Dormant Social Media Life While Sorting Through Drives

Dormant Social Media Life While Sorting Through Drives

Byrichard

Recently my Social Media Life has become dormant. I do visit Facebook every so often but I ignore Instagram, barely touch Mastodon or the fediverse, and in general have stopped looking at social media for a social life. It’s not that my life offline has become vibrant. It’s that online is empty of meaningful engagement, especially in winter.

From the nineties right up to around 2018 or so social media was a place to meet and be social. It’s during the pandemic that social media seemed to die. I think that social media relies on meeting people in the physical world to have value. People on the social web use it when they’re on the toilet, or waiting for something else to happen. They’re just filling small gaps in their schedule.

Plenty of Potential Storage

The other reason is more positive. I have terabytes of storage spread across twenty two drives, or more and I am re-organising everything in order to see how much space I have free. I have at least twenty terabytes of data storage. I might have as much as fourty two terabytes of storage but due to file duplications I don’t have much space that is free.

Required for Video Projects

That’s frustrating, especially if you want to take video and can generate up to 64 gigabytes of data at a time. 64 gigabytes, because my Sxs cards have that amount of storage. The drone could have up to 512 gigabytes of storage if I put the right SD card into the camera.

Freeing Cloud Space

I can’t delete data from cloud storage solutions because I haven’t consolidated all of my photo and video files from iCloud, Flickr, Google Photos and one or two other services. If all of my files are organised chronologically then I can migrate from cloud storage solutions without worrying about losing images that might have been backed up only to iCloud, or Google Photos, or another solution.

By consolidating the data offline, I can manage data in the cloud with ease.

Shrodinger’s Storage Cat

For data to be safe you need to have two local copies, and one offsite backup. If you have a dozen, or two dozen drives then that data is like shrodinger’s cat. You don’t know whether it’s backed up (living) or a single copy (dead). Delete the wrong file and you might end up losing a few days, or a few months of data. By having a centralised main storage your small satellite drives become working drives. You use them while you’re working on a project, and once the project is over you move it to the main storage solution and either wipe and reuse that drive, or keep it as a backup. Shrodinger’s cat has left the storage device.

Looking Forward

Years ago I bought an eight terabyte drive because I planned to consolidate my personal video and photo files but I never got around to it. This morning I finished moving the junk I had on that drive to other drives and I have now started to backup the video and photo data that I had temporarily kept on a five terabyte drive. I realised that I have more data than would fit on a five terabyte drive, but it also failed to mount at least once.

For years I had the same data on five to six drives but in my move towards centralising, and then backing up my data I made myself unsafe. I was left with just one copy of data. Now that I am backing up the four terabytes of data I have from the five terabyte drive to the 8 terabyte drive I have a little margin of safety.

Consolidation

When moving files from the 5tb drive to the 8tb drive the process is simple. Move the video folde to the video folder, photo to photo, and documents to documents. It’s when I start moving the secondary drives to the main drive to consolidate my photos and videos that the value is generated because this is when I detect duplicate folders, videos and photos. This is when the value comes in.

Moving four terabytes of data takes hours, but once that data is moved, and as I consolidate data from six or seven other drives I will copy only the files that do not exist on the main volume. I will then move the files that I have checked into a zz-backed-up folder.

Low Value

When I was trying to free space on drives I deleted the files from the drive as soon as they were copied over. Now I am moving them to zz-backed-up as a scruffy backup. The aim is to be able to recover files if the 8tb volume fails, but these are a stop gap. The next step is to backup the 8 tb volume.

And Finally

Nothing is backed up until you have at least two copies locally, and a third off-site copy. The next step is to copy the files from an older volume to a newer volume. Old drives fail, so having files on older volumes is a risk. When I finish consolidating files to the eight terabyte volume I will then duplicate it to a newer 8TB volume.

As a side project, once I have two or more drives that are free of data I could experiment with setting up a raid system.

Asking for Permission on Instagram
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Asking for Permission on Instagram

Byrichard

If you want to see how unhealthy social media is just look at this story about DMs on Instagram. Now if you want to DM someone that you don’t follow they can send just one text message.

Imagine, you’re a user of Instagram. You’re following friends, family and colleagues. Now consider that every fourth post is by someone you don’t know anything about. Now imagine that you see the influencers several times a day, every single time you refresh your feed.

