rujasu

Likes old games and speedruns!

Non-binary, genderfluid, happily married. Retro gaming enthusiast. I speedrun a few games that you probably played once, enjoyed, and then totally forgot about. Staff for Power Up With Pride and volunteer for several other charity speedrunning events. Alys is pronounced like Alice, Rujasu is pronounced rue-JAH-sue.


Power Up With Pride
powerupwithpride.org/

MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

The fact that 76% of developers responding to the GDC survey still use twitter in the face of clear evidence that the site is crumbling to pieces and may go bankrupt at any moment is a real moment to me of like... man, inertia is a powerful thing

a mere 10% of respondents having tried any of the new alternatives is esp fascinating to me - I feel like there's a popular perception that bluesky is "the new twitter" among its users but clearly brands and marketers don't feel the same way

I can't help but wonder if, when twitter eventually fully collapses, we're going to see a moment where a huge number of devs are just... caught out and have to rebuild from scratch. Like if you were going to get out, the time to start getting out is "as soon as humanly possible". It feels actively dangerous to me to not be at least trying to build up elsewhere as a hedge.

I guess we'll see.


Turfster
@Turfster

Still using Twitter because inertia, sure, that one I can understand.
It's hard to change, especially if you've been using it for ages.
(And it's still the place with the widest... feature set? I guess? In one place? If and when they work on a given day.)

But... Who the fuck is promoting their games on Linkedin, the I'm A Big Business Businesser Person Grownup Roleplaying Site


eniko
@eniko

Waiting until twitter falls over completely or becomes a ghost town is so, so dangerous. I have 8.3k followers on mastodon mostly cause I had some first mover advantage during the migration.

I'm gonna talk about the fediverse here cause uh, well, cohost doesn't tell me how many people follow me and is just too new to see the kind of adoption fedi has. Bluesky also just doesn't have the numbers/activity imo. Feels a lot like the place people have as a backup in case twitter becomes completely non viable.

Anyway, lots of fellow devs used it for a little while, but like, not really? They mostly set up a cross poster, didn't bother to follow people who were actually using fedi, didn't try to form connections there, said nobody was interacting with them, and ditched to go back to twitter.

And yeah I had 13k followers on twitter but 8k on mastodon is effectively more like 30k on twitter. And like, those devs missed out on that. I did try and warn people that 3, 6, 12 months out from the big migration getting traction was gonna be much harder.

Thing is it's still much easier now to invest in being somewhere that isn't going to shit. When twitter does finally bite it though, it's gonna be so hard. The best time to get out of twitter was end of 2022, the second best time is now. The worst time will be when it becomes literally unusable.

It's baffling to me that so many devs, even marketing people, have literally no plan B even though social media marketing is so hugely important to indie gamedevs. Like, you know twitter is dying. It's not a secret. Why are you ignoring the lifeboats? Do you intend to go down with the ship? Cause I don't think that's an amazing strategy!


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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

i don't have energy to set up somewhere new and the "new places" all seemed just as bad or too complicated. cohost is the only one i liked enough to bother with.
if some dev or artist is looking at the new places and they don't consider cohost, then i totally understand just not going anywhere.
twitter isn't dead or anything, it still feels like the place to get quick info or namesearch your games. or if you want to see japanese posts.

I find it interesting how social media sites and forums declining and new ones becoming dominant used to be like, a regular, recurring part of everyday life, but at some point it all became so ossified that even attempting to use a new website seems alien to so many people. Can you imagine if circa 2010 76% of any demographic were still clinging to myspace and fewer than 10% had even considered twitter?

Omg im on the same boat. I started posting my art online since late 2008 and to me it was natural to run 4+ sites in tandem. Suddenly its crazy bananas to even consider ditching one (1) single website? I don't get it. Its like people never heard of "never putting all your eggs in one basket".

Yeah I used to sell on Etsy around the early 2010s, and the advice was always given to me was to be on as many different websites as possible. I was managing a Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, and dA, plus probably more all at the same time.

I can understand how that might be hard to manage if art isn't someone's only job, but even just occasionally posting on other platforms is a great way to start to branch out.

I suspect bluesky might be using invite only to help its growth. It makes it feel like it has some kind of cachet. Like, you personally have been invited into 'new twitter', where only the cool people are... never mind that there are invite codes posted on random websites all the time. And every time someone talks about having, or wanting, an invite - that's some nice organic advertising for the site. Facebook and gmail both did this during their growth phase as well.

almost certainly bluesky is, when i say "not the greatest idea for growth" i mean it isn't the greatest idea for growing brands that want to market on it, since inherently smaller userbase n stuff

in reply to @Turfster's post:

Every time I look at LinkedIn, I'm struck by the degree to which is seems to be populated entirely by Autumn People, but a part of me has always dared to dream that levity is possible there? Would someone going sufficiently stealth to promote their games there have better discovery, or possibly more fruitful click-through because a larger proportion of LinkedIn users have more money than sense, relative to most platforms? Even if it's impossible, I'd be curious to hear the story of anyone who has tried.