Real World News

Be an Early Voting Hero!

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Hey, friends! Early voting is underway in many states – and starts today across Florida and in Michigan, New Jersey, and New York!

Please do vote early if you can. It’s SATISFYING and FUN and it helps you avoid any possible Election Day voter suppression shenanigans.

Time to shine, Early Voting Heroes!

Why I ditched Twitter for Bluesky – and hope you will, too!

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THE SHORT PITCH

Twitter is a cesspool and I’m only posting there now to tell people to find me elsewhere. That elsewhere? Bluesky, a new social media site that’s become the best place on the internet for me… and maybe you too?

If you’re not already on social media, congratulations — you should probably stay off! But if you liked the feel and functionality of old Twitter but want an alternative, Bluesky should feel right at home, and there are loads of interesting folks to follow. Below are a few starter packs of great accounts. Just click on a starter pack, make a Bluesky account, follow some folks, come back and follow more folks on more starter packs, and see if you like it! And then please feel free to read on for a more detailed explanation of why Bluesky feels so good to me right now as an independent creator and a human being in 2024.

People Who Get It – folks I follow with solid info, good vibes, or practical thoughts of how to help in troubling times.

Awesome Artists/Creators I’ve Worked With

150 active comics creators!

Another bunch of active comics creators!

150 news outlets / journalists / explainers!

A bunch of local journalists / news sources!

A bunch of AANHPI writers, artists, and creators!

Some analog film photography folks!

Some sharp folks who frequently post practical suggestions of things we can do to make the world better in 2024!

THE LONGER EXPLANATION

You might not be reading this post or even know who I am if not for Twitter. I’ve built much of my career as an independent creator using the internet – from plain old email lists back in the day to making my own website to blogging and embracing social media — and for years, Twitter played a huge role in helping me reach new readers as a comic book writer.

But Twitter is now run by someone who regularly platforms bigotry and transphobia and shares unconscionable lies and conspiracies. The site is also becoming less safe all the time, allowing harassers and even literal neo Nazis to post and, most recently, promising to deprecate its block function. So almost exactly a year ago, I deleted most of my posts and stopped using the site for anything other than pointing folks to other, better sites to use instead.

The best of those alternative sites? I don’t generally love cheerleading for corporations and realize that any product can fall apart at any time. But after a couple of years of trying almost everything, I’m pretty sure the best Twitter alternative for me is Bluesky — by a long shot.

Bluesky is a social media site that on the surface feels pretty much like old Twitter. You follow people, people follow you, and everyone can make short posts of up to 300 characters, which can include images and video. You can like, reshare, and comment on other people’s posts, and vice versa. Your default feed on Bluesky is chronological and features the folks you actually follow instead of a bunch of random people that an algorithm pushes on you, which is absolutely fantastic for an independent creator like me whose posts will often never reach people who have chosen to follow me on Instagram or similar sites.

So far, so great! But a number of other features and services make Bluesky really shine.

The Nuclear Block

Bluesky’s single most valuable feature in terms of safety and community may be its so-called “nuclear block.” When you block someone on Bluesky, all of their posts disappear from your feed and posts and all of your posts disappear from their feed and posts. So if they’ve replied to you and vice versa, once one of you has blocked the other, those arguments disappear from your respective feeds.

That means that trolls and bigots who literally make money on other sites from ginning up fights for public entertainment get stripped of any incentive or ability to monetize their hate on Bluesky. Their posts just… vanish! They can’t hijack threads so they don’t get eyeballs and thus don’t get new followers and clicks on their merch links or whatever else they’re pushing. And they have vastly less power to create online mobs to harass people.

The one drawback to Bluesky’s block feature is that a user’s block lists aren’t private. Through third party apps, you can find lists of everyone anyone’s blocked. That probably won’t bother most people, but it’s a potential issue for those who worry that public block lists could be used perniciously by persistent stalkers or harassers.

Other User-Controlled Moderation Settings

Individual users on Bluesky can also set individual posts to disable quote posting and limit replies and can detach a post from someone else’s quote post, all of which can help decrease harassment. You can also temporarily deactivate your account, which removes it from use and public view but allows you to reactivate it later.

The only missing function is the ability to lock your account or go private as you can on Twitter, which would let you hide your account from non-followers while still posting to folks who already follow you.

Solid Site-Wide Moderation

After a few hitches over the last year and a half, Bluesky’s administrators seem to be doing a pretty solid job of site-wide moderation — never perfect, but vastly better than Twitter’s apparently non-existent efforts.