Complete strangers are invading your timeline, polluting your streams, and in general reminding you of your social isolation, reminding you to feel Fear Of Missing out. You’re then told that the FOMO person can only be texted once. This is absurd, because Instagram isn’t a social media site now. It is an advertising platform with user generated content spread thinly.

Threads at a Fifth of It’s Peak

I read that Threads is now at one fifth of it’s 100 million user peak. It’s at around 20 million users. This makes sense. Why would people want a timeline filled with strangers, rather than friends? Why would people join a website/app that is part of Facebook. I know that it’s called Meta, to whitewash itself, but I call it Facebook, to show that the whitewashing effort failed.

Toxic Culture and the Need For Change

That Instagram feels the need to limit DMs tells us two things. The first is that they have made Instagram toxic. It’s because of this toxicity that everyone needs to protected from one eyed trouser snake pics and other forms of spam via DM. If Instagram was still a network of friends of friends, it would still be self-policing. It isn’t, so new rules need to be put in place.

The second thing it tells us is that rather than tweak the algorithm to make suggestions and conversations healthier, they are just adding barriers, rather than tackling the core issues.

Social Media and Iconoclasm

This morning before getting up I read about how some people rented a villa, and damaged a statue taking photos of themselves with it. It also mentioned at least three people adding graffiti to the Colosseum. The issue with social media is that instead of having the morality of healthy communities, it has the morality of advertisers and marketers. The result is the vandalism and iconoclasm that is becoming more and more common. social media algorithms amplify emotions, and emotions, especially on social media are toxic.

The Social Media Algorithm Distortion

Social Media Algorithms Distort Social Instincts and Fuel Misinformation

Key facts:

  1. Social media algorithms are designed to promote user engagement, thereby amplifying inherent human biases for learning from prestigious or in-group members.
  2. This amplification often promotes misinformation and polarization as it doesn’t discern the accuracy of the information.
  3. Researchers suggest that both users and tech companies need to take steps to mitigate these effects, including user education and algorithmic changes.

Social Media algorithms are toxic. Rather than tackle the cause of toxic behaviour companies like Facebook prefer to pretend that the problem is the user, rather than the algorithm that drives humans to behave in a toxic or trollish manner. Instead of encouraging humanism algorithms amplify emotion, because emotion encourages people to stick around.

In contrast, algorithms are usually selecting information that boosts user engagement in order to increase advertising revenue. This means algorithms amplify the very information humans are biased to learn from, and they can oversaturate social media feeds with what the researchers call Prestigious, Ingroup, Moral, and Emotional (PRIME) information, regardless of the content’s accuracy or representativeness of a group’s opinions.
“It’s not that the algorithm is designed to disrupt cooperation,” says Brady. “It’s just that its goals are different. And in practice, when you put those functions together, you end up with some of these potentially negative effects.”
In addition, the researchers propose that social media companies could take steps to change their algorithms, so they are more effective at fostering community. Instead of solely favoring PRIME information, algorithms could set a limit on how much PRIME information they amplify and prioritize presenting users with a diverse set of content.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Threads

All of these social media sights are driven by algorithms that amplify negative emotions, rather than foster community. That’s why I think hashtags are bad, and that twitter threads are bad. That’s why I think commenting, re-sharing and other forms of behaviour are better, especially in a chronological timeline, as we have with blogs and most of the fediverse. I won’t use pixelfed because it uses hashtags rather than categories or healthier community building tools.

We worry about AI but algorithms control more of what we see and feel, than AI.

And Finally

After decades of using Social Networks I have almost never felt the need to send DMs, especially to strangers. I usually use them sparingly, either to coordinate IRL meetings, or to share information that I do not want everyone to have access to. Instagram is restricting DMs not because they care about their users, but because they are deflecting from the problems posed by their algorithms that encourage polarisation, and trolling.

The Paradox of Instagram’s Twitter
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The Paradox of Instagram’s Twitter

Byrichard

Within the last two days I saw a headline that is either amusing or tragic. The headline is that Instagram is creating a twitter clone, or even a Twitter competitor. This is amusing, or tragic, because Twitter and Facebook have always been competitors. You had the network of strangers that became friends, with Twitter, and the network of uni friends that became estranged years after graduating with Facebook. 


