about that whole twitter situation...

[ratcreature]

Are there any new up-and-coming places where one ought to namesquat just in case? I do have a Pillowfort account (and if anyone wants an invite, I think I can generate three or so?), and I have heard of Mastodon, though I'm not entirely sure how joining that works. From what I understand you have to pick a server instance based on the reputation and TOS of that specific server? Are there new places? I'm not up to joining TikTok (not that it is new at this point)...

Comments

[melannen]

I am not super clear on Mastodon either, but I believe each server keeps its own set of usernames, so I'm not sure there's a point namesquatting there. You would be ratcreature@serverofchoice.yay and there might be another ratcreature at another server. It might be worth trying to get an account on a specific server where all the cool kids are, but they're starting to have issues with the people who run the larger servers getting tired and quitting and shutting them down (which is the obvious fail point of that model) so I'm not sure it's even worth trying to get a foothold on a specific server.

Discord seems to be the main place at the moment tbh, but I don't think it requires unique usernames, so there's no point in squatting.

If I'm trying to predict the future, possibly Twitch? Non-gaming fandom stuff seems to be slowly creeping in there as gamers-who-are-also-fans use it for other stuff, and there's a lot of active people and a thriving visual art community. I think you do have to namesquat on twitch, but I haven't quite gotten as far as signing up yet. Also if you aren't interested in streaming there's really no point.

Tumblr is having a mini-revival helped by them removing the tits ban simultaneously with the twitter exodus, but I'm sure you've already got that one.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I joined Tumblr soon after it started in 2007 (back when you didn't even have to enter a birth year, which I noticed when Tumblr recently demanded that to show you all posts), then didn't do anything with it for years, but it came in handy to have my pseud when fandom moved there.

I have a Discord account, but don't really use it, because I find chat kind of stressful. And the organisational side seems kind of closed/clique-ish and hit-and-miss whether you find a niche with a group you like. That was already the case with fandom IRC rooms for The Sentinel in the late 90s. It would probably be a bit easier now, because my English has become fluent during my time in fandom, and also I'm typing a little faster now, but I like asynchronous interaction better.

I've recently seen mention of cohost.org but don't know anything about that project? company?

[melannen]

Yeah, I've only seen cohost mentioned in lists of places people might move too, which in my experience isn't a good sign - new sites tend to need to have something to offer other than not being the old site, if they're really going to take off.

I can get you an invite to the Cranky Old Fans discord, which is the one that eased me into figuring out discord, if you'd like. It was the perfect level of activity for me to figure out how Discord chat works and I suspect you'd fit into our niche! :D (It's got a lot of DW people on it.) Discord is in practice more asynchronous than IRC, at least in the not-huge groups - I've seen it described as chatrooms that think they're forums, or possibly forums that think they're chatrooms, which seems about right. IT's pretty normal to carry on a conversation over the course of one post every few hours, or reply to something posted several days ago, on most of my discords.

But you're right that the closed aspect makes it hard to find a place where you do fit. I spent several years not figuring it out until I managed to stumble into invites to a few smaller ones that worked for me, and I have no idea how you make that work if you don't already have a starting point on other social media.

(Oh, if you don't have a namesquat on Reddit yet, that might be worth at least squatting. It is among other things a good place to find fandom Discord invites, and there's a lot of tiny communities for tiny fandoms that are pretty active and not awful; I got active there when I got into a book fandom where that was the only public place with people. And then someone on Reddit gave me an invite to the discord and I wandered out of the Reddit...)

[ratcreature]

I'd like a Discord invite, maybe it's worth another try. I think the last time I joined one was has been four or five years ago during one of the Tumblr exit episodes (not the one that led to Pillowfort, but one of the ones before that...it's hard to jeep track).

I am actually not sure whether I have a Reddit account. I remember installing a Reddit app one smartphone ago to read something on a local Reddit that wouldn't show just by web browsing, but I'm not sure whether that resulted in a real account... It was an overall confusing experience and the app seemed to auto-subscribe me to things? I backed away pretty quickly.

[mellowtigger]

Yes, Mastodon is confusing because it's so diversified. You pick a server, choosing whom to trust as administrator. You can still follow people on other instances, though. "It's like email, pick a server but talk to everybody," as they are prone to explain. There's also Counter.Social, which used to be a Mastodon instance before becoming its own thing, no longer part of the Mastodon federation. It's actually a much-simplified user experience because it's a single service, which you might enjoy. I'm also on MeWe, which is fine but has its own strong conservative presence there.

[ratcreature]

I had never even heard of MeWe. Is there any fandom there? Googling what it is doesn't make that look promising. The extent to which I care who else has a strong presence on a service mostly depends on how well you can tailor your experience, so it wouldn't necessarily be a deal breaker. Like, I don't boycott Reddit for having a ton of sub reddits that I really don't care for.

[mellowtigger]

Not especially. It's mostly where a lot of bears from G+ ended up when Google killed off their social media experience. :/ That's the only reason I stayed, when the other interest groups kind of dried up. It's at least a stable unified experience, though. So it has that in its favor.

[melannen]

Sent a DM for the Discord!

I don't think there's actually anything on reddit that *requires* the app, I've never used it, but if you go the website on mobile it is SUPER annoying about trying to trick you into installing the app, it's true. I only use it on the browser on the laptop these days because they make the mobile experience so annoying.

[ratcreature]

Thanks for the DM, I'll check it out once I'm not this close to my bedtime (well the aspirational one anyway)

Wrt Reddit, it's been a while, but iirc the problem with reading wasn't just that I had to confirm that I wanted to continue in the browser, not the app, but that it wasn't fully public? It just wouldn't show like other subreddits.

[ane]

I've been using counter.social. They've had like 20,000 new subscribers in the last few days so it's very slow at the moment until things get upgraded. I've mostly been posting cat pics, so don't really know if there's much fandom related things. I'm not obsessed with a particular fandom recently so I haven't really looked, although I do see the occasional post. There's apparently groups as part of the paid features $5/month, but I haven't gotten around to upgrading to find out. I probably will at some point soon.