Lots of folks are creating posts like this, and I figure I should as well, since Elon Musk seems to be purposely managing Twitter in a way that reminds one of the Titanic and the Hindenburg. So, this is where I hang out online in the event that Twitter goes belly-up:
:: First, there’s this site right here! The one you’re looking at! And it’s unlike to get loused up by some billionaire unless I win a billion dollars and then screw it up myself. Seriously, though: If you are any kind of creator or you are a person who takes pride in creating good content online, you really really really are well-advised to own your own space on the Internets.
:: Then there’s my newsletter, which I hope you’ll all sign up for! Now, I haven’t heard anything at all, but…Revue, my newsletter service, is owned by Twitter, so I’m paying close attention to that situation.
:: The “new” kid on the block–which has been around for several years, but is seeing a new burst of interest as Elon Musk continues to make Twitter worse and worse–is Mastodon. I have no deep understanding of that site yet, but it is a bit on the “counterintuitive” side, so if you go there, give yourself some time. I don’t understand all of it, myself; it’s decentralized with several servers and I honestly don’t know what all of that means.
:: I continue to love Instagram, even if the people running it keep screwing it up by pushing it farther and farther away from the thing that made everybody love it in the first place: photos from people you follow, shown chronologically. I’m still a fan, though.
:: Speaking of photos, there’s also Flickr.
:: I do have a TikTok account, which I use sporadically because video is simply not my medium of choice, for the most part.
:: I have a Tumblr that I also use sporadically. I’m interested to see if Tumblr has a resurgence, though!
:: I have a Facebook page to which I very rarely post because Facebook has made getting your Page posts seen without paying them to actually show them to people almost impossible. I often think “I should do more with the Facebook page!”, and then I…don’t. (A Facebook page is not the same thing as a standard Facebook profile. You don’t “friend” a page, you just follow it or you don’t.)
As all of this folderol transpires with regard to Twitter, I’m seeing lots of people offer thoughts on how it feels to see the site apparently going through possible death throes. Coupled with that are people complaining about learning new platforms and how clunky and difficult they are, compared with Twitter. This gives me pause, because I remember Twitter being a very clunky experience at first. I didn’t join until several years in, but even then Twitter wasn’t entirely intuitive and had a lot of growing pains. Remember when people could link their Twitter to their Facebook profiles, so Facebook filled up with tweets? Including reply tweets, which made Facebook suddenly very difficult to read?
Another thought is that the social media landscape has been mostly stable for the last ten to, say, 14 years. Newsletters and content sites like Medium and Substack have arisen, partly to give new infrastructure to the generation of long-form content now that blogs have receded in public consciousness, but that’s about it. Compare that to the 2000s, when we went from Usenet newsgroups and Web-based bulletin boards to blogs to MySpace to Tumblr to Facebook to Twitter to Instagram, all in the space of less than a decade. I think that for a lot of us, our “adapting to new social media platforms” muscles have atrophied.
Anyway, though, that’s where you can mainly find me. Or avoid me! Your choice!