Chronological


Both of them had chronological timelines with people conversing with each other. One was about events, pictures and more, and the other was about chatting, between tweetups. 


Facebook and Twitter Are Now the Same


The notion that Instagram would have a twitter clone, today, is ludicrous because Facebook and Twitter are the same thing. Facebook owns Instagram, so the notion that Instagram needs a competitor to Twitter is ironic, since Twitter and Facebook are now the same thing. I could develop the idea further but won’t.


The Rush to Rescue the Shipwrecked


Twitter is having a Titanic moment and nearby ships (social networking solutions) are rushing on to recover all the people in life boats or floating in the water. That rush is paradoxical, since it has expanded social media once again, to become a network of networks, rather than a monolith. 


The Fediverse


I think that the Fediverse offers the best solution because it offers plenty of instances that can focus either on specific niches, or just host accounts, and people can look for like-minded posts across the networks.


Contributions and Instance Specific Adverts


I saw something about people wanting to advertise on the Fediverse and I don’t think they should, especially not in the main feed. To do so would be to destroy what the fediverse is. A network of networks of people conversing. We can contribute financially to the instances we’re using, to help cover costs. For instances that are more popular, and more expensive to run the solution would be to have ads that show up only within that instance. It should be for the community to decide whether they want ads, or donation covered costs. 


Twitter and Facebook Are Clones Already


Seven or eight years ago when you looked at Twitter you would see twenty to thirty tweets with shortened URLs. Over the years individual tweets were given images, and animated gifs, and eventually videos. They even began to take up an entire screen height for just one tweet. Over the last decade and a half Twitter and Facebook became the same thing. The idea that Instagram is cloning Twitter, when Twitter cloned Facebook, and Jaiku, is absurd. 


Meta Chat Options


To illustrate how absurd the “Twitter clone” idea is look at Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and even Facebook. They’re all conversation tools, some for private groups, others for public groups, and others for friends, families, professional circles, hobby circles and more. Instagram Twitter is, yet another conversation tool. 


The Consequences


Twitter stopped having a unique selling point years ago. What made Twitter was the community. By destroying that community feeling Musk encouraged people to spread to other social networks. People are trying to clone Twitter, but most social apps are the same today. A timeline with people sharing videos, photos, articles and more. 


And Finally


Instagram is now part of Meta, and Meta destroyed its reputation without ever apologising for its mistakes. I will not use Instagram’s “twitter” for the simple reason that I do not use any Meta products because I do not trust them not to play social engineering experiments, yet again. Meta takes social networks, and turns them into boring glossy magazines, rather than networks of friends of friends. Facebook was demonstrated to be untrustworthy and never worked to fix its reputation. 

Trying To Read Nested Data From a JSON File

Byrichard

Over the last two evenings I have been attempting to read nested data. I have tried to parse the data and other methods but without success. I have browsed the web to try to find solutions but for now I am getting stuck. Learning is also about trial and error, and knowing where to find the right information. For now I am lost. At the end of this process I will be more self-sufficient.


Learning by watching courses is good, and we do make progress, but it doesn’t require us to think about problems in the same way. We learn to follow instructions but not problem solve, and that’s what I want to learn. So far I have spent two hours on this specific problem, and I could easily remove a few lines and it would no longer be nested. I will persevere.


Playing with Comments


Since I am trying and failing to accomplish what I am trying to accomplish I am now using comments to mark what I still need to achieve, whilst looking for solutions and ideas.


Prototypes and CSS


I have also continued studying prototypes, factories and more. I see some overlap between this topic and CSS. For those with experience and time both allow for more depth and complexity than is comfortable when you are starting out. The short version is that with prototypes and factories you can cut down on the lines of code in a project, making it easier to read, and lighter.


The Pandemic Continues


It is now the weekend but the pandemic is still alive and well. Governments are deciding not to do anything to stop the spread, preferring to tell people that for vaccinated people it’s no worse than the flu, whilst ignoring the fact that children from 0-18 have not been vaccinated. There is a certain degree of indifference by governments that is hard to observe. They expect the next few weeks to be difficult, and that’s as far as their sense of responsibility goes. It is a challenge not to be disappointed by this attitude.


