Update: I gave up IRL streaming completely and have no intention of ever doing it again. I’m selling all my IRL streaming gear and canceling all my accounts including the Belabox sponsorship. It was an expensive lesson to learn, but I’m glad I finally learned it.
Two things happened this week that catalyzed a bunch of changes to my streaming stuff:
While adding my Facebook page I had to categorize myself as a “public figure”. I could only list three things and settled on Tour Guide, Journalist, and Writer. It unlocked something in my brain I’ve been thinking about subconsciously for a while now. That is what I am. I always have been. The tech shit is just to pay the bills and always has been. I spent over 20,000 dollars in college to master Russian, French, international business, and computers and linguistics. Why would I be any different now? It wasn’t until I was unemployed that I took the Internet job and capitalized on tech as income. It was a reaction not a choice.
Knocking my teeth out and getting outside daily again has been a big fucking reminder of who I’ve always been. I’m not really even a teacher. I think back to my earliest careers as a river guide, mountain bike guide, cruise directory, language interpreter, missionary, spelunker, bike mechanic, yoga instructor, scoutmaster, father, and professional vagabond wandering and exploring. I’ve always just been a “guide” taking people along for the ride on adventures I’ve already experienced. That’s why I like mentoring so much. Mentoring is practically a synonym to guiding. Time for me to become the tour-guide-writer-journalist I’ve always wanted to be.
So here’s a summary of changes I’ve already done or plan:
The complexity of managing several streams is greatly simplified in 2023, and with Kick out there (which still doesn’t work for me) it makes sense to stream to it as a backup.
Every time I tell someone about this I get shit about it. Everyone has their reasons for hating one (or all) of these platforms that doesn’t jive with their own personal philosophy about life. I’ve decided to let people make their own choices about this and just stream to as many outlets as I can.
When I tell people I am going to build up my Facebook community again they all roll their eyes. But these people don’t realize that most of the non-technical world is still using Facebook (as much as I absolutely loath it). Since I’ve started streaming to Facebook many people (my own parents included) are able to watch and participate.
Using Restream.io has gotten a lot better than three years ago. I probably still have the bot code I wrote using its API (which is awesome). I’m glad I decided to go with Restream before finishing my Cozy Community platform because I’m only interested in integrating with Restream at this point. That will make cozy a lot less interesting to a lot of people, but I don’t care, it will do what I need it to.
Streaming to multiple platforms means opening up the audience to a wide variety of people—much more than my niche group of friends on Twitch. This requires a bit more decorum on my part, less swearing, less ranting about politics, less calling people morons, and less doxing of people who could easily be identified by my stories.
But I am not changing who I am. Like any writer or journalist I’ll be bringing personal context to things and that means writing about my friends and family openly from my perspective. Hell, it hasn’t stopped everyone else from writing whatever the hell they want about me all through my life and giving it away to everyone. It’s my turn to write whatever the hell I want. If they don’t like it? Fuck ‘em.
Looks like the technology to get great signal in the wild does exist. Combining a signal booster with a fourth modem (if necessary) should allow me to cover any place on earth that has even the most minimal signal (4x200 kbps).
This is an aggressive goal. With my wife making her own money now I have a little latitude to eventually cut back on hours. Eventually, I want to make live streaming adventures my main income. But that is probably far off and after I have a book or two out there to sell. Still, there’s nothing stopping me from starting to work from random coffee shops and parks right now. Hell, once I have the bandwidth, I could do some coworking from a remote part with great ASMR sounds.
Once I have a pretty good following (which I absolutely do not right now) I’ll be able to move to RTMP streaming from my own server and remove all the middle-man costs for all the services out there. I could even create my own app (like the Twit people did). This is a very long ways off, but once someone has that level of reach it’s very doable. I can already embed my stream into a web page.
I’ve built a social media brand before (Mo Hax on Second Life). I know how to do it (I just don’t like doing it). But the fact remains that if you have something interesting to offer the world—that might even change people’s perspectives and quality of life—then marketing that is essential. This is going to be hard for me, but I’m going to do it. I’ll even set goals for number of followers and such and work on things like “algorithms” (especially the YouTube algorithm). YouTube has been cruel to me for pushing such long content without editing, but I can overcome that with live streaming and using clips as “shorts”. The other day I posted a Twitch clip as a short and it had 4000 views in one day. That’s insane compared to discovery through videos alone.