Shorkgirl

That Queer Shark 🏳️‍⚧️☭∍⧽⧼∊🦈

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Oh Yeah, Our name is Aellae on Discord.

A House of Madness
If I am not I
Then who am I
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MelloMakes
@MelloMakes

Going to try to keep this short, but it's the seventh-or-so time I've seen people claim they're going to move to other platforms or methods in response to the latest stupidity, and I'm once again having some feelings watching people not address their Twitter addiction. I'm going to try to take it from a different angle this time, because of recent changes with the site.

Do you know how hard it has become to look at the website Twitter if you are not a Twitter user? I'm usually greeted with a sign-up screen now (they clearly haven't been able to turn that feature all the way off since implementing it) but if I do manage to actually get a tweet, I no longer see the thread it's a part of or the replies to it. If I manage to reach someone's profile, I no longer see their most recent posts, just a random assortment.

If you've had something happen in your life or accomplished something special to you and not talked about it elsewhere, I have not heard about it. Half of the time, I cannot access tweets people share on Discord without reaching a "Sorry, something went wrong." page and I've stopped asking what has been linked because I can only stand to trot out "I'm not on Twitter" so many times. You're writing notes on a sinking ship and then asking me to put my scuba gear back on, but I'd rather just keep breathing fresh air.

They had something like 300 million users at their peak, right? We know they have less now. And everyone outside of that is having this experience. So I hope the art you're posting has tons of winks and nods to dying 2023 Twitter specifically in it, because that's your audience. And even if I did have an account, I know that algorithmic shit is still there, right? So I'm still extremely unlikely to see you. But despite all these barriers and the rapidly narrowing appeal of the platform, this is somehow still the place where people are putting out their most urgent, passionate and true feelings--the online space where "it counts"?

I'm not going to act like deleting Twitter is an easy thing. I pored over analytics for months and got used to the other communication methods I had with my listeners before deciding to deactivate mine. For months after that, I had fears about my outreach that were only put to rest with my recent album release going fine without a Twitter. But what it came down to for me was, even with my comparatively small following, I did not want to be part of the draw for people continuing to use a fascist micro-blogging site.

If you're there posting your stuff without also putting it elsewhere, you are creating a reason for people to stay and look. And because you're reading this on cohost, chances are that you have people close to you who are either trying to use Twitter less or have left it behind entirely. Help them out. Stop letting it be your everything. Look at your online footprint, hell, your existence outside of what you put on Twitter. Ask yourself if it's really detailed enough to define you for people you want to connect with. If it's not, then I have bad news, but it's the part of you a lot of us are limited to seeing.


WobblyPython
@WobblyPython

I just wanna' dogpile in on this one and just address the hard truth of that related question which I keep hearing.

Have you considered continuing to create whatever it was that created that following to begin with? Just... elsewhere? If your following is really something that is a result of your continued creative process then it'll show up wherever. Finding and maintaining an audience is part of the business of art. We all struggle for it.

The reality of the situation is that if you're creating something that is enriching or engaging to the people that are consuming it then they will find it. If you aren't creating something sufficiently meaningful to garner the attention you need to keep making it, then you might consider why you're making your art and who you are making it for, and even what you're making.

Are you really making these weird little shitposts just for yourself and perfectly coincidentally you simply must have an audience to consume it? Or are you making an ultra niche product and you are unsure where your consumer base is going to relocate to? Are you actually a niche sub-creator whose audience is not truly their own but tags along to some kind of other major centralized interest group? Are you posting exclusively for the benefit of assholes who get upset when you don't post about your sub-niche and instead do things that are meaningful to you? Do people care about you or do they care exclusively about your contribution to some monolithic thing you have no real agency over?

Are you an artist building a brand and producing a unique piece of art or are you part of the unpaid media wing of a multi billion dollar international brand? Are you super removed from your own posting? Is your page only a "Gallery page" where you present your hard sweat and tears to recreate characters from popular media? Is that exclusively what you are to your audience?

The websites we post on are ultimately filehosts for the things we are producing. You get to choose what table you're putting your stuff on. Folks that won't leave the neo nazi table probably aren't the ones driving your business. You do not have to care about them. Most importantly they are not your audience. They are twitter's audience. The people you should be focusing on are your creative peers and your vocal supporters.

I use this website because people like 2Mello are here. Cool creatives with vibes that I like, making things I think are cool. Folks doing things adjacent to what I'm doing. There's insight and expertise by the truckload just laying around and it's good for me. I'm here because I'm chasing content that is good and enriching. I'm not just sitting in a chair with my mouth open hoping an algorithm puts something tasty in there today. I have agency, I have value, and most importantly the folks who find value in what we do will find it wherever we post it.

Eventually the content scraping AI article hellsites will start stealing posts from here and repackaging them like they did with all the popular sites. There's gonna' be an article that says "THIS COHOST ARTIST HAS BEEN PLAYING TURN BASED PONG WITH REPOSTERS AND YOU AREN'T GONNA BELIEVE WHO'S WINNING!" and the kind of guy who wants to be first in line on the next hot thing will make an account, and they will find you.

tl;dr: If you want people to care about your work, make things worth caring about and they'll find it. You're not a victim, you're an artist, and this is the job.