How to Migrate from Instagram To WordPress

How to Migrate from Instagram To WordPress

Byrichard

Recently I migrated my photos from Instagram to a WordPress blog. The process took some trial and error. The first step is to understand how to read JSON files and format them in a way that WordPress can use. The next step is to import that data into Wordpress.


To request your data follow this link, request the data and wait for an e-mail telling you that the files are ready to download. When the files are ready to download download them and unzip the files.


Convert from JSON to CSV


You will find photo directories listed by year and month. You will also get a few JSON files but the ones you want are the media.json files. With a tool like the Konbert app you can convert the files from JSON to CSV files. When the CSV file or files are ready open them in Google Sheets or other spreadsheet software and look at the columns.


The fields you will find are


  • Caption
  • Taken At
  • Location
  • Path
  • Stories
  • Videos
  • Photos


Although not essential you can add fields like author. If you see “stories” and “videos” remove these columns. The CSV importer plugin I used cannot import videos and stories automatically.


When this is done you should have a CSV file that has caption, taken at, location, and path. Keep the photo file structure as it is.


Installing WordPress Locally


The simplest Wordpress installation I found is Local. Within minutes you can have a wordpress blog setup and running on your local machine. The reason you want a local install is that JSON to CSV conversions can be messy so if you make a mistake it is easy to reset and start again.


It took several attempts before I managed to import all the images and get them to display properly. If I had imported those files to my production Wordpress Blog I would have spent hours deleting thousands of posts more than once.


Folder Structure


When you import your images to WordPress with the CSV importer tool you have the option of leaving them where they are or of importing them into the uploads/year/month folder structure. Be warned that if you let the importer tool import the images itself it will import all of the images and generate thumbnails. If you have 3900 images you will end up with 12,000 images in a single folder as thumbnails are generated.


I would recommend:


  • creating a folder for every year that you were on Instagram
  • renaming every Instagram folder from /yearmonth/ to month, for example from 202006 to /06/ in the 2020 folder.
  • placing each month in the appropriate year/month folder in uploads.


Preparing the CSV file.


For the next step, I would recommend saving a copy of the document as it is so that you can go back to it if you make a mistake.


If you have changed all of the yearmonth folders to a year/month/ folder structure then you can use find and replace to update the folder names. You can find and replace 202006 with 2020/06 and work recursively. This will take more time, but be tidier. The CSV importer tool does not keep imports tidy. If I had known this ahead of time I would have taken this additional step.


In the CSV file the path is relative. To be tidy I put the photo folders in /wp-content/uploads/photos/ and had to update the CSV document to reflect that. Although you can find and replace in Google Sheets I used Visual Studio code for the next step.


Originally the path will be something like photos/202006/filename.jpg. but as the images are in wp-content/uploads/photos WordPress will look in the wrong place. With Find and Replace I selected “/photos/” and replaced it with “http://localhost:10003/wp-content/uploads/photos/”. At this point, the CSV files were ready to be imported.


Import CSV to WordPress


Although I tried a few tools the one I settled on is WP Ultimate CSV Importer.


The fields you will get when importing the CSV file.


If the CSV file is prepared correctly you should see Caption, Taken at, Location and Path. When I imported I mapped it so that so that Title and Content and slug would be the caption and for slug to be the caption. I then mapped Taken On to Publish date and featured image to the image path.


Select “Use media images if already available and “download post content external images to media


If you have kept the image folders as they were when you unzipped the Instagram download then select “Use media images if already available” and “download post content external images to media.” The images will be copied from the photos folder into the correct folder for WordPress to use.


If you have already organised your images by year and month in the uploads folder then you do not need to check “download external images to your media as they are already there.


The Final Step


The Final Step is to find a theme that reflects how you. want your images to be displayed and share the new location of your photo library to your various social media profiles and networks.


As a final step if you find that an image does not load for single posts you can add this line of code after the PHP tag. 


if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) { // check if the post has a Post Thumbnail assigned to it.
the_post_thumbnail( 'full' );
}


This is a lot faster than going through 3900 posts and adding an image to each individual post.


Conclusion


If everything works as expected you can now export a CSV file of your test blog and upload it and the appropriate files to your online photo blog.

