The Social (Media) Dilemma

as a person that has a mid-to-moderate social media addiction: twitter is borderline unusable these days, and i don't really appreciate the amount of Incredibly Evil Things its been pushing as of late. tumblr is chill, and the lack of shoved-in-your-face algorithm makes it a lot better for me. i like to sit in silence and reblog and say absolutely nothing. main con: unbelievably racist, in a lot of ways even more than twitter is, but in ways that no one seems to understand or acknowledge. i've bounced off of tiktok the few times i've used it.

as a person that runs social media accounts for work: twitter is everything to me.

the meat of my inquiry, or like, fuel to making this thread. i've been thinking about moving back to twitter, but i've also been really really unsure about it. have been "out" of it for a year ish by now, having left around the time it got banned in my country for a bit, then just recently having made a private account to blabber notes and look at posts other friends in there send my way. but it kind of also seems like a good idea to have a public account there anyways, both to reach more people and to keep up with a lot of others that aren't in as many places online as before.

though the only thing that drives me back is not being able to keep up with being in too many places at once, since it would be hard to "crosspost" to so many places, either that or having separate "audiences" here and there. that issue and the other more well known one, related to twitter.

i'm quite content with my current socials, mostly my tumblr account. and it's not like i actively use any of them other than to share art. but still, very unsure about all of it. just airing thoughts out here.

there is no good social media, only good friends.

a lot of my investment in these forums on a personal level is the desire to get the fuck off of twitter. nothing good comes of being on twitter. but most of my audience is there... and so i hope these forums will slowly leech users from twitter and to here. twitter is a shithole with few redeeming qualities and those redeeming qualities are disappearing faster than ever. i also keep up a tumblr presence - it is my go-to doomscrolling site - but tumblr is, as mentioned. pretty unspokenly racist. the upside is that nobody gives a fuck what happens there. "oh, they said something on tumblr-" who gives a fuck. the premise is self-defeating.

that said, as a poster, my minecraft-esque fallen kingdom is cohost, which was tumblr for hipsters. considering tumblr was already tumblr for hipsters... bad sign. but i loved cohost. no numbers, no engagement drive, very few dark patterns. it deserved a better culture than it got, which was mostly "the seattle of the internet", circling the discourse drain forever, with the same sins as tumblr. it had a deep streak of unspoken racism that forms when your userbase is 95% white, it had a streak of transmisogyny. but as a site itself, there's a lot to learn from, both its successes and its failures. my beautiful, naive dream is that we can channel the best parts of cohost into the forums, where i think the effortposter spirit will thrive.

re: kevin and victoria.

ouhhhh... good replies good replies. i get that a lot! or at least hoping i get it. not being as inclined to be verbose about stuff like this might have stunted me in ways. either way, it makes a lot of sense.

i'm glad that most of the friends i've made on these social medias i've been able to gather contact in other areas, mostly discord (even though that one also has it's huge amounts of ups and downs), so i'm not as inclined to be very post-y, even if i ramble a lot whenever given the ability to. and also glad that spaces like this can form up every so often so i'm not as inclined to look at feeds 24/7 for a chance of making those connections with friends again. still, i wish there wasn't such a need for it in the first place! at least on my part.

maybe it's some odd, horrible version of FOMO, but seeing this like, nigh necessity to be in certain parts of the web, either just being in them or having to be active in them, to be "in it" for stuff, especially for niches like fandoms and odd circles and all. especially when a lot of places are just not good to be in a lot of the time/for prolonged periods of time, like mentioned with twitter and tumblr (though i never really knew to which extent with the latter. huh! good to know).

still a bit unsure on which direction to go about with it. having to think about stuff like my "reach" and "presentability" (?) now that i need to get my art commissions game on. but this is very good to read either way.

tumblr is my favorite platform, its just pretty chill and theres a lot of little functions other places dont have that i enjoy, like being able to reblog something multiple times and ofc being able to ramble in the tags :33 plus last time i checked some of my main fandoms (life series, hermitcraft) primarily live on there, and im pretty much on social media just for fandom so it works out! i like it.

twitter on the other hand... twitter scares me LOL i think its just because theres So Many people there im afraid of being perceived or something?? who knows. its just scary. i did leave for a while in favour of bsky, and as lovely as the latter is its SO EMPTY. eventually the deltarune fandom + some other stuff drew me back onto twt so im active there again. i also tried using instagram in 2023 but i hated it and never went back, so its just tumblr and twitter and this forum, if it counts lol

Im also a tumblr user, like nearly everyone else here lol. This isnt due to favoring it over sites like twitter or bluesky, I use it mostly because I dont use anything else. I used to use twitter but have largely ditched it due to the muskening and the nazi problem (I use it to check up on a few cartoonists I follow), and I barely use bluesky despite wanting to, and I hate how instagram/snapchat/tiktok you're encouraged to use your face so I dont touch it.

This has its upsides and downsides. At the very least we have this forum.

I've been on and off social media for most of my life. Most of them(twitter, instagram, facebook) I just cannot get into. The only ones I've ever been able to get myself to use for extended periods of time are reddit and tumblr. I don't use either anymore because redditors tend to annoy me too much and the politics tumblr makes me feel like shit. I don't really know what it is about tumblr that does this, as I am able to read the news and political theory fine, but I just can't stand it on tumblr for whatever reason.

i've had this thought for a very long time that one bad tumblr post is worth 5000 bad tweets. if i see a bad tweet, i forget about it within the hour. when i see a bad tumblr post? i think about it for literal years. it haunts you. i don't know what it is.

but yeah, re: feeling exposed on twitter, my honest feeling is kinda the opposite? which is the main reason why i use it: i love having a locked account really badly. if tumblr added locked accounts? it'd be over. it'd be so over. no competition.

feel the same way about feeling exposed and wanting locked accounts but for bluesky. i'm pretty ok with the app at the moment, but a lot of its unspoken rules and general formality drove me away from posting as much as i did on my twitter days (though i could also say the same when i first started posting on tumblr, that quickly went away after a bit and i just post whatever whenever there now). if i had the option to make my accounts private there i would do it in a heartbeat.