Any Bluesky user can report suspect accounts to the administrators, and I often see bigots, scammers, and spammers disappear within one to three days of reporting them, a level of responsiveness I almost never saw on Twitter, even before Musk took over.

Bluesky also has a labeling system that tags accounts and individual posts with warnings. The tags include a controversial “Rude” designation, which I’ve worried could be used to hide posts that rightfully criticize politicians or the New York Times, for example. But so far I haven’t seen that happen. I’m keeping an eye open for it, though!

Moderation Lists

Bluesky also allows individual users to create public moderation lists that other users can subscribe to. So if a friend has identified a bunch of bigots or trolls, you can subscribe to their list and automatically block whomever they suggest. That can be great, but it can also lead to conflicts and moderator burnout. Normal people really aren’t generally equipped to handle the incredible pressures of running moderation for a social media site, so it takes a special person to maintain a popular moderation list. Since they’re public, moderation lists could also potentially be used to increase instead of decrease harassment.

So I appreciate the existence of moderation lists, but I use them with due diligence and caution.

Starter Packs, Feeds, and User Lists

A starter pack is just a list of accounts that you like that you can share with other people. This post began with a big list of starter packs I’ve created. Folks can click on a starter pack and follow accounts individually or all at once. Brand new folks can click on a starter pack link on a different site and open a new Bluesky account to follow the folks in that starter pack. It’s a great way to share the love with accounts you like and build community.

A feed is a slightly different creature. Any user can create a feed that includes the posts of certain users or posts that include keywords or hashtags or otherwise match certain criteria. When you “pin” a feed, a new tab shows up on your front page that shows all the posts in that feed. You could think of a feed as a custom algorithm — a way to make sure certain kinds of posts pop up without having to follow specific accounts or search for specific terms. Creating a feed is a bit more complex than making a starter pack. Despite my old school mastery of HTML 2.0 (lol), I don’t have the coding knowledge necessary to use the Bluesky feed generator, so I used a simpler third party app called SkyFeed to make the #DidThisToday feed.

Finally, a user list is a list of accounts that you can share and pin to your home page. Pinning a list to your home page creates another tab that shows all the posts from users on that list, so as I undertand it, a list basically functions like a feed. Lists can also be added to feeds (or starter packs!).

These different options can admittedly get a bit confusing. I personally find starter packs to be the most intuitive, simple, and easy-to-use of all of these features — just sharing a bunch of accounts that other people can follow! But lots of folks get a lot out of lists and feeds, which is great.

Community and Ethos

From the beginning, Bluesky had a lot of users who were LGBTQIA+ and a lot of users who were very wary of Twitter’s collapsing moderation — two heavily overlapping groups, no doubt. One result is that the users of the site established an ethos early on of immediately blocking and reporting harassers and bigots. Combined with the nuclear block, that’s has resulted in less arguing with (and thereby less spreading the reach of) bigots, which is fantastic.

But Bluesky has gotten considerable criticism at key points over the last year and a half for failures in handling anti-Black racism in particular. Rudy Fraser wrote extensively about some of these issues along with a deep dive into his goals and challenges as the creator of the now legendary Blacksky feed in a great post a year ago.

As an Asian American creator, I’ve noticed fewer accounts and posts by AANHPI folks than I saw on Twitter in its heyday, which is one of the reasons I launched the AANHPI Creator Rollcall starter pack.

I think Bluesky’s constantly getting better as its userbase grows and more diverse communities expand, but it’s still a work in progress.

Bluesky has also been criticized as a left wing “echo chamber” by folks I won’t link to here. I’m not particularly bothered by these critiques since they often seem to boil down to thinking that a social media site should allow transphobes and racists to post freely. That’s not what I’m looking for.

Possible Future Issues

It’s a bit telling that I’m around 1500 words into this post before even mentioning the AT Protocol, the big technical dream that the site was created to showcase. As I understand it, the AT Protocol, like the ActivityPub protocol that Mastodon is part of, is designed to federate social media, meaning that anyone can use the underlying code driving Bluesky to create their own social media server that existing Bluesky users could interact with or migrate to, if they desire.

That’s a lot to wrap your head around, isn’t it?

But from years on Mastodon, I internalized this kind of “federation” as a positive thing — it means that your following and follower lists are yours and you can take them with you to another site if, for example, your current site gets bought out and ruined by a billionaire. And I still value that very much conceptually.

