Just gonna crank it up to full blast since most of these thoughts have been sitting in an unformatted text file for weeks.
I won't get into the weeds about the specifics, nor do I want to, but my day job has been tied to social media for coming up on 9 years now, and I have some thoughts about where to go from here. Before I get into that, though, it's important to take your own needs and perspective into account. It'd be nice to consider what I have to say here, but don't take it as gospel - all advice, including my own, should be considered and evaluated, not blindly followed.
This is mostly my thoughts about the slow collapse of Twitter, the rise of X (you may not want to hear it, but what Twitter was before and what X is now are two very distinctly different platforms) and what you can do next.
That's as good a starting point as any. Let's talk about X and Twitter.
"Twitter still works just fine"
The fact that X is still operating is something of a small miracle that I'd say is more due to the diligence of the people who used to work at Twitter more than it is the people who still currently work at X. (Not to demean the people who are there now, as many of them are likely on work visas or don't have much of another choice. I'm not here to bash someone's choice of job.) At the same time, we've all seen what the last year has brought, or what it hasn't, in some cases, as the ouroboros loop of people appearing smart because they're rich and appearing rich because they're smart prevents others from calling in debts.
I would not call many parts of the site functional at this point, at least not in the way that it worked before. Yes, the site still runs, but your ability to use it as you want to has gone down drastically. And I certainly don't see a path to it improving as bits and pieces are carved off or stop working with nobody to do much more than maintain it, or worse, having those parts be removed to serve one man's desires.
"I'll just ride it out until it gets better or dies"
Let's rip that "it might get better" Band-Aid off right now. Twitter has historically lost money nearly every year for well over a decade, and X is loaded down with billions more in debt from a clownshoe buying it and loading it right back up with the debt that he used to buy the damn thing. The best he can hope for is to use it as a free money scheme by buying back the debt, which he very well may do, but that doesn't solve for X being a money hole.
He's charging $8 a month for the privilege of basic features and visibility. He's toying with the idea of making the "public town square" a service you have to pay for to use, because his interest was never in creating a place for everyone to speak, just a place for himself and the people he likes. Think about that. And I mean REALLY think about it. What's your plan if X makes you start paying to use it a month from now? A week from now? Tomorrow? Do you have a backup plan in place if all those connections you currently have on Twitter simply disappear?
"Nothing else has the same reach"
I can not tell you how many conversations I've had to navigate in both personal and work environments about if an account or a post is being "shadowbanned". It honestly frustrates me to see people insist that they have a wider audience on X while also having to navigate a sea of perceived rules about what you should or should not post, or how you should post it based on The Algorithm or a hidden rule set that nobody can know is real or not. This was true of Twitter, regardless of if those rules were real or not - everyone felt like they had to follow them.
Don't use hashtags. Or do use hashtags, but only use the correct number of them. If you need to include a link, don't link it in your main post, have it in a reply to your post because you might be deboosted if you include a link, despite replies being routinely hidden on Twitter and now, on X, being buried entirely by blue checkmarks or actively removing context around a post if you're logged out. Everything you actually want to tell people should be in a separate post that's easy to bury in case the Shadow Wizard Council decides that your post doesn't meet the right criteria. You can't tell me that's not an absurd way to handle showing people your art, or trying to sell something to make a living, or simply telling people about your latest video or livestream.
People who benefited from the algorithm years ago will continue to benefit from it. People with lots of followers will continue to get lots of followers because the line is already going up, and it's good when the line goes up, so algorithms will prioritize those lines continuing to go up. If your line hasn't been going up to this point, I've got some real bad news for you. On a similar point...
"I'll lose my current followers"
If this is a sticking point, I honestly don't blame you. We've all been sold on the gamification of making a number go up. We've all been convinced that having more followers = better, because it must mean more people are seeing our stuff despite having to navigate a maze of dos and do-not-dos when it comes to posting. But growth can't be infinite, despite what late-stage capitalism wants from all of us as it grinds us into dust.
More importantly, though, you should sit down and ask yourself what your end goal is. Is it to get more followers? What does that do for you, exactly? Are people engaging with what you do? Having conversations? Making connections? I don't have an answer for you here, but if number of followers are a concern, I suggest you take a look at who those followers are and what they're doing. How many people are engaging with your post? And I mean actually engaging - sharing what you're doing, commenting on it, doing something with it besides clicking a "Like" button.
To be clear, I'm not going to judge you for your thoughts on this. It still claws at me, too. We're all victims in some way to this sort of gamification of other people. I do think if followers are a concern, though, it's worth asking yourself what you're actually losing.
"I'll lose my connections"
This one is, strictly, true. A lot of communities are going to flare out or fall apart, and connections will be lost. I absolutely understand the feeling of inertia that makes people want to cling to the familiar. But at some point, it will be gone. That could be X itself failing, or it could be that it becomes such a toxic, unsafe place to be that there's really no recourse but to leave.
