS feed. Unfortunately I have to use FeedBurner (by Google) to do it. Add the Atom url in FeedBurner and in the options click "convert" to RSS 2.0. Grab the new RSS url. That's what you have to use. As a side-note, the developers of the Flow Flow plugin plan to implement Atom feeds support.

d. Flow Flow + Fediverse RSS feeds = great. But, in order to only grab posts that contain #tromlive, you have to add a filter in Flow Flow for each of the RSS feed you have added.

And that's all.

Now, for TROM Live I had to add a HTML code to the page to refresh the page automatically every 10 minutes so that users don't have to do it manually.

The downside for TROM Live is that it takes around 15-20 minutes for a post to go live. Say I make a post on my Friendica. It takes Friendica a few minutes to update the Atom Feed. Then the Atom Feed needs to be read by FeedBurner - FeedBurner checks it every couple of minutes. Once it grabs the update, Flow Flow must check it too. It checks every 5 minutes (you need to change the plugin code a bit to allow for 5 min - ask me in the comments if you need to). Once Flow Flow grabs the update, the Live Page must refresh (every couple of minutes).

I post on Friendica -> Atom Feed gets created -> FeedBurner reads it -> Flow Flow reads the FeedBurner RSS and filters by #tromlive -> TROM Live gets refreshed with the new update. All automated so no sweat.

What you have to understand from all this, is that the Internet should work this way. The Fediverse way. If TIFY wouldn’t make a business out of the human cattle, keeping them trapped into their own garden, then they would for sure implement such tools. Why can’t I follow a Facebook page or profile, or Youtube account, without registering with these companies? Because that will hurt their business. TIFY is trade-based, so its sole purpose is to engage in trades with the users. Users are its clients. I give you a “social” platform, you give me your data. They are like any other store out there. If I sell tomatoes, but they are not as good as the ones in the shop next door, or I don’t have enough of them, I will never send you to the other shop. I’ll lose!

The reason Friendica and the like are so great, is because they are trade-free. They ask nothing in return from the users. They give you this platform, and grab nothing from you. Yes, at times you trade your freedom since you may not be allowed to post this or that (violence, gore, nudity, etc..), but these are smallish trades and you may find instances where they do not inject such rules. Also, we live in a fucked up world of mindless zombies and charlatans, so they can abuse such platforms. These rules are in place for that. When TIFY puts up such rules, they are usually to make their advertisers happy that their platforms are as clean as the inside of a disinfectant bottle, so they can advertise there in abundance.

Facebook

Friendica

I feel relaxed by using Friendica and knowing about the Fediverse. I need to keep my online life as clean as possible, in order to focus on the stuff I create and what I digest online.

It also goes to show how, with billions under their mattresses, TIFY created platforms that are technically inferior to what a handful of good humans created, with not even a fraction of a percent of the resources these TIFY giants have.

The moral of the story is this: if you create trade-free goods/services, it is very likely that you will create good quality and honest goods/services. Because there is no incentive for you to do “bad”. Imagine if these platforms would label themselves as “trade-free” so we can also educate humans about the problem that they are trying to address. Because in the end, these people created these platforms because they wanted to solve some problems: that of data collection, of proprietary software, of privacy, etc.. Problems that are in fact symptoms of our trade-based society. And I explained that in great detail in this book.

I understand that the vast majority of people will not use these platforms. The sad truth is that humans got so enculturated that they will hardly ever change. If you can’t change your online social network, how can you change anything in your life? Really. Is there anything easier than this? If humans can’t use a different Facebook, that is honest and so much better, when it exists, then there is no hope we will ever change anything in this world: how we distribute resources, organize our society, etc.. We will cling onto old notions and platforms. We will die on facebook, screaming about democracy, in a trade-based society that makes both of these, irrelevant, useless, illusionary, and at times harmful.

So don’t be one of the morons. If you really want to use a social platform, use Friendica or other Fediverse alternative. If you still have to use TIFY use it as a disposal machine. Just to put your “ads” there about your work. A necessary evil, but put gloves when you use it, like we do with Hootsuite. I am sure, one day, in the near future, I’ll close all of the TIFY. We ONLY use them to automatically share our work.

We are on TROMSITE.COM/LIVE. We are on FRIENDICA. We are on our personal websites. That’s all. The rest, we are not.

In a saner world, we would create stuff and not care how many people we reach. Who likes what we do. We just do it. And that’s what I’ve been doing all of my life. I care about my work and what I do and I enjoy that. The rest can fuck off. This is why I have the “courage” to go use another social network and won’t care much or at all if I will close all of the TIFY accounts. Our stuff is hosted on our servers or archive.org anyways. Our work and chats are done via NextCloud. I am using the tools I think are best and trade-free. We have lost lots of “followers” because of that. And I don’t care.

