Begging that Mastodon take up the mantle of 'professional audience communication' instead

[yvannairie]

Unironically seeing youtubers list their Tumblr at the end-card is making me more confident about the death of Twitter and anything else

It also signals the death of Tumblr but whatever.

I do not want these people around, and for people who have had their Tumblelogs as long as I have, I do not want them to advertise themselves as sources of parasocial interaction.

The discourse situation on Tumblr is already bad enough.

Comments

[ebonwinged_nova]

They're listing tumblr now? Wow, twitter is DEAD dead... I feel sad about losing contact with so many artists who just aren't anywhere else on the internet

[yvannairie]

Not any big big channels yet, at least. There's a chance it'll flare out and the big channels never adopt Tumblr as a platform because it's, in a word, "too cringe" but in the opposite way as listing your LinkedIn would be.

Tbh no matter how I feel about Twitter otherwise, I think it's done horrible damage to fandom in specific, eroding the boundaries between different modes of interaction between people as people, people in a fandom and people as conversing with their professional peers. Tumblr already has the cults-of-personalities of some prominent smaller fandoms running around, but that's a niche of a niche. Twitter is where Jean Average goes to check on their favourite content creators. I don't want Tumblr to be that site unless they strengthen the ability to form filter bubbles and personalise the site experience way more.

But I do also feel for people whose entire professional existence is on Twitter. It's always been the worst possible site for discoverability and community, but the payout of going viral is truly the most powerful meal ticket in the current social media environment. I feel pretty comfortable in predicting that most of them will move off to Instagram when the servers start shuttering, just because the user experience there is far more like Twitter than Tumblr with its steep user-propagated usability floor.

[ebonwinged_nova]

Oh, no defense of twitter. Even before musk twitter sucked and it would have continued sucking even if he hadn't bought it. It was also a place to come into contact with other cultures' fandom activity much easier than elsewhere though, and as you said many people's entire career hinges on twitter discoverability. Getting your audience to follow you elsewhere isn't so easy either.

Regardless of the merits of twitter... or lack thereof... I do find it profoundly sad to see something like that run into the ground because of one incompetent billionaire manbaby.

[sexytronians]

I do social media management as my job, where people go after twitter is something I'm having to keep a close eye on.

I really wish Mastondon would be where those folks go, but it doesn't have the tools you need if you've got to manage your social media professionally.

I think Threads may take off, not that I like Threads personally. But from the perspective of my job that and Bluesky are the most likely candidates for a platform to replace twitter.

[yvannairie]

Yeah I feel like Mastodon really proves that the more control over how your content spreads you have, the less well you do as a marketing platform. You can't kick off exponential exposure snowballs on Mastodon, and I doubt you can kick them off on Threads, either. I don't know about Bluesky, but Dorsey is behind that one and he's always been good at courting people who know how to make exceptions happen.

But you know what site does allow for exponential expoure snowballing? >_>)