This week, as announced a couple of months ago, the Twitter feed on my blog’s sidebar finally broke. It was removed to put it out of its misery.
This came after a fresh week of chaos at Twitter itself. Last week Elon Musk announced that you had to be logged in to view tweets. Which for most purposes, made linking to them from other places on the web, like blog posts, mostly pointless. The policy was reversed a couple of days later, but given how quietly that was done, I have to wonder how long it will last.
But that was really overshadowed by the announcement of rate limiting, essentially limiting how many tweets a logged in user could view. Of course, it was ten times higher for paying customers.
The result is that signups at Mastodon skyrocketed, as it normally does when these antics happen. Mastodon now has over thirteen million users. Although it’s not clear how many of them are active.
But Mastodon’s latest surge was completely overshadowed by Meta announcing the release of Threads, their own Twitter clone. Essentially you get a Threads account by logging in with your Instagram one, which allows porting over of connections. Instagram has over a billion users, so it probably shouldn’t be surprising that within a couple of days, over 70 million people signed up.
I actually didn’t have an Instagram account, but I decided to get one so I could try Threads: (my profile: selfawarepatterns, in case anyone wants to threadify). My overall reaction so far is that it’s a very incomplete product. Web access at this point is read only; you have to use a mobile app to actually participate. There are also no lists, hashtags, direct messaging, or even just a straight chronological feed from your followed accounts.
The only feed is an algorithmic one, which frankly is pretty awful. Even after following more than a dozen people, the feed insists on shoving posts (threads?) from sports, music, and reality show stars at me, along with the occasional politician. Gross. Finding posts from the people I’m actually following is hit or mess, mostly miss. The easiest way to find the posts I care about seems to be digging into the settings and accessing the profiles I’m following directly, which is painful.
So why bother? Well, the service is promising ActivityPub integration in the future. ActivityPub is the protocol Mastodon uses to communicate between servers, as well as with the rest of the Fediverse. Of course, that promise doesn’t mean Meta will necessarily integrate in a manner that the existing Fediverse will allow federation with Threads. (There’s been a fierce debates on Mastodon about this.)
But the main reason is that Threads has a higher chance than anything else of eventually filling the role played by Twitter. I’m not happy about this. Personally, my preferred solution remains Mastodon, and honestly my feed there is much calmer and far more intelligent than most of what Threads is currently coughing up. The problem is getting enough people interested. Ultimately a social network’s success hinges on who joins it. So, with a lot of reservations, it makes sense to at least establish a foothold on Threads.
I’m also on the waiting list for Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky, but I’ve been there for months. It’s taking them so long to get off the ground that it’s beginning to feel like their moment may have passed. Still I will check it out if they ever let me in. (Or if anyone sends an invite.) And finally I’m on Post (SelfAwarePatter), but not really doing anything there.
And of course you can always find me here on the blog, which remains the center of my online presence. Given the meltdowns happening on many social media platforms (see also Reddit for its own recent drama), and the fact that social media companies are increasingly reminding us that they are not a public service, it seems more prudent than ever for anyone who cares about what they produce to have their own web presence.
Of course, you get more reach by participating in social media. (At least that’s the theory.) But social media appears to be in the process of fragmenting all over the place.
Have you had any experience on any of these platforms? Or others not mentioned?
SelfAwarePatterns 
I can’t help you with the other platforms. And I guess my use of social media is not typical. The only reason I ever got on twitter was the idea that you could tweet messages, and they would go to the people following you. I only ever use the “following” tab, and never the “for you” tab. I find new people to follow from likes and retweets, and I unfollow if the signal to noise ratio is too low.
As such, I am pretty much unaffected by the new problems w/ twitter. I have not yet reached a viewing limit. My only fear is people disappearing from the app without my knowing, of which I know of one example.
So I appreciate your delving into this world and trust you’ll discuss a better option when you see it.
*
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Your use probably is more typical than mine. My problem is that I let my followed list bloat over the years, so that trying to read the Following tab is a lost cause. I did spend some time in it over the last few months clearing out some of the more toxic accounts that had creeped in over the last decade. (No one seemed toxic when I followed them, but either they changed or someone hacked their account.)
But really, with my other tools now gone, I now lean heavily on lists to not miss posts from the people I’m interested in. That works somewhat. And the For You tab does manage to highlight some of the interesting stuff from my overall followed accounts, but I have to sift through random garbage. Although rarely as bad as what Threads is currently making me do.
