First off, I’m changing the site’s date format across everything to be year first when it’s just numbers to remove any confusion or inconsistency. Not sure if I’ll go through every single old post to adjust this for those pages but at least moving forward it’ll be year/month/day. I’ll try to hit most of the stuff up front at least. Anyway, to the main event.
The thing about a site going under is to figure out where all the people who use that site will go. Like when old Napster got sued into the ground by the entire music industry, where were people getting their Metallica songs that weren’t actually even related to Metallica? I’m not entirely sure how long Limewire and Kazaa lasted after that actually. While there’s no real shortage of sketchy file hosts or torrent sources or whatnot, the question is what happens when it’s a thing that people make connections on.
While Twitter’s userbase still pales in comparison to Facebook’s billions of users, it’s a significant number. Of course there’s alts and bots and so on as it’s a username-focused service opposed to a real name one, and the whole real name requirement was really screwing over Oculus users who got accounts getting randomly banned until they branched off the accounts, but for all I know it’s still an obstacle. Regardless, Twitter ended up becoming a major player in connections and marketing. When something that major falls, people panic, because what’s going to have that same level of impact?
I’ve been suggesting that people make their own website for some time now, pretty much ever since I got mine rolling, even if it just ends up being a very basic page that just links out to other social profiles and whatever. They even have a service just for that sort of thing exactly on Linktree, but of course it has some other random features for marketing or whatever and honestly I wouldn’t be satisfied with just that, plus the threat of things being made weirder or more limited over time because it is a corporate operation, but for some people it works. Sometimes people have both for some reason. Do whatever you want I guess.
However, when it comes to content specifically, I like putting what I can on my site, essentially things that aren’t huge files due to limited space and also for the sake of low bandwidth usage. Ideally I’d be able to host hundreds of gigabytes on a server of my own but servers cost money and that cost scales with how much you’re dealing with storage and traffic and all that junk. I was just glad I found a host with a free option for the time being. Plus I can talk about whatever and not risk the post being deleted by the algorithm, even though I’m not really one to stray into highly controversial grounds or use incredibly derogatory language or even doing the apparently high-penalty crime of depicting legal sex-related things, at least as far as advertisers and Apple are concerned.
From what I hear, even Tumblr hasn’t loosened back up entirely yet. Apparently they won’t outright ban everyone just for having not-work-safe stuff anymore, but they’ll sure as hell make it harder to find in general searches and whatever. Probably to appease the advertisers and Apple. Pretty sure Twitter is doing that too. And whoever else is running one of these corporate blue sites. Plus there’s the whole concern about “what if kids find this” but they already have systems for that, which of course smart kids know how to circumvent anyway. If anything the ads might be more likely to bring up that sort of content at random.
As far as where people are going after Twitter, which given how much money billionaires have to burn on stupid shit will probably still be around after this even if it’s completely fucked over and generally unusable, because somehow Tumblr still exists for one thing, it’s up in the air. Some people are of course going back to Tumblr. I’m not doing that. In terms of similar sites, there’s Cohost that I can think of for now, which I went ahead and made one in case I feel more inclined to use it, and maybe some thing called Itaku but I’m not entirely sure what that is. I think it’s art-focused but can also post other stuff, so that sounds Tumblr-esque. Others are going to Mastodon, and when someone “goes to Mastodon” that could mean potentially several servers because it apparently kind of works like e-mail but also not really? I still haven’t bothered to figure out what I want to do, but I think there’s a “main server” people usually start with before getting more specialized.
There’s also Telegram, which apparently is a stereotypical furry magnet because it’s encrypted and secure and has stickers, apparently those are things furries like aside from anthropomorphic animals. I don’t know. Personally it doesn’t appeal to me because it’s so phone-focused. As in you require a phone with a working phone number to set up initially. I don’t like having to give my phone to things because it pretty much guarantees I’ll get a spike in spam calls soon enough because that stuff always gets out somehow. Plus it’s more of a messaging thing with groups and channels and whatnot so I hear, so really it’s more adjacent to Discord by the sound of it. Speaking of Discord, I wonder what the plans are whenever that might go under, and I hope it doesn’t require me to give everyone my phone number and get all the resulting spam for that. If anything I’ll just look into a general IRC server thing. Or e-mails. Those are still useful. I even have a public-facing email that nobody really messages, but of course I’m not exactly popular either and I also exist in a few other spaces people use more. But it’s there just in case.
Reasons like the Twitter panic are why I always try to look ahead at alternatives for presence as part of a prepper mindset, minus all the stereotypical craziness and trigger-happiness that gets associated with that. Really to be a successful prepper, one should keep their morale high and their mind as stable as possible, not just jumping at whatever the latest conspiracy is, and to also not only store useful supplies but rotate out and use ones that might be going out of date to replace them with fresher ones. Preparing ahead of time is why I decided to set up a website well before I stopped using Twitter, just so I’d have something to mess with that others could look at out of curiosity if they somehow happened across it. I just like to plan ahead in case terrible things happen, and of course this also extends offline. While it’s difficult to plan for every single scenario, I really just need enough time bought to figure a way out onto the next thing.
As far as this sort of thing goes online, it mainly means diversifying your online presence portfolio. Don’t just be on one social media site if you can help it, if you even are getting into social media. It can be other types of sites like art galleries and whatnot. Even if it means the others aren’t updated as much. That just happens, some sites lean more toward longer formats and might be more spaced out. Twitter is really a “this thing just happened” type of site and Mastodon might be similar depending on the server. Of course it doesn’t mean you can’t make short posts on a site that supports longer ones. Either way, better to do it sooner than later, so if one falls over it’s not just always a mad dash to the next, it’s more just closing one bridge that blew over and having the detours ready to go while planning a new one.