Social Media Potluck

As things are turning out, social media options are more of a potluck than a smorgasbord. For public figures, it’s not so much a choice of dishes to find people hanging out around, as it is browsing the table to see what new plate has been added, and which of the previous ones are empty.

I mentioned a couple of days ago the group of 8 sites (bottom of that post) I’ve been exploring beyond Facebook, and today I arranged them on my phone in order of following and followed.

Twitter tops the list for both, because that’s where I’ve had an account the longest (15 years), and consequently have engaged with people the most (9,499 Tweets and who knows how many thousand more comments).

Sigh. Late last year (29 Oct. 2022), I posted on Twitter that with Musk’s purchase, I was ditching the site to explore other waters. Upon the advice of some other folks leaving Twitter, I kept my account to prevent anyone else snagging the username. But my intent was to never return.

I’ll confess that my iconoclastic nature not infrequently takes a binary, yes/no, either/or, all-or-nothing leap. And while in some cases that can be good (married 47 years now), in others not so much. Fortunately, I’ve never been averse to publicly apologizing. So, to any Twitter followers reading this, I was wrong.

Wrong because it’s not an either/or situation. Things have changed in social media since last October, making Twitter only one of many communities. And in the same way that it finally occurred to me that I need not choose between Facebook and this blog for posts, it has finally gotten through my thick skull that posting on several different social media is not out of the question. Especially given that what I find to read, like, and comment on is different on each site.

So that’s my strategy for now, though tuned to each outlet. Less frivolity on Post.news; more frivolity on Hive; somewhere in the middle on CounterSocial and Mastodon; and an open firehose on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Twitter.

And probably some Twitter-specific poking of the bear. Because for me on Twitter, sometimes you poke the bear, and sometimes the bear pokes you.