The Fun and Games of Attempting to Migrate Instagram Data continue

The Fun and Games of Attempting to Migrate Instagram Data continue

Byrichard

The Fun and games of attempting to migrate Instagram data continue. I have now spent several days on the task. I have my Instagram posts currently sitting on a local blog. The challenge has been to migrate it from my local WordPress installation to the main website.


After dozens of failed attempts the SQL database, seperate from this blog’s database was getting filled with lines of data. I was up to over 31,000 pieces of data or more. I didn’t check the term a plugin uses.


From my experience of playing with JSON files they are dealt with differently by each app you use to convert them, so what works in one instance, fails in another. This is true of JSON to XML and JSON to CVS conversion.


I went to PHPMyAdmin and purged two tables and now I’m back to having a blank slate. I cleared both the media and the post tables. I also emptied the uploads folder. I feel optimistic that my next attempt will be successful.

Close to Success – Exporting Instagram images to WordPress Natively
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Close to Success – Exporting Instagram images to WordPress Natively

Byrichard

When Instagram was a self-run startup I loved the product. I loved that it was a way of sharing images with friends. I loved that it was fast and that it was light. I also liked that it had it’s own community. I liked that it was a way of sharing real life with people we conversed with online.


When Facebook bought Instagram that slowly changed. Algorithms and popularity contests became more important than sharing between friends and so the sense of community was lost and we were posting for strangers rather than friends.


For months, or even a number of seasons now, I have felt that Instagram is just a way of forcing us to see images by people we are not that interested in, with the hope that we will eventually see images that are relevant to us. That time investment we make is devalued when you consider that the Facebook behemoth is making millions from our mindless scrolling.


During the pandemic my patience for social media finally fizzled out and I’ve been playing with my website. By playing I mean, experimenting, learning, and developing and trying new ideas.


One of those ideas was to export my Instagram account and find a way to flip it over to Wordpress. Why Wordpress, rather than another social network? WordPress is an open-source social network that we control. We control advertising, we control posting frequency, we control layout, and best of all, there is no group of investors holding our… …I’ll leave that to your creative imagination, over the fire.


I tried finding tools to import from JSON to WordPress but in one case I needed to install wp-cli and that was complicated, and I wasn’t confident that it would be tolerated by the web host. I could have asked but instead, I set myself the challenge of installing MySQL on the laptop and running the localhost for experimenting. I failed to connect my localhost WordPress install with MySQL and eventually after two days of trial and error I decided to take a break and try something easier. I tried XAMPP but then I found what looked like a simpler tool, with WP-CLI integrated.


I settled on LocalWP. With this, I tried the GitHub project I thought would help me import the JSON files but that failed so I looked for another solution and it got me 90 percent of the way to achieving what I wanted to achieve. When I confirm that this process works I will post a How-To guide.

Replacing Instagram With Eyeem and a Blog

Replacing Instagram With Eyeem and a Blog

Byrichard

Replacing Instagram with Eyeem and a blog makes sense. When Instagram was new, before it was bought by Facebook it was a network of people who liked to take pictures sharing with friends and family. As it grew and as more people used it people followed less discerningly and so it became more of a popularity contest than a photo-sharing website.


Today Instagram shows an advert every four images and whilst this may not sound like much it is. This means that as you skim through the timeline you see an advert almost all the time. In some cases, you see the same advert a few times in a single session. For now, you can block advertiser accounts not to see their adverts again but this takes time.


Simultaneously you think “If I wanted to see adverts I’d browse a magazine or I’d visit other websites.” You also think “Why am I putting up with these adverts and “Why am I providing Facebook with people’s attention from content that I generated?”


That’s where websites like Eyeem make sense. Such websites allow you to share your pictures to a community of photographers. It also allows you to attempt to monetise your images. For now, 55 of my images have been accepted into the market program and 33 are in the partner program. With persistence and time, people may show interest in these images.


I also have a photo-sharing blog because I want a place to share pictures for which I do not have enough inspiration to write a blog post and they are not good enough to share on Eyeem. I like the idea of having a blog where a picture a day is posted. I’ve posted over four thousand to Instagram and it takes about 3 gigabytes. Wordpress allows us to share content via a decentralised content management system.


With Wordpress or other platforms, we can use their services for free until we establish a big enough audience for it to be worthwhile to monetise our content eventually.