In the end, you have to enjoy what you do. Else you are a prostitute of a trade system, trading your stuff for currency, likes, reactions. Don’t be a sad cattle.

Make a Friendica account. I recommend you venera.social/. Takes a minute. Get familiar with it. Add me as your contact. Add others. You’ll be surprised how friendly the community is. Then add more contacts from the Fediverse, add RSS sources like our website, and all that. Ask me here if you need any help. And use fediverse.party/ to find other such Federated places in the digital universe.

UPDATE 1

Shortly after writing this blog post I realized that it is super uncomfortable for me to pat 12 Euros a month for Hootsuite to what? To post on those trade-based social networks? To then have those posts mirrored on Friendica? What for!? So I changed the plan. Friendica (TROM and Tio), both pages, are the ONLY ones I will touch. Instead of posting on Hootsuite that will send posts to Facebook, Insta, and Twitter, and then FB RSS to push to Friendica, I will do the opposite way. All posts from Friendica go to Facebook and Twitter automatically. Like so:

The biggest advantage is that the way I make the posts on Friendica is simply beautiful and clean and smart. The way I compose them. You can make full posts there, like a blog post. Also, the fact that I only manage 1 single place for updates: Friendica. The biggest downside is that I am using a 3rd party service (IFTTT) and when it tries to push updates from Friendica’s RSS to Facebook or Twitter, it does not send the images….so….posts without images…which sucks. Bad. Cause many times we relied on images to tell a message. But…I will try and try to see if that can be fixed….at least the setup is done. Also, we lose the ability to schedule “memes”. However I will look for a trade-free solution for that. I imagine a fediverse or other tools for say WordPress that allow us to upload our memes and schedule them and then grab an RSS feed and push it to Friendica.

Trust me I tried so much…I made accounts….I even made a new website to try to push proper updates to Facebook through WordPress…nothing really works….Facebook is the most awful company….Anyways. Maybe I’ll update the post again…I feel so drained of energy.

UPDATE 2

There we go, one more update hahah. Maybe this is the last? Will see. I made it even better. Improving. Mind you, I want stuff to be as automated as possible. I also don’t want to completely shut down FB and Twitter since there are people following us there…

So, the bellow image explains it very well. 5 RSS sources. 3 bubbles in the picture. They auto feed TROM Friendica and FB. For FB I had to do an IFTTT hook-thing…it is free for 3 or so hooks. These are automated. The social.tromsite.com is a new thing that I made….JEEZ. Basically it is a new website that uses 3 main plugins to automate all of our memes. We have around 6k memes. Only 1k or so are converted for tromsite.com from tvpmagazine. I used the plugins: “Auto Post After Image Upload” to make a new post whenever we upload an image. Thus, we can uplaod 1k photos to this website, and it creates 1k posts. Amazing. “Revive Old Posts” is a plugin that takes 2 random posts and posts them on FB. The free version only post them as links, so doesn’t look 100% ok on FB but is the best I can do. Is fine. And lastly “WP Auto Republish” to republish these posts in random fashion on the website – this is necessary for the RSS. It makes sure that we always have at least 2 new posts a day out of those random ones made out of the 1k images we uploaded. This is so that when Friendica checks for new posts from social.tromsite.com, it finds new ones daily.

So the automated RSS feeds Friendica and FB. Plus I also manually post on Friendica. And whenever i tag my posts with #tromlive, the Friendica TROM page ones go to FB, and TROM Live, and my personal Friendica (tagged with #tromlive) go only to TROM Live.

And, of course, the last ones: Posts from Friendica are mirrored to Twitter, from my Friendica profile to my Live.

Trust me. It makes a lot of sense :D. This way we don’t replicate posts anywhere. And keep TROM Friendica updated (that’s the best source for what TROM releases or the most important news) + TROM Live with our work + FB and Twitter (yaks) + my personal website.

Brilliant! 🙂

And all works. Tested. I am so so so so so happy with social.tromsite.com because we basically have to upload photos there and that’s it. They are randomly posted 2 a day. And these memes are super interesting.

Let’s see if this is my last update.

UPDATE 3

Oh yeah, update numero tres. Ha-Ha. I kinda perfected the system. I really want to make it very well. I looks like this is the last update, but don’t quote me on that for now. Here’s the thing, although TIFY sucks balls, and I hate it, I understand that there are some people who find it super difficult to move to some Fediverse alternative because maybe their friends and families are on TIFY. So my goal is to keep TIFY updated in a proper way, while not giving a shit about it ;).