But in practice, I’m realizing that what the vast majority of users mostly want on a day-to-day basis is a social media site with good functionality and great moderation where we can post without getting dogpiled by bigots and scammers. That simple ask requires enormous resources to maintain quality moderation and safety, which (again, from years of Mastodon experience) I’m not sure most everyday people can ever deliver without burning out or destroying themselves.

I gather this was a journey the Bluesky developers themselves had to take in public for the last year and a half. My impression is that they launched the site mostly as a demo for what folks could do with the AT Protocol. But instead of creating other sites using the AT Protocol, users really just wanted the Bluesky site itself to be a great place to post. And to their great credit, the developers have been very responsive, adding feature after feature and improving trust and safety to get it to this point.

But in the long term, I don’t know how Bluesky will make its money back. I’m not privy to their plans and it’s not really my business. But I hope that if and when they need to monetize more aggressively, they’ll do so in ways that don’t undermine the remarkable features they’ve already implemented.

COMPARISONS TO OTHER SITES IN A NUTSHELL

Bluesky vs. Twitter

Twitter still presumably has “reach,” with many more users than Bluesky. But even when Bluesky was in its infancy, I’d regularly get more interaction from a couple thousand Bluesky followers than 50,000 Twitter followers. I absolutely understand that many folks, particularly folks from marginalized communities, have friends and networks that only exist on Twitter, and I will never judge them. But aside from that, the algorithm on Twitter is trash and I don’t think “reach” feels like a good excuse.

Bluesky vs. Instagram

Instagram’s algorithms notoriously limit the reach of your posts through mysterious and ever-changing formulas so you never know if anything you throw up there will be seen by the people who chose to follow you. Instagram also notoriously doesn’t allow active links in posts, so folks have to resort to the sad “link in bio” tag.

Bluesky has no overall algorithm and delivers all posts in chronological order, so the people who follow you will get your posts in their feed, and Bluesky allows live links so you can drive traffic to whatever you want.

Instagram also crops images so that the top and bottom of vertical comic book pages and 35mm photographs get chopped off.

Bluesky presents vertical comic book pages and 35mm photos fully, without cropping. (Only REALLY disproportionately vertical images get cropped, and you can still click a button to see those images fully if you want.)

Bluesky vs. Mastodon

Mastodon has many of the positive features of Bluesky, but the interface remains kludgy. The fact that folks are spread over different servers on Mastodon is a feature, but it’s also a bug that can make it hard to follow or see the posts of folks on other servers. Mastodon also does not natively allow or display quote posts, which decreases conversation, and its direct messages have a quirk that sends the message to anyone who’s mentioned in it, which can result in messaging folks when you’re just talking about them behind their back (which no one reading this would ever do, of course, lol).

Bluesky vs. Threads

Threads is constructed like a tiny blogging site, with main posts and comment sections. It’s also driven by a bad algorithm and has a bonus system that pays people for viral posts, so every time I visit there, I see annoying “story time” posts by folks trying to gin up engagement. For me, it’s a feel-bad site that discourages actual conversation in favor of broadcasting. Bluesky feels a place real people are just posting their weird (complimentary) thoughts, which is much more my speed.

CONCLUSION

I hate what Twitter’s become. I dislike what Instagram and Threads are. I like Mastodon but feel limited by the interface. So…

…Bluesky still has work to do, but it’s by far my preferred social media site right now, and if you’re still on social media and everything I’ve written here hasn’t scared you off, I hope you’ll give it a shot!

Social Media Showdown 2022 – a Personal Overview of Twitter Alternatives

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Twitter has always driven more clicks to my crowdfunded projects than any other social media site. So launching a Crowdfundr campaign for my 35mm Love Letter book this month as Twitter ran through several stages of its slow-motion collapse was a bit harrowing, to say the least. But my pain may be your gain, because I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time on nearly every viable Twitter alternative, and I have some opinions to share!

Before we plunge in, here are a few personal pointers for social media usage that seem particularly relevant right now, since Twitter’s grip on privacy and safety may be slipping and the reliability of new services remains untested.

  • Don’t give any social media site your credit card info.
  • Don’t use direct messages for anything sensitive and assume that any DM might get revealed to the general public. (I’m not using them at all on most of these new sites.)
  • Assume that anything you post may be preserved forever by someone. Also assume that anything you post may be lost forever if the service goes under.
  • Be aware that many newer social media services have tiny or non-existent safety and moderation teams and proceed or not according to your personal comfort levels.