What is worthwhile, though, is starting those conversations about rebuilding elsewhere, and making sure you have other ways to keep in touch. Discord (and Matrix, an open-source alternative) exist. Forums still exist. If nothing else, email exists. Social media has changed a lot of structures in terms of how we connect with each other, but it hasn't outright replaced other methods. In most cases, though, you need to be the one to take those steps, and maybe bring a few people with you - don't count on someone else to do it for you. You gotta be the change you want to see.
I think that covers all of my thoughts on that, so let's move on to the next part.
"Okay smartass, so what should I do?"
Glad you asked. I always recommend diversifying. Twitter was a fun hellhole, good for making connections and having a one-stop shop, but X is a terrifying hellhole that is increasingly designed to feed the ego of a single person and his libertarian, hateful, and "I'm not a fascist, but" views. I would like this to be a teachable moment that no one website, app, whatever is going to be around forever, and more importantly, platforms are not your friends.
Independent sites like cohost (where you're reading this now!), Pillowfort, and the Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, and so on) are good places to be in my opinion. The Fediverse is a bit more resilient in that there's no single owner, but that's a whole different discussion. Yes, there will be a learning curve. No, it won't be quite as simple as what Twitter used to offer. There's pretty much alternatives for everything - PeerTube instead of YouTube, Owncast instead of Twitch, Matrix instead of Discord, and so on. You'll have to roll up your sleeves and give yourself an hour - or a few hours - to get into some of this stuff, but it is possible, and in the case of something like Owncast, it's entirely yours.
But ask yourself - and I mean really ask yourself - if what Twitter offered was that easy to begin with, particularly if you're looking for that most nebulous of concepts, growth. Did you enjoy trying to crack an algorithm? Did you find it interesting navigating a maze of what and how and when you should post? Were people picking up what you put down, or was it lost adrift in a sea of people pumping out endless content for the sake of making content?
Places like cohost and federated platforms are free of algorithms, free of hidden rules. And that's worth a hell of a lot more in my opinion when you can focus on making what you want to create and knowing other people will find it based on shared interests.
You can also be the one to start rebuilding your communities, and encourage others to join you. That's probably one of the scariest parts, but it's no good waiting for others to go. I'm not trying to Alpha/Beta this, just someone's gotta take the lead on these things, otherwise there's the potential that everyone's going to sit around and wait for someone else to do it first. You may have heard of this one before, but it's like when there's been an accident - telling a group of people standing by "someone call an ambulance" means nobody takes action, while telling someone specific "call an ambulance" gives them purpose and a reason for action. Alternatively, you can be the one to call the ambulance.
It's okay to ask for help - hell, it's encouraged. You don't have to do these things alone. It's typically better to bring a few people with you, anyways.
For creative folks, I also recommend looking into a newsletter (email still exists, remember?) or, if you can swing it, a website. Websites can be tricky, and you'll need to do some research, but having a space that you own is the absolute best way to make sure your online footprint survives damn near everything. There's lots of registrars out there, including Dreamhost, GoDaddy, Namecheap, and others. Any reputable registrar will replace publicly visible registration information with their own info so that your private info is hidden, but do your research before signing up for anything. That said, hosting is separate and can get expensive, so be mindful of pricing and if this is what you want to do.
Still, I'd recommend it if it's not cost prohibitive. You can set up a site via Wordpress, a flat-file CMS, or good old-fashioned HTML / CSS, there's plenty of templates out there you can use. Linktree or Carrd are also good starter options, but, as a reminder, platforms are not your friends. I'll always recommend a personal website, as that's your space that you own.
I've rambled long enough, so some closing thoughts. I don't think much about numbers - what matters to me is that people see and appreciate what I do, and that's good enough for me.
But if you want some data? I had an art account on Twitter for around 9 years. (You currently can't view on X while logged out now anyways because it hasn't hit some popularity threshold. Also as mentioned at the outset, I'm deleting all the posts and, after that, the account itself.) It took me less than 6 months of actively using my account on Mastodon.art to fly past that number, and over the course of about a year of use it's close to doubled the amount of followers I had on Twitter / X. I didn't do anything special to do that; I just used a few relevant hashtags for my posts. I've had a Tumblr for even longer, and cohost regularly exceeds the total number of interactions I'd get on my posts there (when I still used it).
Plus, I've been able to use those same tags to search for other people and find their art. As a result of both of these things, I've had genuine conversations and made connections with people, something that never happened on Twitter or Tumblr. (For the record, I don't know how many followers I have on cohost, I don't know where to find the number, and I don't particularly care, either.)
I guess what I'm trying to get at with this last bit is that it finally feels like I'm starting to find some communities again, not an endless stream of people all trying to make an audience of one another in search of endless growth. And not only is that pretty damn powerful, but it has, funnily enough, been great for discoverability and, yes, I'm gonna say it, growth. The thing that was missing, in my eyes, was our ability to connect to each other based on shared interests.
Anyways. That's all for now. Ride rails, punch fascists, and catch you on the flip.