The update numero doz, above, had a few critical flaws. The images I scheduled on FB were not posted as images, but as links that could use the image as a “preview”. So the image was cut. Not good! Same on Twitter. Thus, all of the work on social.tromsite.com was only great for Friendica and partially good for these two. I FIXED THAT through IFTTT hooks. Now those 2 images that we post daily in a random and automated fashion are indeed posted as images on FB and Twitter. Great!

Another issue is when I posted on FB from Friendica via the hashtag thing, it only posted a sentence. FIXED IT! Now it posts the entire posts.

Here’s the beauty:

The RSS feeds from videoneat, tromjaro, and trade-free.org/directory feed via IFTTT to FB and Twitter, and directly to Freindica. The 2 images-a-day from social.tromsite.com are going through the same exact process. And when I post on TROM’s Friendica page it goes nowhere unless I tag it with #tromlive and that makes the post go fully on FB and TROM Live + I can also “tick” (check) a simple box when I post it, and goes to Twitter too. So Friendica feeds the rest when it comes to direct messages. GREAT!

I’ve also bulk edited all of the 1.140 posts on social.tromsite.com and added as the title “Read our books at tromsite.com/books”, so now all of these images that are posted on the 3 social networks (Friendica, FB, Twitter) are posted with that message.

Lastly, I had to remove some plugins that didn’t work very well (from social.tromsite.com) and add new ones. Actually I only use “Auto Post Scheduler” that basically I setup to choose 2 random posts a day and change their publishing date to the most recent date possible. Thus, we have 2 new random “posts” on that website, a day, at different hours. The RSS is then read by our octopus above, and feeds the social networks.

Oh, and to make it perfect, Georgi (my sister), will manually repost as many images from FB to our Instagram account. it is easy.

Thus, we treat all of these social networks like first class citizens. Frendica, FB, Twitter, will post the same exact content (most of the time). And most of it is automated (but good and new content). I may have found BLISS with this…finally…. I did all of this because I wanted to focus on creating stuff and the “sharing” of it to not stay in my way + I wanted to not use TIFY anymore. Like directly use it.

We will close Hootsuite the following days. We will save 11 Euros a month. This can help pay for all of our domains. Entirely. So it is a good saving of money kind of thing ;).

There is one single downside: when I share from Friendica to FB, I can only share plain text….and links. But images won’t display on FB…maybe I’ll find a way to fix this last thing, but is not really that important. Usually I do not share images directly from Friendica to FB.

UPDATE 4

Another update haha. I fixed a few issues and such. So, the main issue was that whenever I would post on Friendica with the hashtag #tromlive, it would only go on Facebook. For Twitter I had to manually select to post it (from the Friendica’s message composer). I always forgot to do that. Now, when I tag a post with #tromlive on TROM’s Friendica page, it goes on both. Great! However if I were to add an image to such a post, on Friendica, it would not upload the image on either. It would only post the message. I fixed that. If I make a post and tag it with #tromimg instead of #tromlive, then the post goes on Facebook and Twitter and also uploads the Friendica’s image. So a proper post with an image on those networks. That’s very useful since at times I make posts and add images to these posts on Friendica, and I want the images to also go on the ad-networks.

Another thing I did: we have released our TROM II Documentary campaign, and the documentary will take at least a year to finish. And I want to post updates about the work since it is a very important project for TROM. So on the campaign page tromsite.com/trom2, I have added the same RSS feed like I did for TROM Live, only that this time it only posts items that are tagged #trom2 from Friendica’s TROM page and my personal Friendica account.

It sounds complicated but it is NOT. I still only posts on 2 accounts on Friendica, mine and TROM’s. On mine I post all the time, on TROM’s only when there is an important update that I want to stream to all social networks. And I have to keep in mind 3 tags:

#tromlive – the posts go to TROM Live + Facebook + Twitter, if they come from TROM’s Friendica. And they go only to TROm Live if they come from my personal account since that one is used for the work I do.
#tromimg – it is exactly as above, the only difference is to use this tag when I also post an image together with the message. And this is only relevant for TROM’s Friendica page.

#trom2 – when I post updates about the documentary

So imagine I want to make a post telling people about the next TROM-Cast. Since it is an important message for TROM, I will post on TROM’s Friendica page and tag it with #tromlive. That’s all. And it goes on TROM Live, Twitter, and Facebook. If I post something important about TROM II and I also include an image, I do that from TROM’s Friendica account again, and tag with #tromimg and #trom2, and it will go to TROM Live, Facebook, Twitter, and our TROM 2 campaign page.

#tromlive pushes posts to all of our places (TROM Live, Facebook, Twitter). #tromimg does the same only that it also uploads an image to those. And #trom to posts on TROM II campaign page. Combine them and it is great. Easy. Not difficult at all :).

trom

2020-09-16 15:33:59

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The Social Dilemma

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