Where to Find Me on Social Media

UPDATED 8/25/2023: I am on Vero now, primarily as a photography account.

Here is the current rundown of where I can be found on social media, keeping in mind that this site right here will always be my main base of online operations. Until I reach a point in life where I cannot own and maintain this space, I’ll be right here.

::  Then there’s my newsletter, Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars, to which I hope you’ll subscribe! I do not mirror newsletter content here, so if you read the newsletter you’ll get stuff you won’t get here! I have not as yet instituted paid content over there. I may, or I may open up paid content while basically keeping it all available for free…I’m not sure yet. (As of February 2023, I’ve only written three installments of the Dispatches on Substack, after I had to migrate there when my original newsletter service, Revue, closed down. This is still a learning process, but I’m enjoying myself.

::  One of the “new” kids 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 just showed up and started posting.

::  Another that’s very new is Hive Social. This one is, thus far, mobile-only. My user name there is “Jaquandor”.

::  Even newer is Spoutible. I’m there as well! I like their interface thus far. As of 2/11/23, I’ve been active on Spoutible for just a few days, so we’ll see. As with the other relative newbies, my usage is in fits-and-starts, but good luck to all of them!

::  And even newer than THAT is BlueSky Social, which is run by former Twitter people but on a more Mastondon-like model, I think. My handle over there is ksedinger.bsky.social, but for now that service is an invite-only thing. Users occasionally get “invite codes” which they then give to friends/cohorts/enemies they wish to keep close. I do not know how long it takes to get awarded with invite codes to give out, so…stay tuned, I suppose. (I think you have to have an account and be logged in to see profiles over there, currently.)

::  I am increasingly disappointed by Instagram, which is more and more run as a service geared to paying influencers than as a social network to build community through photos. Instagram was an absolute joy way back when, but now, the refusal of those running it to allow a chronological feed of people you follow, combined with their removal of the ability to search hashtags or common terms grouped by “recent” photos, is making Instagram an increasingly unusable service. I am still there, though–just posting less.

::  I am also on Threads, which is  Instagram’s answer to Twitter. As of late August, Threads has finally launched a web service, so it’s not just app-only.

::  I have been using Flickr for years, most recently as an image-hosting service for this site, but I’m using it more for posting actual content, especially now that I am studying photography seriously.

::  Very new on the block is Vero, where I am “kellysedinger”. (Why don’t I have the same username everywhere? Because consistency is boring and un-fun, that’s why!) Vero is also mobile-app only at this time, I believe. I am using Vero almost entirely as a photography display app, since it’s probably far too late for me to rebrand my Instagram account thusly. I am displaying only what I consider to be my best photos there. IG is basically photos of whatever pops to mind, whether it’s “quality” work with the camera or quickie phone snapshots, and Flickr is somewhere in the middle, plus the fact that I use Flickr to host images that appear on this site.

::  I do have a TikTok account, which I am current using to force myself, in a blunt-force trauma kind of way, to get more comfortable with making video content. I don’t know that I’ll ever be a natural at it, but if I can become less-obvious awkward, that’ll be a win!

::  I keep wanting to do more with my YouTube channel than just videos of me getting hit with pies, and I really will do something there, at some point, soon! But for now…yeah, it’s mostly just me getting hit with pies.

::  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.)

::  I don’t know if Pinterest counts as “social media” since there’s very little interaction there outside of pinning stuff, but I am there as well. Because its algorithm seems to be very aggressive in offering content similar to what you’ve been pinning already, its usefulness is a bit…low for me. Mostly it ends up being outfit inspiration involving overalls, pics or videos of forest streams, writers’ desks, and libraries and bookshops.

::  As of 8/12/2023, I have finally tired of Twitter to the point of calling it a day over there. I put my account on “Protected”, deleted the app from my phone and tablet, and deleted it from my Chrome bookmarks. I’ll probably pop in over there to post once in a great while, mainly to keep the account from being deactivated (I don’t rule out Dipshit Elon selling it at some later date when he decides he’s bored), but for now, I am no longer an active participant on Twitter.