I should also note that since Twitter began its decline, I’ve spent a lot less time there, and my mental health is the better for it. Many of these social media sites are designed to maximize clicks, but have traditionally done a bad job of distinguishing between positive and negative engagement. So they’ve frequently amplified our worst tendencies, which creates a stream of bad vibes that isn’t good for my heart and brain to marinate in all day. A significant part of my business relies on social media, and I treasure the positive experiences I’ve had and friendships I’ve made there. But less social media in general seems like a good idea. For those of us who can’t log off entirely for personal or business reasons, Twitter seems likely to get even worse as disseminator of bad vibes, so finding alternatives feels especially urgent.

The Essential Functions I’m Looking For

I’ve used Twitter for the last 12 years for hobnobbing with comics industry colleagues, learning new things from folks from many different backgrounds, spreading the word about and raising money for causes and organizations important to me, plugging my books, and encouraging folks to back my crowdfunded independent publishing projects. I think Twitter has been uniquely effective in all of those things for several key reasons:

  • Critical mass of users. Twitter has been the primary place where my colleagues and readers congregate online, which means I’ve always gotten more shares and clicks from Twitter than from any other social media site.
  • Text-based social media. Yes, I make comics. Yes, I’m a filmmaker and photographer. But I’m primarily a writer, and a primarily text-based social network like Twitter just makes sense to me and lets me shine.
  • Live links in posts. If I’m plugging something on Twitter, I can post a link and people can click to it instantly. Instagram doesn’t have live links, so you have to nudge people to check out the link in your bio, which means there’s an extra step involved and clicks drop off drastically.
  • Quote-tweeting. Twitter’s quote tweet function means that friends and supporters can add a little personal note to their retweet of your links, which can be critical in getting their supporters to actually click.
  • Threading of posts. Creating a sense of drama and timeliness is key to plugging a crowdfunding campaign. When building up to a key goal or deadline, Twitter threads create a linked timeline that’s much more effective in creating real-time excitement than separate, unlinked posts.
  • Desktop functionality. I’m a myopic Gen-Xer, so I hate typing on my phone. And when plugging my projects, I need to manipulate photos and links and chunks of text quickly, which I can do more easily on a laptop than a phone. So a service that’s designed primarily for mobile is less useful to me than a service that works on my computers as well.
  • Chronological timeline. If you toggle Twitter to “Latest Tweets,” you get a reverse chronological timeline, with the latest posts first. That’s critical for anyone trying to reach people about time-sensitive events or projects or for anyone trying to find out about breaking news.

An ideal Twitter alternative would incorporate all of the above features. Do any come close? Let’s see!

INSTAGRAM

instagram.com/gregpakpix

You’d think that an image-sharing site like Instagram would feel like second nature for a comics creator and photographer. But the site’s never felt comfortable to me. I’ll keep plugging away there since so many folks use it and I’ve got more followers there than anywhere but Twitter, but by intentional design, Instagram doesn’t provide direct links in posts to external sites, which makes it far less useful for my purposes.

Advantages

  • It’s established and popular and is a relatively known quantity when it comes to privacy, moderation, and safety.
  • The site is mainstream and easy enough to use that you don’t have to be a tech expert to manage it, so it’s got the biggest user base of any of these non-Twitter sites.

Disadvantages

  • Instagram doesn’t display comics pages or vertical 35mm film images in their native ratios. So you have to dump vertical images into a template and add bars on either side to show them in their entirety on Instagram, and that’s very often a step too much for someone (me) who’s not getting paid to post.
  • Instagram deactivates links in posts, so to plug a project you’re working on, you have to point people to the link in your bio. But on the internet, the vast majority of people don’t click through. So having to click through twice means only a tiny fraction of a fraction of Instagram users will actually reach whatever page you’re plugging.
  • Instagram subjects your feed to aggressive algorithms, showing you what it wants you to see instead of just displaying posts from the people you follow in chronological order. So I’ll often see a friend’s post plugging an event the day after the event happened. At first that just struck me as goofy; now I’m actually offended by it. It feels like an insult to prevent grown adults from reaching each other in a rational, efficient, timely way.

