At the end of 2022 I published a post about changes in my social media strategy.
At the time, I intended to transition off of Twitter, where I had several accounts. It was already obvious that Elon Musk had no understanding of how to manage a social media platform, and probably did not care in any case, because he had (and still has) other motives. As we can all see, Twitter’s reliability and functional integrity has been steadily declining since October 2022, and a recent data center consolidation which led to numerous component services of Twitter failing for periods of time tells me that Musk’s firing of 75% of the IT staff, plus other staff defections, is eventually going to result in the platform failing to be usable in any consistent functional sense.
One principle that I think the current era of social media has made clear, is that it is difficult to impossible for a truly global “all things to all people” social network to operate in a way that does not eventually result in it being sunk by problems and issues related to both scale and culture.
Moderation is the biggest problem for social media platforms. No moderation results in the platform eventually being dominated by a toxic collection of assholes, morons, scamsters and peddlers of dubious sex-related offerings. Too much moderation results in a narrow platform that is not representative of broader society.
However, one can make a compelling argument that higher levels of moderation are a good match for platforms about specialist subjects. If you (for example) run a social media platform for Motor Racing fans, there is a good case for preventing other topics from being discussed, and for ensuring that trolls and morons do not get to hijack discussion topics and threads.
The Mastodon federation recognizes this reality, via the creation and maintenance of specialist servers, both for countries and regions, and topics, and many of the servers have little to no moderation. Servers may or may not be federated. One of the social media platforms, counter.social, is based on Mastodon, but is not federated since its anti-spam policies (which are really effective, I have an account there and we rarely see spam, and trolls last less than 24 hours) were deemed to violate Mastodon principles. That is the Mastodon federation’s loss. You can see the difference between counter.social and other Mastodon locations quite easily.
The Big Social Media platforms like Facebook/Meta, Snapchat, Twitter, Reddit, Telegram and TikTok, still want to be All Things To All People, and their moderation policies are therefore less intrusive. In the case of Twitter, content moderation is a shadow of what it once was, because of the loss of staff, and because Elon Musk has been un-banning various individuals previously banned for being toxic and dangerous assholes and rabble-rousers.
New social media networks have to decide on their niche, and most of them are trending towards a narrower focus. Post.News has positioned itself very much as a news and current affairs platform (hence the name).
Spoutible, an offshoot of the BotSentinel project, is the latest new social platform. Since the functionality is in many ways identical to that of Twitter, it is not difficult to see Spoutible as a direct rival to Twitter, a platform aiming to hoover up all of the (many) currently disgruntled Twitter users. However, it is also trying to not acquire adult-content or sexually themed accounts. This makes it more restrictive than Twitter.
I am currently trialing Spoutible, and it looks as though it will be a good platform for authors in general. Whether it will be a good platform for erotic authors remains to be seen. There is a definite tendency on the part of some people to regard erotic writing as fundamentally unserious compared to non-erotic writing. Which makes no sense to me, and I tend to be suspicious of people who promote the distinction because I wonder about their motives.
At this time, my strategy is as follows:
General Community – counter.social
Writing as a Craft – spoutible and counter.social
Current Affairs – post.news and mastodon
Erotic Stuff – Twitter and Mastodon
We are in a shakeout era for social media, and I believe that the era of the global EveryThing Social Network may be coming to an end. I will be flexible and pragmatic about social media and promotion.