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in reply to @MelloMakes's post:

  1. I don't think people are really talking enough about the addiction aspect of it which is absolutely a thing
  2. I had no idea you were on here and I'm glad this ended up on my timeline

i'm in a strange state with twitter and this post is contributing to those turning gears. i no longer post on twitter. i basically never go to my actual feed and haven't for around a year (maybe more?). but i do use it to look at people's posts.
i want to hear about the jobs people are tweeting about mainly. my current job came from a tweet, and yes it's more or less random because i apply to lots of jobs that aren't on twitter (or at least not primarily), but it's hard to shake that when i know that the not-logged-in experience is radio silence or login popups. i don't think this is a hugely helpful addition to this great chost, but it's what i'm mulling over even more from reading it, so thanks.

The way I've been seeing it lately seems like it's people riding the outrage waves to remind everyone that they can be found elsewhere, taking advantage of the algorithm to get the eyes of their followerbase as much as possible to prepare for when it's well and truly dead.

Having said that, my use had steadily declined, especially after tweetdeck's gutting, the more inconvenient it is the better, I don't want workarounds or bandaids, I want the experience to be as revolting and raw as possible so that I may well and truly give up on it once and for all.

I never really got into Twitter. It doesn't support RSS, so I had to either use third-party solutions like Nitter or take the time to log in just to follow people. I like solutions like Mastodon, Cohost, Movim, Tumblr, etc. They support RSS, so I can just see everything from my reader, just signing in if I want to respond to a post

I finally just locked my Twitter account and posted that I was leaving about a month or so ago, I barely used it anyway except for scrolling and the few people I only saw there I can contact on Discord if I want to. I feel much better hanging out here, or following creators I like on the sites they post to. And my favorite thing about Cohost as opposed to Mastodon, where I'd tried to flee to a couple times before but not felt comfortable enough to post into the void like I do here, is that it's a proper longform post style. The whole "character limit to keep things brief" always sat wrong with me. It's not going to "respect people's time" if they're still on a site constantly shoveling more brief posts at them and with huge argument chains in replies. It's just going to pollute discussions by forcing people to compromise and compress their arguments into witty soundbites or memes that probably don't actually explain jack shit, even if they try to make a thread. (And paying extra to increase that character limit doesn't work when the site is still designed for the small scale posts, especially when the people most likely to pay for it have the worst takes.) If you're going to blame someone typing a "wall of text" or posting a two-hour video for "not respecting your time", maybe you should respect your own time more and be the one in control of what you actually consume, rather than just complaining about what a platform shoves at you because you feel compelled to constantly take it.

Sorry for replying to your rant with another rant, but I just feel so freed here and I think more people should realize that they don't need Twitter. It's always bothered me that people give up on trying to quit it so fast. Being on Twitter isn't the default. And that 300 million peak users figure puts that in perspective - the population of the US alone is 331.9 million (as of 2021 per a quick Google search), so no, not everyone is on there. It's okay to promote yourself elsewhere and not feel beholden to one site for everything. People got their work noticed before Twitter, even online. People get their work noticed without Twitter even now. You aren't bound to the birdcage. Be free.

Do you know how hard it has become to look at the website Twitter if you are not a Twitter user?

RIGHT??? it's honestly infuriating trying to engage with friends who post twitter memes, because 9/10 times if I say I can't actually see the content, they refuse to post a screenshot or something

at this point I feel -more- disconnected from my friends who actively use twitter, because even if you ignore the whole "I'm not comfortable with a platform that's outright hostile to my existence as a human being" shit, there's just this utter disregard for the experience of people not using twitter

It feels kinda bad sometimes :/

This post motivated me to log out of the website on my phone's browser (I had already uninstalled the app but that deterrent has been failing recently). I really hope this finally keeps me off Twitter. Thanks for sharing.

I really appreciate where you're coming from, but as someone who's cross-posted to several platforms for years, Twitter has and largely still does outperform literally any other social media site in terms of income. While some people certainly have an addiction, I'm sure many people are in the position I've been in (no longer using it but left my account active) because it still translates to far more actual dollars (not just winks and nods). I love the vibes on cohost but I can't pay artists or printers with vibes. I'm glad you've done the months of research and course correction to make the (objectively good and correct) decision to move off twitter, and I hope more people are able to put in that same amount of time, effort, and energy to do the same—but I get that not everyone has.

I get it too, and it's an anomaly and privilege that I was able to leave and have things stay roughly the same. I wanted this to be more about people updating and putting time into their Twitter more than any platform (or exclusively) to the point where I feel I've lost my connection with them by leaving. Or how a lot of communication of news and humor is done by dropping a twitter link and nothing else. The way things are, it feels like I can either participate online with most stuff walled off from me and reminding me of what I don't have, or opt back in to all of it along with the severe mental health problems and time sink it caused me. I'd like some middle ground where people see how we feel walled off and meet us halfway. It's one thing to log off or stop posting and looking, it's another to not have an account for 7 months and become increasingly aware of how much you're surrounded by pathways back into twitter. I don't want to judge people who are on the website, but I do want them to look at how they use it and how they hold up its relevancy by assuming anyone can access it.

Oh, for sure, and twitter has only become increasingly hostile and unusable, especially to non-users. I agree that if folks are only dropping a link to a tweet and that's it, that can be super frustrating. A few groups I'm in are asking themselves the questions, "we've always used twitter for [blank], so what do we do now?" And then there's a lot of caution around ending up on a platform that's worse (I'm reminded of the short-lived Vero we were excited about for all of ten minutes before learning the owner was a crook). A lot of rebuilding of habits and ecosystems, and I really hope more folks do that on more platforms like cohost.