TUMBLR

tumblr.com/gregpak

Once upon a time, Tumblr was huge for the mainstream comics community. Major Marvel and DC creators pointed their personal URLs to their Tumblr pages, using the service to power their main websites. I didn’t make that much use of the site and deleted my own Tumblr page back in the day because I couldn’t turn off direct messaging from the general public, which felt like a privacy and security hole. But when Tumblr introduced a setting to enable messages only from blogs I followed, I created a new account and now have about 1,500 followers there. But I still don’t use it that much!

Advantages

  • The timeline seems chronological.
  • The links in posts are live.
  • There’s been an uptick in users and interactions on the site since Twitter began to crater.
  • The folks who run Tumblr seem like a lot of fun and have run some delightfully trolly campaigns to lure folks back to the service during Twitter’s decline.

Disadvantages

  • I’ve always been confused by the way comments and shares and likes are all jumbled together at the bottom of Tumblr posts. Maybe it’s just me, but I find it very hard to follow a conversation there.
  • I’ve never really gotten much traction on Tumblr. My Kickstarters barely showed any click-through from my Tumblr posts. Maybe it’s just because I’ve never posted there that often. Maybe I should just post more? But it may also be a Tumblr culture thing — my particular kinds of projects may not be best suited for the site and its users.
  • I’ve seen a number of comics folks starting or reactivating their Tumblr accounts in the last few weeks, but the site doesn’t feel like an active hub at the moment for the comics creators and readers I’m trying to reach.

MASTODON

mastodon.social/@gregpak

I joined Mastodon back in 2017 when Twitter’s failure to handle multiple big cases of harassment inspired a bunch of folks to look for alternatives. Mastodon made a lot of sense to me as a primarily text-based social network that looked a lot like TweetDeck, a Twitter client I’d occasionally used. And right now, I’m having more actual fun and seeing more engagement on Mastodon than any of the other Twitter alternatives. But then and now, Mastodon’s biggest virtue is also its biggest drawback.

Mastodon is part of what’s called a federated system, meaning there’s no central Mastodon social network. Instead, when you join Mastodon, you’re actually joining a single incidence of Mastodon run by someone on their private server. You can generally follow and be followed by folks on other servers, so it’s possible to kind of ignore the separate server situation and use Mastodon like Twitter to follow your individual friends, wherever they may be. But the choice of a server matters, because there are no universal moderation and privacy policies or safety teams. Each server handles those things itself.

Some folks see that as a huge advantage — a billionaire can’t buy out the entire service and arbitrarily change all the rules, for example. But the disadvantage is that the quality of the moderation, privacy, and safety enforcement on any server depends on the private individuals running that server. In fact, those individuals could choose to shut their server down completely overnight, causing all your posts and connections to vanish. So there’s a bit of impermanence to the system that’s troubling. I semi-solved that by joining the server that’s run by the main developer of the Mastodon software; I figure that server will be around as long as the software exists. But I’ve seen some folks talking about having issues with moderation on that server. One good thing is that you can switch your server and take your following and followers lists with you (but not your past posts, apparently). So in the long run I have the option of switching servers if I need to. It’s all a lot to wrap your head around! But Mastodon has some pretty key advantages at the moment.

Advantages

  • Primarily text-based, which is nice for someone who was comfortable on Twitter.
  • Chronological feed, no algorithm, threading enabled. It functions more like Twitter than Instagram or any of the other current alternatives, which is a good thing in my book.
  • Default web presentation is familiar for anyone who liked Tweetdeck. There are also decent iOS apps that make the interface more Twitter-like.
  • Since Twitter began its slow decline, user interaction on Mastodon has gone way up for me. I have just 3,700 followers on Mastodon versus 51,000 followers on Twitter. But a post on Mastodon will often get roughly the same or even more likes or comments as the same post on Twitter. The place feels pretty populated, with something new and interesting on my feed every time I log in.
  • Great for analog film nerds like me. There’s been a big influx of film photographers on Mastodon who post under the #BelieveInFilm hashtag, and that’s been a huge pleasure. There’s also a comics community slowly forming. The great Steve Lieber is a fantastic follow on Mastodon if you’re interested in comics.

Disadvantages

  • The effort to wrap your head around the federated system and pick a server is a big disincentive for mass adoption. Thousands of new users are nonetheless signing up for the service every week. But unless/until it becomes a bit simpler, it seems unlikely to achieve the same mass reach as Twitter.
  • The federated system means that folks are joining individual servers that may not have the capacity or interest in providing the moderation, privacy, and safety support that users expect.
  • There’s no quote tweeting on Mastodon, which may or may not be a disadvantage depending on your perspective. No quote tweeting limits others from personalizing their boosts of my crowdfunding projects, for example, but it also limits quote tweet dunking that can lead to context collapse and harassment. Then again, that might seem to be a disadvantage because it also limits accountability for big accounts that say ridiculous things. I’m not a big quote tweet dunker, so it’s not a big issue for me personally, but I understand the critique.

