I’m usually as early an adopter as I can be with the various tools and apps that come online in the world of social media and social networking. For instance, I was one of the very early users of Plurk and subsequently twttr, although I think when I signed up in June 2007 it had already become twitter.
Anyway, there’s lots of activity at the moment with people shuffling allegiances. As you’d expect, I’m on Threads, BlueSky, Mastodon, even Spoutible. If you want to find me on your favourite site, and I will almost certainly be there, just use a URL like this:
https://sciencebase.com/social
Swap the word social for your chosen site: pixelfed, Instagram, mastodon, the aforementioned spoutible etc. The link above will open my page with active links to all my social media outlets.
Anyway, the main point of this blog was to discuss whether or not it’s worth homing in on a particular site at the moment. Most of the discussion seems to be around Threads versus BlueSky. Very few people are talking about any of the others, at least it seems that way in my timelines. Personally, I’m seeing some interesting discussions and a little engagement on Bluesky. My recent mineral moon photo did better there in terms of likes and reposts. But, some of the bird photos do much better on my Mastodon page. I’m having more conversations on Threads, but I am not seeing likes or reposts of photos, or indeed, anything that even gets into double figures.
At the time of writing, I have almost 40000 X followers still, although I used to have 55000. On threads not even 300, BlueSky less than 100, but on Mastodon, I have 1339, although I suspect a large proportion of those were active in November 2022, but have not even logged in since, if my followees are anything to go by. I realise it’s not all about the numbers, but if you don’t have some numbers then it’s hard to gain any traction or get any reach for engagement or conversation, and certainly not for sharing widely.
It’s hard to know what to do. Most of it is watercooler banter and little more. Back in the day, twitter helped me get into the bestsellers lists with my book Deceived Wisdom, it also helped me get enough votes for a major charity grant for our village community centre, but I doubt I could get any of that to happen today. I will perhaps just maintain my ad hoc approach. Posting as and when and hoping that at least a few of you still enjoys my songs, snaps, and science…