Have to admit the rate limiting hasn’t affected me at all. I doubt it will. I’ve never been much of a doom scroller. Without tools to isolate what I’m interested in, I give up pretty quickly and go do something else. But killing the API, outside linking, WordPress connectors, and now sidebar widget, certainly have affected my use dramatically. I’ll also note that the web interface for me has been messed up for the last month or two. Still usable, but ugly.
Thanks. I’ll do my best on the other social networks. Really it depends on where the people we follow end up.
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I’m still trying to figure out what Instagram is all about. I post photos and videos there only because that’s where my friends will see it and be able to share it, but I really can’t spend much time there since it appears to me there’s nothing much going on. It takes me about five minutes max, then I’m done. Twitter just looks like gibberish to me. I think hashtags are super ugly.
Reddit could be interesting, but it feels like people aren’t actually talking to one another, like they’re just posting a question and going away. Maybe I just don’t know how to use it. They also have a bunch of features that look like BS (trophies, points, etc.).
Recently I thought about switching to Substack, and I may do it in the future simply because I resent having to pay to get WordPress ads off my blog, but we’ll see. I didn’t love Substack. It seems like it’s trying to do everything all at once, and again, it seems like people aren’t actually talking to one another, but simply trying to get paid subscriptions. Well, like hell. Everything seems to be a paid subscription these days and it’s getting tiresome. Anyway, it feels like individuals sounding off in their own bubble. (But then again, WordPress is starting to feel more and more like that too.)
What you’re saying about the fragmentation of social media rings true to me. I think it’s about trying to do everything all at once, but the result is they’re doing nothing well.
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Yeah, I never got the attraction of Instagram, which is why I didn’t have an account until this week. It seems unlikely I’ll ever post anything to it specifically.
Twitter has always had something of a learning curve. Which is probably why it never got near the billion user mark. Hashtags on it are mostly passé these days. I used them when I was crossposting to Mastodon (where they have utility similar to WordPress’ hashtags), but stopped once Musk killed that ability. Of course, I do still use them on Mastodon itself.
Reddit is another one that I think has a learning curve. I know some people who were very much into the cultures of various subreddits. But Reddit’s CEO appears to be taking Musk as a role model, killing free API access, and as a result knocking out the add-on clients used by power users. Reddit may have entered its own tailspin at this point.
I took a look at Substack, and even put a placeholder account out there, just in case. But there are things about it that drive me nuts, like only being able to subscribe by email. WordPress is more about running a web site that happens to be a blog, whereas Substack seems about running a newsletter that can be accessed as a blog. But I’m not sure how good of a community they are for anyone not famous.
On trying to do everything at once, you might be right. The trick is in knowing what to actually do.
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Yes, you hit the mail on the head. As to why Substack isn’t great for me. I don’t get people reading my blog from my email list, and I don’t get the sense people are using it to discover blogs about topics they want to talk about but instead use it to follow people they already know about. That makes it for celebrities, as you said.
All I can say about Twitter is I’m glad I didn’t use it, since I’d be pretty mad about all the changes going on.
I notice you’re active on Goodreads. Have you tried LibraryThing? I just found out about it because I was looking for a way to get reviews. Right now I’m running a giveaway there. Basically you sign up and get free books for review, and there are a lot of ebooks. Print too, though those are harder to win. I picked this giveaway because they don’t charge authors to run giveaways (unlike Goodreads which charges over a hundred bucks.) Anyway, I thought you might like it next time you’re looking for something different to read.
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On Substack, there was actually a stink early on about the special sweetheart deals they made to get famous people using it, deals they didn’t extend to the rank and file. And I don’t see anything like the WordPress Reader, which, despite its many flaws, provides some community building. Although maybe for people in that ecosystem, their Notes platform will be useful.
On Twitter, yeah, it’s a serious pain. I’m currently juggling four services (Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky), and increasingly wondering why I bother. The work of sharing something on all of them is just too much. And I’ve yet to have a meaningful conversation on either Threads or Bluesky.
My activity on Goodreads is limited. I star-rate books, mostly in the hopes it will enable Goodreads to make targeted recommendations. (Very mixed success on this. I think the recommendations are tainted with advertiser money.) The written review I left for your book may be the only one I’ve ever done there.
Hadn’t heard of LibraryThing. Thanks! I’ll check it out. If nothing else, I can leave a review for your book.
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Yeah, as much as I hate having to pay to remove ugly ads, it’s better than having no conversation whatsoever.