HIVE SOCIAL

Username “gregpak” on the Hive Social app

Over a three day period a couple of weeks ago, it seemed that the entire Star Wars creator and fan community decided to open accounts on the Hive Social mobile app, which opened the floodgates for the comics community to move in. And for a glorious week or so, Hive really became a hive for pretty delightful nerdy hijinks. But then folks discovered major security issues and the whole service shut down for a few weeks — which felt like a decade in The-Last-Days-of-Twitter era — and since the service has returned, engagement seems much lower. Given how many comics creators signed up for Hive, I’m really rooting for its success. But it’s absolutely a work-in-progress and it’s important to be aware of its issues.

Advantages

  • A fresh, friendly, familiar interface that feels like a more text-and-link-friendly version of Instagram. (Yes, links are live.)
  • A massive influx of comics people made the place feel active and fun for a while — and that vibe could return if users felt the incentive to post more.
  • Unlike Instagram, Hive displays vertical images in their native ratios and thus doesn’t require an extra step of optimizing with clunky templates.

Disadvantages

  • According to a November interview, Hive is run by literally three people and does not appear to have dedicated moderation or privacy teams. The app has “Block” and “Report” buttons. But I’d love to hear more from the developers about what they’re doing to ensure user safety.
  • Hive only runs natively on mobile. That’s a huge disadvantage to users like me who prefer to work on laptops or desktops. You can actually download and open the iOS version of Hive on the more modern Macs. But it pops up as a small iPhone-shaped-and-sized screen and it’s not much fun to operate. It also no longer works for me on the Mac after the most recent Hive updates.
  • You can’t thread posts on Hive. Instead, each post is like a blog post with its own little comment section. That limits real-time live-posting, sharing, and conversation.
  • With no web presence, Hive provides no direct links to Hive posts, which makes the service more insular than it could be and complicates archiving. Jamie Zawinski regards this lack of interoperability as a fatal flaw and his post is worth reading.
  • To post images on Hive via an iPhone, you have to import your media into the Photos app — you can’t post from Dropbox, for example. That’s added friction that makes posting more time-consuming, which is annoying for a non-paid poster like me.
  • Hive hasn’t yet added alt-text for images, which is a minus for accessibility.
  • The Hive app is being updated and improved every week and many of the disadvantages listed above should be addressed in time, but it remains a bit buggy at the moment.

POST

post.news/gregpak

Like Instagram and Hive, Post works like a stripped-down blog, with each entry having its own little comment section. So there’s no threading and less open conversation. But the real drag on the service for me is that its biggest users right now seem to be journalists, news organizations, and semi-famous-to-famous celebrity activists. This is no knock on those folks personally! But the vibe of the site feels more formal than fun for me right now, as if everyone’s account is a semi-respectable blog with crafted mini-essays instead of off-the-cuff tweets. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — I like well-written blogs! The bigger issue is that I haven’t found much of a comics or camera community on Post, so the experience feels thin to me.

COHOST

cohost.org/gregpak

I registered for Cohost back in early November but just got approved to actually post this last week. I can’t say that much about the site because I’m not following enough people — but I’m not following enough people because of what feels like a major flaw in the system for me. Cohost doesn’t publicly display users’ followers or following lists, which means I can’t browse my friends’ following lists to find familiar names to follow, which is usually the first thing I do when I sign up for any social media service. I understand that could be a big bonus for some folks for privacy reasons, but it makes the site largely unusable for me at the moment. I can tell that that Cohost is built like Instagram, Post, and Hive as a microblogging site with individual posts with their own comment sections. I can’t yet say anything about how well it works because there’s very little for me to see or interact with right now.

PROJECT MUSHROOM AND SPORE

projectmushroom.social/@gregpak

spore.social/@gregpak

I was excited to see Eric Holthaus’s announcement of Project Mushroom as a new social media site for climate activists and other progressively inclined folks. I was a touch less excited when I learned it would basically be a new Mastodon server. But I still backed the Kickstarter and joined because I loved the promise of an active, paid moderation team, which feels absolutely essential for the long term success of any Twitter alternative.

