Backseat Social Media Driver

[lb_lee]

 Mori: we have no dog in the social media wars so have mostly just watched Reddit and Twitter burn down with a detached, "watch that hurricane spin on the horizon, man am I glad we ain't closer," but we do appreciate the people who have moved to cohost.org because that's the only damn one of them that doesn't require an account to view AND allows RSS. (Meaning we can follow along with your sweet hamster pics.)

Bsky and tumblr both require accounts to view (though tumblr's real unpredictable on that count, sometimes it cuts you off after a few posts, sometimes it doesn't) and Threads... look, Instagram is the worst, I dread people linking me their stuff on Instagram because it's a coin flip whether I can see it or not, I would rather eat lard straight than go to Threads.

Some handy articles by Kiriska:

• How to Build a Personal Website
• The Only Way to Beat the Algorithm is to Retrain Your Audience
• Freedom from Algorithms: How to Use a Feed Reader

Comments

[starfallhaven]

Is cohost, like, decent as far as data security? I know our account with tumblr makes that a very funny question to ask, but still. -Ai (she/her)

[hungryghosts]

Oh, Bluesky is kind of a clown show: https://cohost.org/jkap/post/2218949-ok-i-realize-that-i

I'm biased too, but I have to echo the sentiment of "why on earth is anyone using that site"

[silvercat17]

I'm sticking with Tumblr just because I've been there. I'm on Pillowfort, which is very eh, and otherwise I'm just waiting for something to win out (besides Mastodon). I think everything so far has had some fair criticism (I don't remember what the problem was with co-host and I'm not going on Twitter to find it again)

[acorn_squash]

In my experience, Mastodon also lets you view posts without an account, which is nice.

[minoanmiss]

* takes motes*

[we]

There is a reason why we've operated an independent plurality website for over a decade—we don't trust social media platforms to be honest, and we don't trust them to keep our websites the way we designed them. No account required, no personal information collected, no existence at the whims of social media companies that care more about profit than their users.

We're still on Reddit for now, but who knows how long that will be. We left Twitter last year after Elon Musk bought it.


~J.