@kevin Tumblr's had password locked accounts since forever. Just don't make it "password123"

dammit. you got me.

Bluesky to me has no identity outside of being Twitter, But Not! and they don't even have some of the best features of twitter like private accounts or bookmarks or hell stuff like circles

it's just nothing to me, I don't know why I even bother to use it. I made one for art when I deactivated my twitter but I don't really care about using it for art, there's better places for art like Newgrounds.

Twitter is a fucking tar pit website literally all it did was make me paranoid

I only actually like using tumblr. but i still wish they had twitter-style private accounts or they made it so your mutuals or something were the only people that could see locked posts. idk the password locked blogs have always functioned strangely to me, they should be changed to be more like twitter's private accounts

well. it looks like nobody's said it yet and I was thinking about making a thread about it but here the opportunity stands before me.

Yall know about. The Fediverse?

you might have heard of "mastodon" but mastodon is actually the software that many sites use and theres plenty more than that! you may have also heard of "peertube" in the talks about avoiding youtube thats also part of the fediverse. The thing that makes the fediverse great is that each instance is run by a different person and has a different mod team. What that means is that its shielded from some of the (imo) worst aspects of the big social medias. Mainly that mods are real actual people and generally can/will react to bad actors in a timely manner, most of the popular software used is open sourced so even if say the main guy enshitifies things theres forks and other options to go to (or just not update I guess), and that one can go down but they won't All go down, you can even migrate your account (provided both instances are compatible for that) to a new place if yours gets sunset. I'm on dragon.style and I love it! however the admin has expressed frustrations with maintenance on the backend and may close shop if things get worse. and I've already scouted out potential new "homes" theres plush.city, denden.world, wetdry.world, and many others! (there also used to be a couple of homestuck themed instances that even had built in quirk tools but im pretty sure most went belly-up. sad!)

If you are a tech savvy person you can even start your own instance! it can be solo or you can invite friends (or just make it open!) I know that joining an instance seems to be a big hurdle for people but I must stress: its easier than you think. some places may have a review process as a way to deter bots, but don't let that scare you off!! just go for it!!! if you want more info and a beginners guide look here: https://fedi.tips/ and here is a tool that can be used to find you an instance to start out on https://fedidb.com/welcome (i recommend clicking the small communities toggle, the Big Instances tend to have moderation issues and are sometimes blocked by other smaller instances because of it) and remember! you dont HAVE to stay if you dont vibe with the instance and happen to catch wind of something better. you can just Move

sadly, as far as im aware, there is no fediverse tumblr clone... the format of tumblr is by far my favorite way to Experience social media. the tagging system is Perfection... and so many tumblr clones fail and go bankrupt because its such a media-heavy platform style (which is why federation would help because now everyone shares a tiny bit of the costs)

fedi is pretty great but you tread the line between stumbling into a software that's a slog to use and a software that's used by people who *really* want to make sure your entire fedi experience is talking about said software

sharkey's pretty great for user expression though, funny markdown settings give you a lot of things to play around with in formatting and it supports a whole bunch of post media types like being able to embed flashes via ruffle (* with the caveat that your browser may not play nicely with embedded ruffle instances, fairly enough). not to mention actually having a tolerable UI with some decent settings for user well-being and thereabouts (*grumbling vaguely at mastodon*)

as a community though. fedi's a mixed bag - we're set up on transfem.social as an instance and it's been . fairly resilient over time but ymmv

very diverse at least, but there's also a fair share of bad faith actors scattered across the network who end up stirring a lot of the same shit that's worked elsewhere and so every once in a while you get to see everyone groan a collective sigh of "oh my god not this shit again" when someone tries getting momentum to cut off a primarily transfem instance, or someone really wants to make their personal beef everyone else's problem and back it up in insincere language

the actual Posting is ballin though

also re: autumnwyvern

pretty sure wafrn is the fedi software that pulls after tumblr the most but i think that's still more in personal passion project territory than something widely adopted .w.

RE: talentshredder

Seconding the idea that bluesky feels like "twitter but not!". Seems a bit like this meme if Im honest.

Christ that brian is huge. Apologies

How do you use twitter. There aren't any boards or threads dedicated to any specific topic, no one ever uses tags... like how am I suppose to talk about homestuck on twitter. Do I follow Homestuck talking heads and pray that the algorithm shows me people that also like homestuck? Insane website. It's beyond my comprehension. Same goes for Snapchat and Instagram, these modern social media websites confuse me.

@666666t

ooh I havent heard of that one at All. cuuuute. interesting it has like built in bsky bridging? my admin like just unblocked bridgy but its kinda clunky Im truly not sure if I have it set up right lmao

also in regards to the community wrinkles I think the power to block whole instances on either the user level or for the whole instance is really powerful in terms of curating your community and experience. bad actors are always gonna pop up and try to get involved but the ability to cut them off entirely once they make themselves known is v nice

I wish tumblr worked for me. Twitter is awful and basically unusable. Tumblr doesn't work on my browser which is, really annoying bc I do mostly like it. I guess the social media i use most is bluesky, but honestly I haven't been checking it much since using the forums. It's not that bad tho.