I’ve been putting myself through the wringer so you won’t have to!

If you are a member of Twitter’s #writingcommunity, you already know that it has been a wonderful platform to connect with writers, agents, and publishers of literary journals.

I’ve been testing the other platforms and so far, there isn’t one that lives up to the Twitter that we know and love. But neither is Twitter. It is changing. Rapidly. And when things change, if we try to hold too tightly we end up being dragged along and getting sore hands.

Change brings opportunity (I keep telling myself). So I’ve been testing other services.

Here’s my very biased rundown based on my experience so far.

Mastodon is a federated system. Never heard of that before this Elon mess but my husband tells me I use it like a pro! What that means is that there are a lot of little mastodon servers all connected. You can connect with people on other servers and search your own too. It’s a bit complicated to sign up and takes some time but there are a lot of writers and creative people. And there are high community standards. So bigotry will get you booted off. This is the social media community where I can honestly say I like the people.

Tribel feels the most like Twitter. There’s more politics. More snarkiness. You also can categorize your posts by topic and become a starred contributor in that category. When I posted a call for submissions for Tangled Locks Journal, there was almost no response where there were multiple people asking about the call on mastodon. The people who are organizing politically on Twitter have talked the most about Tribel.

Post.news is in beta and has a waitlist. I just got the invitation at the end of the week last week. I haven’t posted yet. The thing that immediately struck me was the clean graphic design. It has an option for paywalled and free content which means you can build a following and also have a revenue stream. I’ll share more soon.

Here’s my recommendations for writers.

Keep using Twitter but make some changes to how you use it.

• Follow and follow back so that you can see content that you like. This is a great opportunity to build followers.
• Block accounts that you don’t want to read. For example, the algorithms are heavy for Elon right now. (He owns the platform and seems to like attention!) I don’t want to see his tweets dominating my feed so I block his account.
• Make lists and use them to see the accounts you want to see to bypass the algorithms.
• Think twice before signing up for twitter blue. Strangely, it could devalue your brand.

Sign up for the other platforms to hold your name and see what happens. Use the same name as your writer’s Twitter account. Test the other platforms out. Crosspost. Maybe one of them will be the next big thing. Maybe not. But there is an early adopter advantage. People are engaging! Would love to hear what you are doing and follow you on any of the social media platforms.

Mastodon @teresaberkowitz@mas.to

Twitter, Tribel and Post: @teresaberkowitz

Photo by dole777 on Unsplash