Then I heard that there would be a second Project-Mushroom-related Mastodon server called Spore, which confused me. Ultimately, I’ve learned that the Project Mushroom server will be a walled garden wherein only folks who are signed up for Project Mushroom can see and follow you. Spore, on the other hand, is a public server, meaning folks outside of the server can see your posts and you can follow and be followed by folks on non-Spore and non-Project Mushroom servers.

Yes, this is all a bit much to take in! No, I don’t really want two Mastodon accounts from one organization! And yet I remain intrigued by and am rooting for Project Mastodon/Spore because of the promise of paid moderation.

Have I used Project Mastodon and Spore? Barely! Functionally, they’re pretty much just like my main Mastodon account, so that’s comfortable enough. But as with Cohost, I don’t have a big enough follow list on the sites for the experience to feel substantial to me yet. But I’m keeping a very interested eye on them. Ultimately, if I’m uncomfortable with moderation on my current Mastodon host, I could imagine up moving my main Mastodon account over to Spore to take advantage of the paid moderation.

SPOUTIBLE

I can’t actually review Spoutible because it hasn’t launched yet. But I’m awaiting Christopher Bouzy’s new social media site with great anticipation. Bouzy runs Bot Sentinel, so he’s well acquainted with questions of moderation, safety, and harassment on social media and is presumably building Spoutible accordingly. I’ve preregistered for the service and look forward to testing it when it launches next month.

CONCLUSIONS

During the course of the 35mm Love Letter campaign, Twitter still brought in the most clicks for me — huge thanks to everyone who shared and backed! But engagement on Twitter felt several ticks lower in comparison to my previous crowdfunding campaigns. That’s partly because I was running the campaign between Thanksgiving and Christmas, which is a ridiculous time to try to get folks’ attention. But I think it’s also because a decent number of my comics and book friends have deleted their Twitter accounts or simply backed away from the site, which meant fewer eyeballs on my posts and fewer shares.

So I was very happy to have a presence on other sites that could give me additional places to plug the project. Both Mastodon and Hive moved the needle in terms of reaching people and getting folks to actually back. I had about 3,600 followers on Mastodon at the time and had made some friends in the #BelieveInFilm community there, which helped a lot. Hive went down a couple of days before I launched and only came back on the second to last day of the campaign, but friends in the comics community shared my posts and I got some clicks and backers as a result.

I can’t quite tell how much of an impact Instagram had on the campaign, but I know a number of friends shared my posts in their stories. I may have more “civilian” friends from outside the comics community on Instagram than anywhere else, and I suspect that many of them found out about the project there. I have no idea what Tumblr or Post or Project Mushroom did for the campaign. But I was happy to post there, because you never know when or where someone will take notice and finally make the critical clicks.

But to answer my question at the outset, none of the Twitter alternatives I’m trying out feels like a true Twitter replacement. Overall, Mastodon is the most fun place for me to hang out and post — there just seems to be more interaction there than on other sites and the interface has the most Twitter-like features. But each of these alternatives is missing certain features or qualities that prevent it from becoming a new mass public square.

Still, I could see a number of these services becoming great places to reach certain communities. Mastodon felt like a great place to reach analog film photographers; Hive felt like a decent place for comics creators and readers. That’s encouraging — niche marketing is fantastic for indie crowdfunding projects, and I’d be thrilled to have reliable places to reach different communities.

Sadly, that’s also an exhausting future to imagine for indie creators. We’re already overwhelmed by the responsibility to be our own publicists and marketers. Having to cobble together followings on a bunch of Twitter alternatives to keep reaching different segments of our audiences sounds really tiring, particularly since it’s unclear which of the current sites will survive more than a year or two.

I’ve always been a HUGE believer in email newsletters and blogs and personal websites. Again, it’s a lot of work, but it feels essential to me as an independent creator to maintain a website and newsletter that don’t depend on other people’s platforms, websites, or services. And my newsletter and the mailing lists I’ve built through my various Kickstarter projects over the years were critical in getting word out about 35mm Love Letter. But a newsletter by itself doesn’t generate the kind of ongoing excitement in real time that a crowdfunding project really needs. Social media, for better or for worse, remains essential for getting the word out and building participatory urgency and drama.

So as Twitter continues to fragment, I’ll keep trying out these social media alternatives and see what’s what. And if no new overall town square arises, I’ll have to figure out what little separate neighborhoods I need to connect with and build up separate little home bases in those distinct places.