I know what you mean about sharing across all these different platforms. It is a pain. And each one tries to be the kind of platform that ties them all together, but fail to do a good job of it.
As for Goodreads, you can be sure anything Amazon touches is tainted with money. They keep sending me advertisements to run advertisements, all without publishing my audiobook which should have been done a long time ago. It’s insane.
Anyway, LibraryThing is smaller, but very similar to what Goodreads is doing. I have no idea how their recommendations work, but I very much appreciate that they’re not charging to run promotional giveaways. They are pretty strict about who can run them too, since they are intended for early reviews.
Anyway, since you have a blog and are active on Goodreads, I thought you might stand a good chance of getting free books. And the fact that you like ebooks is also in your favor, since most people seem to be going after the print books. Anyway, you can check it out:
https://www.librarything.com/ner
By the way, your review for my book on Amazon was fantastic. I thought it gave a really good sense of what my book is about. Feel free to just copy and paste that anywhere you like! I do really appreciate it, since getting my friends—or even my writing group—to review my book is like pulling teeth. I don’t know why it’s so hard to get reviews, but it’s just as everyone said it would be.
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I wish the platforms actually did take a shot at trying to tie things together. Even a feeble attempt might be useful.
Only Mastodon really makes the effort, allowing you to interact with anyone on any Mastodon server, as well as anything else in the Fediverse. (Which has its own Goodreads-like site, although it looked pretty limited to me.) Threads, WordPress, and Tumblr are all promising to eventually talk with the Fediverse, but none do yet. And Bluesky has its own federated protocol, which if it’s open I imagine the Fediverse will eventually add to their repertoire. If multiple big networks join, things could get interesting, assuming they don’t do in too dumb a fashion.
I’m surprised it takes so long to publish things on Amazon. I wonder what the holdup is. Are they doing a copyright check or something? We once had to publish something to the Apple app store at work, and that was a pretty miserable process with all the checks involved. Hope it’s not like that.
I registered at LibraryThing and imported my Goodreads library. It ended up importing my review of your book, which I wasn’t expecting, but it saves me the time of doing it manually. So it’s out there now. My pleasure on providing it.
Yeah, one thing I’ve always heard about writing a book: don’t expect an avalanche of friends and family being eager to read it. Even among heavy readers, any one book is just too much of a niche product, even for stuff that fits in mass market genres. You have to count on people throughout the world who’re interested in your particular niche finding it.
The LibraryThing recommendations are a little more diverse than the Goodreads ones, a bit less focused on recently published stuff, but not too different. Oh well, I guess there’s only so many algorithms for this kind of thing. Thanks for telling me about the site!
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It shouldn’t take long to publish on Amazon. I had a feeling something like this would happen, actually. I had to “publish” my audiobook in order to get promo codes to give to reviewers. Fine. But in doing so I had to choose where to distribute the audiobook, and in order to distribute to Amazon (Audible), I had to have an ebook already published. Well, it wasn’t, so I left off Audible. Once the print and ebook were published, I changed the distribution to include Audible. That was nearly a month ago…actually, back when you pointed out that my book was up on Amazon.
Anyway, something is totally screwed up here, and everyone is giving me the runaround. Now I have to send audiobook reviewers to an Amazon page that has no audiobook. I just “republished” my audiobook on Findaway Voices and I’m hoping that fixes the problem. By magic.
I think I’m mostly in favor of LibraryThing for the free-to-authors giveaway. The site itself looks like something out of the early 2000. But whatever, so long as people get free books and authors get reviews, that’s good enough for me. I do see what you mean by it being focused on recently published stuff. I’m a bit surprised by how everything is focused on recently published stuff. I feel like I’ve got a clock ticking. It’s strange to me since I don’t care when something is published when I go to look for a book to read, but apparently the rest of the world does.
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Best of luck on getting the audiobook stuff straight. Tech problems between providers are the worst, because it frequently ends up with both saying everything looks right on their end, but your problem unsolved.
I’ll have to remember LibraryThing if I’m ever in the position of needing to give away ebooks for review. I wonder what the rules are around that. Can an author (assuming they hold the copyright themselves) just provide copies by any means they want? Are there restrictions from publishing with Amazon, etc? Is it okay to publish excerpts on your blog, site, etc?
I don’t think most people care when a book was published. But the publishing industry obviously does. Most of the promotion of a book happens on its initial release, and awards are typically scoped to publishing date. But at least for the author, their back-catalog continues to be discoverable and make at least some money. Not big bucks to be sure, but then anyone going into this for the money has seriously miscalculated.
