Genre Grapevine Twitter Update (Including Info on Alternatives)

Note: My regular Genre Grapevine column will be released on Sunday. My apology for being late. I've been dealing with some personal issues in recent months that took time away from the column. But the good news is my life has finally returned to a decent amount of sunshine, so my Genre Grapevine is again back on a regular schedule. Thank you to everyone for their patience.

In today's launch of SpaceX's Starship, the spacecraft underwent a "rapid unscheduled disassembly." Which is interesting language for one of Elon Musk's companies to use since Twitter has been experiencing a slow scheduled disassembly over the last six months.

Ironically, on the same day Starship blew up, Twitter is supposed to finally follow through on Musk's desire to remove legacy verified checkmarks. Add to that the glorious news (sarcasm) that only verified accounts are now eligible to show up in Twitter's "For You recommendations." All this means your Twitter feed is likely currently dominated with people who pay for the blue checkmark, which is essentially the same as turning Twitter over to the world's scummiest advertisers.

In short, Twitter is a mess. Or as Gareth L. Powell said in a great post summing up the situation, "OMG, Why is Social Media so F***ing Difficult Right Now?"

Read Powell's entire post, but this sums up the situation:

As a writer, I’m primarily on social media to keep up with friends and colleagues, interact with readers, encourage new writers, and hopefully sell a few books.

Basically, I just want to help people and make a living. Unfortunately, since the Great Twitter Exodus of 2022, these goals have become much harder.

Friends and colleagues have scattered to Mastodon, Spoutible, and half a dozen other apps, which means having to take the time to remember to regularly check those half a dozen apps.

Every time I switch to a new platform, I lose a segment of my audience. For instance, I left Patreon because I wasn’t happy about the fees they charged. In effect, they were making money off my content and I was working for them. So, I moved to Ko-fi, which doesn’t charge fees. But by moving, I lost almost all my existing Patreon supporters, and most of my monthly income.

If I quit Twitter for Mastodon, I go from a public platform with a following of 39,000 to a niche corner of a ‘fediverse’ with only 500.

Everything Powell said is absolutely dead-on. When I'm on Twitter it's become very difficult to see news and information from the people I follow. And I rarely see tweets from the people I want to interact with on the platform. As C.C. Finlay said, "I thought almost everybody I knew I had left twitter, but it's just that my timeline (under either option) no longer shows me tweets from 95% of the people I follow. If I haven't been reacting to your clever or important tweets, just know that it's not you, it's Elon."

If I change my Twitter feed from "For You" to "Following," things are better. But still not great. As Finlay said, I still seem to be missing a ton of people I want to interact with. 

Twitter Alternatives

Unfortunately, as Powell said, other alternative social media platforms aren't great. Last year when Musk first purchased Twitter I profiled a number of social media alternatives. 

Of those, Mastodon gained the most traction with people in the SF/F genre. Unfortunately, the Mastodon experience really varies by which server you are on. I'm on Wandering Shop and there are a good number of SF/F people on that server.

Other Twitter alternatives I profiled last year haven't, in my opinion, panned out. Hive had a lot of potential and the most Twitter-like platform of all the alternatives, but the platform experienced so many major technical problems last year that people who created accounts never came back. These days Hive feels like a ghost town.

Post has a nice platform but it's mainly used by journalists to share info and posts, not to interact with people in the community. And while Tribel Social has a good platform, it's more focused on political and activist communities. No one from the SF/F or literary community really seems to use it.

There is a bit a good news. Spoutible appears to have started taking off with people in the SF/F genre, with a number of people in the genre creating accounts there in recent weeks and sharing "spouts." 

I like the platform, which reminds me of how Twitter used to be. I created an account and it's amazing how easy it is to interact with people. And while Spoutible is currently only available through a browser, an app release appears to be coming soon. I was also impressed with how Spoutible handled a recent surge in racist accounts created on their platform. As Spoutible's founder and CEO Christopher Bouzy said, the platform dealt with the issue within two hours, suspending all the accounts.

That said, Spoutible is still a new platform and doesn't have anywhere near the level of users that Twitter does.

Update: Per comments shared on my Patreon by Sara M. Harvey and Skye Kilaen, Spoutible majorly screwed up in their dealings with Romancelandia and Courtney Milan. See this post for more info plus an overview of the issues with Spoutible's terms of service and the harassment that emerged from all this. Also check out the comments on my Patreon post. I don't know if Spoutible learned from this or not, so do consider this when looking at the platform. I'm definitely reconsidering based on this.

Otherwise, if you stay on Twitter try using the "follower" feature on your feed. And block as many of the new blue checks as you can. That's my plan for Twitter in the coming months.

Sadly, the issues at Twitter are also happening on other legacy social media platforms. An article in New York Magazine perhaps best sums up why this is happening:

"The big social apps now feel increasingly the same because they’re filled with the same stuff: content their users didn’t ask for made by people they don’t know on platforms they may not even use. Where they used to see posts from people they know, now there are algorithmically suggested videos from somebody made for nobody."

What Elon Musk and the companies running major social media platforms have forgotten is that their platforms are merely tools used by people to connect with each other. If people can't connect with the people and information they care about, they won't use the platform.