Best wishes to every other creator or organizer or activist struggling with the same problems. Here’s hoping this article has been helpful, and if you have any insights to share, please feel free to let me know on Mastodon!

VOTE!

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It’s a cliché, but it’s true – this is the most important election of our lifetimes. Literally everything you care about is on the ballot, so please please please get out on November 8 and VOTE!

To find your polling place and other information, visit vote.org.

If you need help figuring out voter ID rules, visit voteriders.org.

Big hearts and all the best!

Great post from Andy Daly about turning from tweeting to blogging (or “twarting”)

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Andy Daly's website graphic

Andy Daly, a brilliant comic and an old acquaintance from my New York City improv days, has written a very funny and thought-provoking post about his decision to step the hell away from daily posting on Twitter in favor of blogging — or “twarting,” as he puts it.

I very highly recommend you click away from this page and go read his post right now. Then come back for more of my brilliant thoughts!

Andy does a great job of describing the social and political pitfalls of Twitter. But this passage hit me particularly hard:

It seems that after 12 years of tweeting, I have quietly trained my brain to compose tweets all the time.  In the early days of my Twitter self-banning, I kept coming up with dumb, trivial, concise notions that were designed to be shared with the world.  I kept thinking “well, maybe I’ll tweet just this one thing”, but instead, summoning really very impressive will power wouldn’t you say, I opened the Notes app on my phone and tapped my tweet in there.

I strongly suspect that as as a fellow person in comedy, Andy, like me, spent years of his youth coming up with jokes and one-liners all the time and scribbling them down in a little notebook. So Twitter was perfectly designed for us, and we were/are pretty great at it! But posting jokes on Twitter serves masters other than ourselves and can create a less than healthy dynamic of approval-seeking that Andy wryly refers to when he “praises” the site for allowing him to “most meaningfully, [attract] attention to myself whenever I needed some.”

I missed Andy’s post when he published it back in September, but strangely, right around the same time, I was undertaking a similar project, revamping this website and amping up my blogging — mostly by going into excruciating detail about my renewed obsession with analog photography.

So I love Andy’s new (old) blog, and I particularly dig the fact that he’s letting himself write both longer posts and short bon mots he’s dubbed “twarts.” I’m not going to use his terminology, because he strangely insists “twarts” is a combination of “tweets” and “darts” instead of “tweets” and “farts,” and that’s a little too classy for me. But I am going to take inspiration from him and let myself write more very short posts on this blog about whatever, because that seems like fun.

This is also inspiring me to do a bit more research into finding a good old-school blog reader. If I can get a few more cool blogs like Andy’s into a nice app, I’ll have a great place to go other than Twitter when I want to read some funny/insightful stuff, and that’ll be a good thing.

So thanks, Andy! Also please join my web ring?

Three Good Things

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Many years ago, in the wake of 9/11, I set up a website called Three Good Things where, shockingly enough, I’d periodically post lists of three good things.

This year is off to a harrowing enough start that it feels like a good emotional and spiritual exercise to revive Three Good Things. So here we go!

  1. Homemade chicken broth. Made some tonight from the bones of a roasted chicken that I’d seasoned with garlic, onion, shallots, salt, garlic powder, and smoked paprika. The broth is absolutely incredible – the smoked paprika put it over the top. Not sure what I’m gonna use it for yet, but it’s already worth it for the five sips I took as it simmered.
  2. The vaccines and boosters. Yes, everything is terrible. But things would be exponentially worse without the vaccines, which decrease the chances of getting infected and, probably even more critically, vastly decrease the severity of the disease if you do get infected. Please get vaxxed, friends. And if you’re vaxxed, get boosted. I want us all to survive and thrive.
  3. The “I fucking love fingerling potatoes!” line in DON’T LOOK UP. Ridiculous and funny and deeply moving in context all at once. My favorite moment in the movie.

PSA: COVID vaccine boosters now available to all adults in NYC (who meet time requirements)!

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Just found out this morning that New York City health officials have approved COVID vaccine booster shots for all adults who have been vaccinated for at least six months (Pfizer and Moderna) or two months (J&J). Check out the New York Times article here!

Then Mark Levine, the new Manhattan borough president, noted on Twitter than you can get an appointment at https://vax4nyc.nyc.gov/patient/s/!

I clicked, I filled out some forms, and a few hours later, I’ve been BOOSTED! They even gave me a sticker!

It’s a good day. Please do click on that link yourself and get that booster if you’re eligible!