Meanwhile, some housekeeping…
It’s obvious to anyone that Twitter is at the very least becoming unstable and unreliable, and quite possibly on its way to uselessness and/or implosion. I can see that a fair amount of traffic comes to this site directly from Twitter, so it’s clearly time to make contingency plans. I’d like to imagine that most of you who come here via Twitter would probably just check in regularly anyway, but let’s assume that’s not the case or that there’s a convenience issue for you.
That’s why this post exists: to invite comments from you, YES YOU, on the alternatives.
You can find the same links on Hive, where I’m @ifdestroyed, and on my Mastodon account https://mas.to/@ifdestroyed.
But… I don’t honestly think either of those platforms is going to replace Twitter (or that they could cope with the infrastructure and moderation demands if they did), and I don’t know how much use any of you are likely to make of them. And if you’re going to check in on them once a week to see what I’ve posted there… well, you might as well just come here in the first place.
I have also have accounts as @ifdestroyed on Post.News and Cohost which are currently dormant. If there’s a lot of you out there who’d actually find it helpful for me to post links on those platforms then let me know.
The other option is Substack. Using that just to send out alerts of a new post seems a bit clunky, but I could do a weekly round-up, maybe with a bit of extra material thrown in. Or I could go the whole hog and have every post on Substack as well as on here.
Thoughts?
I definitely remember Paul still posting these reviews to rec.arts.marvel.xbooks when there were no other non-spam posters left. At this point, I can remember childhood Christmas Eves on dial-up reading X-Axis reviews. HousetoAstonish will outlive Twitter. I wonder if Reddit might be a good place to submit and link these posts — certainly it’s a bit more mainstream than Substack, and I don’t have a whole lot of confidence in the robustness of Hive, Mastodon, or any “Twitter replacement.”
I agree that my comments were inexact and conflated various categories. I knew that when I was writing, but I wanted to succinctly make the point that people who rely on Twitter to keep them updated here are probably underrepresented among commenters on the blog.
The basic thesis is that the regulars who comment here—often long-time readers—are less likely to use a portal because we’re habituated to checking.
The people using Twitter to keep track of updates may or may not be regulars. But new visitors and irregular readers are going to be better represented in that group. New and irregular reader are also less likely to be commenting here.
People with training in statistics and the methods for doing population surveys can probably pick apart that wording too. Its not my area and I have no training in it.
I think the point is clear enough, however, that the absence of much support for Twitter in these comments isn’t likely to be an accurate reflection of its utility for bringing readers in.
because their discussion is by commenting on the dead bird site itself.
Not being a Twitter user, it didn’t even occur to me there might be a separate conversation thread going on there. In addition to the self-selection bias I’ve been pointing to, this might be a second reason why Twits would be underrepresented here.
Yay, someone liked my Reddit suggestion!
Also, um, what is Twitch?
I’m also using RSS feeds (A reminder that google killed google reader 10 years ago, and still some people are using RSS feeds)
Reddit might be a good idea tbh