Cutting down on Facebook, Instagram and Youtube

Cutting down on Facebook, Instagram and Youtube

Byrichard

The Issue


For a while Facebook was the network to keep in contact with university friends after we all graduated and then it was the network to keep in contact with colleagues. Eventually it became the network where people shared news without engaging with others. It has become a network where you scroll through dozens of irrelevant posts in the hope of finding something personal, and failing.


Instagram used to be the network where we could share images with friends and see what they were sharing. After Facebook bought Instagram it grew out of favour with people sharing between friends. Now when I use facebook I need to scroll by an advert from the second post onwards. They have flooded Instagram with so many adverts that it has become unusable.


When youtube was young we were able to look through 30-60 videos and find some that were of interest. We would need to wait for videos to buffer and then watch the desired content. Today we no longer need to wait for videos to buffer, we need to wait for adverts to pre-roll the obligatory five seconds before clicking to content we want to watch.


The Solution


It’s 2019 and I have reduced the amount of time I spend on Facebook favouring news websites, Twitter and other web portals. When Yahoo and other companies were still young we called them web portals. Facebook has shifted from being a social network to being a web portal. It has undermined person to person communication. It has undermined its unique selling point. If I want to browse through news or information websites I can use newsreader apps, web portals or visit worpdress.com


In its hayday Instagram was unique because it downscaled and uploaded images in the time it took for us to prepare the text that went with an image and we could share it despite little bandwidth. Today it has become yet another multimedia sharing option with the drawback of having to flick through adverts. They have degraded the experience so much that I have uninstalled the app from at least one of my phones. I decided that I would pay, at least for now, to preserve the thirty six thousand images on Flickr. I also paid because I want to move away from the Facebook monopoly. On Flickr I am the client, rather than advertisers.


On multiple occasions I have binge-watched content by youtube creators, sometimes for hours at a time. The issue that I have with youtube now is that they have made it challenging to find new and interesting content. This is because they have reduced the amount and diversity of videos that we can see on the home screen. It is also due to the amount of pre-roll that we have to sit through before the video starts. I often give up before the pre-roll videos have ended. The reason I gave up on YouTube content watching is the request for us to pay 20 CHF per month in Switzerland to watch content without adverts. That is more expensive than Netflix, Curiosity Stream and the same price as I would pay for a telecom provider’s various content packages. I wouldn’t mind if this content was paid for and produced by youtube and if youtube creators such as myself could monetise content, but we have been demonetised.


That’s why I stopped using Youtube. For Video On demand, I have Netflix for general interest content. I have CuriosityStream for documentaries and I have Swisscom TV for random content that is “broadcast” when I am watching television.


Conclusion


By blogging I am developing my creativity and writing skills. By sharing images on Flickr and other services I am contributing to communities where people are sharing images because they love photography rather than to become web celebrities. Finally I want to cut down on YouTube because browsing is no longer straight-forward.

IFTTT – Instagram to Twitter
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IFTTT – Instagram to Twitter

Byrichard

Instagram is still a healthy social network. It still finds an engaged group of users who want to share their adventures, meals, friendships and more with other users. Some of them love sharing selfies and others share beautiful landscapes. This keeps the network vibrant and young.

Twitter on the other hand has neutralised peoples’ passion and engagement with the site. They wanted to become google reader, they wanted mass following of key accounts, they wanted to neutralise the social, conversational aspect and they have succeeded in their goal so effectively that now an IFTTT rule reduces the need to visit twitter.

When you share your instagram photos as native twitter photos you are hiding that you are disengaged from Twitter. By hiding this disengagement from the social network you are hiding that you may not respond to replies, mentions etc. By not responding to those interactions you are negating the purpose of your presence on the social network.

When you fail to interact directly with websites such as Twitter you perpetuate the notion that twitter is a place where bots interact with bots because humans are no longer present. When humans are gone, when interactions between users no longer take place then what remains of the “social network”?

Two hundred and ninety six thousand people have added this recipe to their IFTTT accounts. A quarter of a million people have chosen to spend time on Instagram rather than twitter. For this reason it makes sense to share pictures via Instagram. We will see your instagram account and we can start following it. In so doing we spend our time more effectively. Instagram still has a future. If you post to the networks that you want to use there is a good opportunity that others will want the same. Lets cut out twitter. 😉