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From what I gather, LibraryThing has an early review giveaway and another one. The early review one has to be within the first six months of a book’s release and reviewers who win book from that one will get penalized for not leaving a review (meaning not selected for the next book). I believe the book also cannot be self published for early review giveaways, though the author can offer the book rather than the publisher.
As for Amazon, I’m pretty sure you can do what you want with your work as far as posting excerpts on blogs, etc.
“anyone going into this for the money has seriously miscalculated”
Totally. I think I’d make more by looking under the couch cushion.
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I was thinking, that sounds great except for…
Except for that, exactly. Calmness doesn’t drive engagement, outrage does. I think these things are related.
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I fear you might be right. I’ve actually seen some people complain about the lack of an algorithmic feed in Mastodon. One thing I’ve heard about Bluesky is it supposedly provides a choice of algorithms, which sounds interesting.
What I really want are tools to do my own curation. I used to have that using InoReader to sift through Twitter list feeds. The only drawback was a time delay, so I was often late to a discussion. Having it in the service itself would be a lot better. But I recognize most people just want it done for them.
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Mastodon gets plenty of outrage. Have you ever posted an image without alt-text?
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I did early on. No one said anything, but those posts didn’t get very many likes or boosts. The expectation does make me think before I post an image, of whether I have time at the moment to do the alt-text. Often I just end up linking to the website it’s on.
I do agree there’s a lot of people outraged about one thing or another there. But like on the other platforms, I mostly try to steer around it.
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Yahoo used to have Groups / email threads. I wasted hundreds of hours reading/responding there back in the ’00s.
I started my own private Slack and have my family invited there. That’s where I use @Claude.
I also have my own private StackOverflow and run coding discussions there.
You can even chat/through pull-requests on GitHub.
And Substack has Notes.
As the social media sites popped up, I tended to grab their nom-de-web real estate. But yeah, it’s a pain to keep track of though.
As soon as LoserLon walks completely away from Twitter, I suspect it’ll return. The community alert channels were such things that I thought the government should have bought it. As a national, regional, city and neighborhood news distribution platform it is unparalleled. Emergency alerts, evacuations, Amber alerts, crime alerts, weather… It should have become the National Notification Center app.
I value the wordpress blog the highest, though.
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I remember the old Yahoo / Gmail groups. Been a long time since I participated in any of those discussions, and the email account I used for them is long gone. Memories.
I haven’t gotten into Substack’s Notes. Is it any good? Are there a lot of people on it?
Musk walking away from Twitter is probably the best scenario at this point. Although he’s decimated the company now. I’m not sure it could just bounce back. I fear it would take real skill to pull it out of the nosedive. But stranger things have happened.
I’m with you on WordPress. Let’s hope Automattic’s leadership stays sane. Moving to self hosted would be a pain.
I think I just followed you back on Threads! (Or someone who shared your last blog post.)
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Yup, that was me. Too many netonyms to manage.
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Ah, on Substack Notes, now I remember why I don’t use it. You see posts from people you’re subscribed to. I’m not really subscribed to anyone, so all I see are the ones from Substack. Musk was really not thinking straight when he freaked out about this one.
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In my opinion, the “short” formats like Twitter or TikTok are designed to increase the number of views and make people flip through posts for hours. These platforms, by design, deprive the users of any control of what to see there and deliberately shove unsolicited content in front of the user’s eyes. I don’t expect the new platforms will be any better. All of them serve their own interests.
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You’re probably right. I’m just weird that it never captured my attention like that.
I do think Mastodon is different, if for no other reason than it’s not commercial. It’s really set up for people connecting with each other. But as someone else noted, that mean people don’t get the same kind of quick dopamine hit, which is probably why it’s still relatively small.
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I have not tried Mastodon. In terms of “connecting with each other”, Facebook has allowed me to find my classmates and distant relatives with whom I probably would have lost contact otherwise. But other than getting their contact information, I see little value in Facebook for “connecting with people”. Few people post personal things on social media. If they do, it tells you nothing of a person’s life – pictures from vacations and restaurants, links to trivia, etc. And when you call them, you learn that a parent has recently died, a child is sick, they lost their job – a totally different picture than what you see online. In terms of finding people online, social media is definitely useful. In terms of connection, nothing beats personal contacts – visits, calls, letters. And for finding people, it’s better to use a platform with the most users. I don’t expect to find many people in Mastodon.
