Social Media Is Fractured

last updated: 2023-12-23

ed. note: this wiki post / page does not follow its own advice

Places to Post and Read

a curated list

• LinkedIn
• Medium
• Substack
• Bluesky
• Mastodon
  • recommended instance for IT professionals: Hachyderm.io
  • recommended instance for general social: mastodon.social
  • you might have two accounts:
    • post from your website (micro.blog or WordPress)
    • read from mastodon.social (to see the most people) or a niche instance (because there are certain people on the niche site who you probably wouldn't see on mastodon.social)
• X (formerly Twitter)
• Instagram
• TikTok

As of 2024, for the best reach, you should post to most of these, and set up some way to make sure you see replies, and then reply to the replies.

There are also lively discussion forums elsewhere: Discord, Signal, Telegram, Slack, various Discourse instances, etc. These are niches, not general public forums, but still valuable places to find your people and conversations.

Note that using each service or federation carries some political / social baggage / "correctness". Do your own research, ask your friends and desired social contacts for their thoughts. Some questions to consider: who owns them? who controls them? what's their business model? who do they let post even though perhaps they shouldn't? who do they effectively censor (explicitly or implicitly) even though perhaps they shouldn't?

Not listed above / ask me more about: Nostr, Ghost, Flickr, Threads.

Crossposting / POSSE

Some reading:

• The poster’s guide to the internet of the future (The Verge, 2023-10-23)
• POSSE (IndieWeb, wiki page)
  • POSSE (IndieWeb, wiki page) - micro.blog implements many IndieWeb building blocks and may be a good to/from POSSE tool)
• Cross-posting to Twitter, Medium, Mastodon, and more (Micro.blog Help Center, 2021-03-08 et seq.)
• How Cory Doctorow publishes Pluralistic (Cory Doctorow, 2021-01-13, xlnt description of Cory's publishing process)
  • Pluralistic is two. Still at it! (Cory Doctorow, 2022-02-19, POSSE Cory's way)
• Why I'm cross-posting (Larry Anderson, 2023-12-20) (love the ∞ symbol for the permalink!)