I announced a while back that I would be evolving my social media presence in 2023, since it was already apparent that X..er, Twitter was deteriorating to the point that its signal-to-noise ratio would become unacceptable.
That has already occurred. Since the beginning of the year, the site has been overrun by sex bots and Elon Musk authoritarian fans, who mostly have less than 50 followers, and have the intellectual acuity and debating skills of a house brick.
So, like a lot of other people, I have been reducing my use of that site. I spend relatively little time there.
The challenge is that most people are looking for a single straight replacement for Twitter that magically contains all The Good People and keeps out the Bad Folks. Whether that is realistic is one question (given the challenges of content moderation at scale, I do not believe that it is). The second question is whether that era of a single monolithic site is over. (I believe that federated social media is the future).
The trend towards federation, in turn begs the question of how one uses social media in an era where there are many sites. My tentative conclusion is that you keep your samples, selected content and marketing materials on your own private site and link to them on whichever social media platforms you want to be on. This eliminates the IP hoover catch-all of social media. All of the big-league sites assert IP rights over your content.
Of the sites I list below in my analysis, the only site which charges a subscription fee and promises to never sell your content or data is counter.social. All of the other sites are silent on those topics. They have to make money somehow, and if they are not charging you to be there, that can only mean that you (as in, your demographics and activity) and your content are the product.
From a professional prudence standpoint, I do try to grab my user names and key pen names on new sites, simply to avoid the possibility that some vengeful asshole will decide to impersonate me on a platform. Whether I continue to use those sites depends on how people engage with me. At my age, I tend to not spend too much time posting to platforms where I get little or no response. Life is too short etc etc.
Getting online inside a new social platform is not the work of a minute. You can set up a profile quite quickly, and soon ID a few dozen people that you want to follow. However, it takes a while to get to know who is really there, and how they interact, so it takes at least 1 month, possibly as long as 2 months, to determine if the platform is going to be good for what you want to get from it. Anybody who says “I spent a week over at <platform> and I decided I don’t like it” either had some fundamentally bad initial interaction experience, or has made an uninformed decision.
A quick review of where I am in the social media firmament right now:
X, or Y, or Z (formerly Twitter) – Winding down my presence. The only advantage is the DM facility, that still works, despite the owner making threatening noises. I engage in slightly salacious talk in some DM channels.
Post – More of a news site. Not much author activity there.
Spoutible – I spent 3 weeks there, and left when Christopher Bouzy began ban-hammering people who dared to point out that the ToS was problematical. Then he and his fan club proceeded to bad-mouth romance and erotic novelists, which unleashed a censorious wave of “get porn off this platform”. If you wonder exactly how literal witch-hunts could have started all of those years ago, look no further than this incident on Spoutible for evidence of the ability of large numbers of humans to collectively Lose Their Shit and proceed to go on a tear fulminating against entire classes of literary creators. Ironically, Bouzy used his Twitter followers (over 300k of them) to go after people he perceived as opponents or troublemakers.
Bouzy then proceeded, after rightly being excoriated for being a horse’s ass, to play the reverse race card (“you all hate me because I’m black!”), failing to notice that no, we were pissed off with him because he was behaving like a dictatorial misogynist. I left the site and I have no intention of returning. He also blocked me over at Twitter, which I take as a badge of honor.
Threads – This looked like a good new site, but like all new sites, it has missing features, an odd feed algorithm that does not promote people with similar interests, and after an initial burst of activity, traffic has dropped off. There is also the reality that it is part of the Meta universe, and Meta has a track record of not giving much of any damn about content moderation. I am not very active there. There are a lot of authors there, however.
BlueSky – This is growing on an invite-only basis, and just passed 1 million members. Unlike Spoutible, which seems to have been assembled from out-of-the-box Russian ripoff code costing $150, BlueSky is purpose-built by (mostly) ex-Twitter personnel. Which might be why it looks almost exactly like Twitter, with the exception that it currently has no DM feature. Mainstream authors have moved to BlueSky, led by leading authors like John Scalzi, Charlie Stross, Neil Gaiman and Stephen King. There are a number of romance authors, but it is not clear that this is where romance and erotica authors will end up. I finally got into the site 2 weeks ago after being on the Wait List for 4 months.
Counter.Social – I continue on that site, which is becoming more and more like The Well, in that it is dominated by substantive discussion. There are authors, musicians and artists there in equal abundance. The site has 175k users, and like The Well, I do not expect it to ever be a mainstream site. However, I can certify that there is NO SPAM, and assholes last no more than 72 hours before they get booted.
Mastodon – That continues in background as backstop for people who prefer a more leisurely (and in some cases, deeper) interaction experience. The good news is that the UI deficiencies are being addressed by the new Elk desktop client, and several new Android and iOS clients. However, the sites for romance and erotica authors remain fragmented, with no single site having any critical mass of authors operating in those spaces.
Instagram – part of Meta. I have a presence there, but more to ring-fence my pen name.
Facebook – HELL NO.
Right now, I am 25% Twitter (reducing), 25% Counter.Social, 25% BlueSky (trickling upwards) and 25% Threads and Mastodon.