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Definitely if you’re looking to connect with people you know in real life, or once knew, then Facebook is probably the place to go. With the caveat you mentioned that most of what gets posted there is performance rather than true updates on their personal situation. (That said, I did announce my dad’s funeral on there, probably the only personal post I’ve made in the last decade. )
But I haven’t found it the best place for finding people you don’t know yet that share common interests. WordPress has been pretty good for that. But if you want to find the credentialed experts on that common interest, then Twitter was long the place to go. Mastodon has gotten some of that, but really just a slice. But the chances of finding your old high school friends there are vanishingly slim, particularly since much of what’s posted there is even further from their personal lives than on Facebook.
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I am the same – I prefer Mastodon to come on top. But most people have Instagram accounts and it was not surprising at all when Threads became a hit. However, it is a good sign for decentralised social media if a big company does this. I believe more will follow eventually.
Ps: I hate Threads. I kept getting misogynist, himbo posts in my feed. No thanks
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I’ve found Threads a little better in the last day or so at showing posts from followed accounts. But it seems to want a certain volume in our feeds, and too much of what it fills it with is what you describe, or other pablum. They have a lot to fix before I’ll spend much time there.
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If WordPress were to fold, that would go with 95% of my digital footprint. I am not on any of the other platforms and reading about the meltdowns make for entertaining reading.
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Hopefully Automattic’s (WordPress.com’s owner) business model is more robust than a lot of the other platforms. But one thing all this drama is reminding me of: nothing lasts forever.
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I wonder if a specialized Twitter-like feed for scientists and academics could sustain itself separated from sports, pop music, show biz, and politics. Certainly the backend server requirements would be much reduced with a more limited audience but then the limited audience might not generate sufficient advertising for it to survive. Would the academic publications, colleges (seeking students and teachers) be willing to advertise?
Let call it Academic Wire.
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Don’t know. That’s sort of what was developing for a period with Mastodon. There are even servers dedicated to specific academic disciplines. They’re invitation only, although typically people from other servers can follow people on those servers. But the biggest complaint from some academics is that they want to do outreach, and being in any kind of academic enclave feels self defeating for that. I know someone like Neil Degrasse Tyson is probably going to be where most of the people are.
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I wouldn’t envision it as exclusive to academics, especially for comments and questions. But it might need to be more limited it what it allows for original posts. I certainly would follow feeds from several disciplines: neuroscience, anthropology, cosmology, for example – and several publications – Nature, SciAm – and then probably some individuals Northoff, Koch, and others.
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Historically, a carefully curated Twitter feed could get you close to that. The only problem is people tend to mix in their personal business and other interests.
But what really used to be good was the old ScienceBlogs site. It was invitation only, but I used to follow a bunch of the bloggers there. Anyone could comment, but the posts were all by scientists, or other academics. It fell apart when the magazine that owned it started putting limitations on what the bloggers could post. And then Google killed Google Reader, which undercut the overall blogosphere for most people.
In many ways, that’s why I’m sad Mastodon isn’t doing better. The way it works has the promise of bringing back something like the old open web. Although it’s a good sign that Threads and Bluesky are at least talking about playing nice with open federation protocols. So maybe it could still work out.
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Thanks to a very kind new friend, I’m now on Bluesky.
https://bsky.app/profile/selfawarepatterns.bsky.social
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“Of course, you get more reach by participating in social media.” Reach toward what end?
Social? Economic? Health? Status?
We (humans) did not evolve in this context. Ergo, we’re not wired to live in a virtual world. We evolved to live in a physical world, experienced by our 5 senses, with a proximate reality. Moreover, where PRESENCE mattered, a lot. There was danger, in a physical sense, to cheating, lying, etc. and so on..
Now? What?
“Social media may be hazardous to your health” is a hand-stitched, framed, aesthetic in my psych-girl’s office. Now, it’s a new world. Not brave, perhaps.
I think we will fragment into tribes – that’s what we are wired for. We have an “Upgrade problem.”
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Reach as in what you write reaching more people. As I noted, at least in theory. The reality is I’ve always seen a little traffic increase from the social media accounts, but most of the people I hear from are WordPress users.
You may be right about us fragmenting into tribes. I’ve seen a few writeups from people saying exactly that. The age of the global social network may be over. On the other hand, prior to social networks, we were pretty fragmented throughout the web. Something attracted people to those networks. They provided something we wanted.
