2022 was pretty much the year of consolidation, so what’s Lynxmic been up to in 2023? We only have to see…

State of the channel

In terms of content, 2023 wasn’t a “wow” year. However, this year was by far the best in terms of growth. My channel began the year at a subscriber count of a little bit over 110+, and currently it is at over 400+. I cannot thank you all enough - both the new and old subscribers - for making this possible.

Looking a bit at the channel history this year, there were several bangers that contributed to getting my channel to an unexpectedly high subscriber count. First was my Windows 8.1 EOS video, which unsurprisingly has gotten substantially high numbers in comparison to my other videos on the channel at that time: the video now sits at almost 3,000 views, and has given 12 subscribers to the channel.

Later on, I moved on to remaking my Upgrading from Windows 3.1 to Windows 7 video for a second time. The main rationale was that in my 2021 remake (which is now unlisted) I skipped Windows 8 and jumped from 7 right to 8.1, in reality there’s no direct upgrade path from 7 to 8.1 as you can only choose between a clean install with personal files retained and a clean install, which is odd since 8.1 is supposed to be an update to 8 RTM?

The resulting video is Upgrading from Windows 1.0 to Windows 10, and my channel was compensated beyond my expectations for the mistake I made in 2021: a SINGLE VIDEO has gotten 30K+ views, and gave the channel 140+ subscribers. It is by far my new most popular video; that title used to belong to my 2017 video How to install Visual Studio Code Rich Presence for Discord for years!

Another successful video of mine this year was Downgrading from Windows XP to Windows 3.1, which currently sits at 5,500+ views and gave my channel another 35+ subscribers.

Given the huge success of these videos, I ended up remaking another in an attempt to wrap up my channel’s 2023 with a bang. Back in 2020, during the COVID lockdown, people that were subscribed to my channel at that time might remember me doing a “Windows NT Upgrade Fest”. I’ve worked on that sometime during May that year but uploaded it only in early September in an unfinished state. I’ve redone the NT Upgrade Fest from the ground up and the resulting video made an impressive 1K+ views and gave my channel 5 subscribers within a week.

I’ve had multiple countless other videos pass the 1K view milestone as well which I won’t bother listing, and as much as I’d like to dive in deep into further analytics, I don’t want to unnecessarily waste both your time and mine’s looking at numbers, so let me just attach two screenshots with my main channel’s SocialBlade subscriber graph and - of course - YouTube’s 2023 snapshots for both my main and second channels.

My “ambitions” to expansion on the Fediverse and into FOSS

Where do I even start this section? Let’s start from the fact that back in March, I made an alt fediverse account over on Firefish, which used to be called Calckey at that time. So, my first Firefish/Calckey instance used to be stop.voring.me, then two months later I migrated my account over to calckey.social (which became firefish.social with the renaming last summer).

After that, just a few weeks later, I made a third Firefish/Calckey account on lethallava.land (@lynxmic@lethallava.land) back when it was in its “infancy”. The first 1-2 months on lethallava.land pretty much marked my peak on Firefish, after that I largely lost interest especially as I discovered Firefish’s (and by extension, of Misskey’s and its other forks) UI wasn’t really my taste, so as of now I’m not longer as active on Firefish.

As for my other Firefish accounts, the first was deleted, while the second one (@lynxmic@firefish.social) remains up as a backup (though I’m looking to migrate that account somewhere else someday). Thanks for coming to my TED talk!

Okay, alrighty, moving on, last May, in the blog post where I announced the purple Lynxmic branding (I’ll get to that later in the blog post), I announced that I would create a server on Revolt, a FOSS alternative to Discord.

I’ve since created a Revolt server but then later deleted it after just under two months since for the most of the time the server was neglected (honestly, why would I maintain a Revolt server if I don’t even care about it). Maybe in the future there may be a Lynxmic Revolt server that may see the light of the day, though for now that’s just far off on the horizon.

State of the website

2023 for this blog was way better than the previous year, and most of the motivation to write posts more frequently at the beginning of the year came from… the blog layout itself. Namely, what I dubbed at that time “the Bulma redesign” - which is still in place today. This year I finally wrote my first post on this blog (since 2021) that isn’t strictly related to Lynxmic itself: to be more specific, a review of my Galaxy A23 5G.

I’ve been notably inactive on this blog after May as I basically didn’t really have anything to talk about. Even if I did have something to talk about, I would later abandon the blog post after a while…

The good news of the second half of the year however is that there’s now a new personal website with a proper homepage with links to my social media and everything else Lynxmic. Just like the aim of this blog was to be independent from any of the popular blogging platforms, the aim of the new website was to separate myself of Linktree, where I previously used to host my “landing page” with links. This website also gave way to a new “quick access” URL for my Discord server (lynxmic.github.io/discord), which replaced the Discord.io links I had previously (D.io having been shut down due to a data breach in August).

Other notable events

And that’s not all! There’s more! For this section I’d like to begin with the Lynxmic branding in assembly, which got its biggest refresh since 2019 (especially as in changing the primary branding color from blue to purple); I’m personally proud of how it turned out and I hope you enjoyed just as much as I did!

I should also mention me abandoning the Lynxmic Twitter account (I refuse to call Twitter ““X””) and creating accounts on Bluesky and Vanillo. I also opened an Internet Archive account; so far I uploaded the Windows 10 1511 Media Creation Tool executable over there.

Before I sign off…

…thanks for yet another year! 2023 was another good memorable year for the Lynxmic project, hopefully 2024 will be at least just as much. No, there’s no best moments video this year.

What’s next for 2024? There’s a new Lynxmic refresh in progress, depending on when you’re actually reading this, you might find a place I operate that might look like a complete mess, this is due to the refresh. I’ve been actually preparing all of this for two months, so please look out for another blog post one day right after this one.

Generally speaking, I hope to be able to bring in more content next year, including to this blog (no guarantees yet!). I’ll be finally free from refreshing or reorganization tasks (for the first time since summer lol) and will be finally able to concentrate on the present and pump in some content (idk about you, but the first two months of the year are the most boring for me), in the blog post immediatelly following this one you’ll see more of my 2024 plans.

Until then, this is Lynxmic signing off for the last time in 2023!

…oh, did you know 2023 marked 10 years (one decade!) since I started my content creation hobby?

Previous “Wrapping up [year]” posts: 2022, 2021