Maybe it was just because it made things easy. If so, it seems to me that we traded a lot for that ease of use. No one could buy the web, email, or blogging and impose their will on us. By reminding us that social networks aren’t a public utility, the drama may have guaranteed people will be leery of just depending on a single one again. At least maybe for a year or two.
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Facebook is pretty much the only social media company that I hate more than Twitter, so Facebook making their own version of Twitter is a hard no from me.
I still think it’s important to be on social media of some kind if you want to expand your online reach, but the idea that you MUST be on any specific social media platform doesn’t make sense to me anymore. I’m not sure if it was ever true. Go to the platforms where you have fun. Stay away from the platforms that feel like a chore. You’ll connect with more actual people that way.
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I’m pretty sure nothing about the current Threads experience would improve your opinion of Facebook / Meta. If they keep their promise (we’ll see), maybe we’ll eventually be able to interact with people there through Mastodon.
I’m with you on going where it’s fun. I see a few accounts posting on every platform, and can’t imagine the work they’re putting into it. (There is software to help with that, but I wouldn’t think they cover the new platforms like Threads or Bluesky yet.)
For me, it’s about getting information and having conversations. But both depend on the right people being there. It’d be nice if all these things interoperated, so we could all talk to each other from our preferred environment.
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That would be nice. I just recently reread Ender’s Game and was struck by how interconnected “the nets” are in that book. I felt like Orson Scott Card got a lot right about how political discourse on the Internet would work, but he missed how fragmented and echo chamber-y the Internet would actually turn out to be.
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It’s been decades since I read Ender’s Game, but as the internet developed, I’ve periodically thought of his idea of the brother and sister having global influence via the networks. Given that his examples at the time were CompuServe, dialup bulletin boards, and early usenet, sounds like he might have done alright. Although he also could have had the early cyberpunk novels for conceptual material as well.
But he probably underestimated the fragmentation because he wrote that novel in a time of big TV networks. Prior to big broadcasting networks, most news came from newspapers, and those were historically pretty partisan. We probably shouldn’t be too surprised that a proliferation of sources and platforms is resulting in a return to those kinds of enclaves. Still sad to see the global town square go away though.
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It sucks to be at the mercy of these awful tech guys. It also sucks that they own most of the world while billions live in mud. However I find my self less than ever inclined to engage with social media and only occasionally feel like posting my own thoughts these days. Frankly, I just don’t care about much these days and although I won’t go as far as Schopenhauer, much of what our ghastly species does makes me wonder whether he was not right after all. Yes we have been very clever apes, but I find myself wondering to what end.
Social media is one of the many “benefits” of the modern world I cam do without.
Huge bums and pouting lips may amuse some. And just as well. There is little else out there on social media it seems.
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It does suck to be at their mercy. Historically the people who run these companies have been very careful not to call attention to their power. (Sort of like the earliest Roman emperors.) It’s much better for business if people think their platform is an institution, a benevolent public service of some kind. Musk, not realizing the importance of it, has largely shattered that illusion for Twitter / X / whatever.
What I find kind of frustrating is people aren’t going for the option that will minimize the possibility of a central authority messing with them again. They’re jumping into just another centralized service, albeit one that still maintains the illusion to some degree. And we have Reddit as evidence that Musk isn’t that much of an outlier.
Personally, I much preferred the pre-social media internet of blogs and RSS feeds. But I’ll admit it requires more effort, and that is its Achilles’ heel. The social media companies make it easy to join and find people. But the price they exact is they now own your relationships and interactions, and want to monetize it, which can now include forcing us to pay for what we once had for free.
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I have a Bluesky invite code available if anyone’s interested. They appear to be coming up once a week right now. If so, DM me on Twitter or Mastodon (or drop me an email).
If I don’t hear from anyone in a day or so, I’ll likely offer it up on Twitter, uh…X, whatever.
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Ever since the twitter api had been shutdown and wordpress has to stop using, is when I also stopped using it. And because I really never really saw any success on there, thinking of just leaving and switching to Mastodon.
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I know what you mean. The loss of the api hit me hard, taking out WP integration and the tools I used to monitor and curate a lot of the Twitter firehose.
Mastodon is pretty nice. It’s my favorite in terms of feature set. And WordPress just provided Fediverse integration (most of which is still Mastodon), although it still seems pretty rough at this point. I’m also on Threads and Bluesky. Bluesky in particular seems to be getting a lot of attention at the moment, although like all the others, it remains a work in progress.
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