My world's on fire, how 'bout yours?

[bladespark]

I use lyrics to title things a lot, even when the song isn't really relevant. I still find it amusing that I have an EPIC action-drama-romance MLP fic that's entirely Beatles themed. Why? Because Pinkie Pie romance in the first chapter = Honey Pie in my brain for a moment, and I just rolled with it.

I was re-reading that yesterday, because I've been comfort-reading a lot lately. My brain is MUSH and I have no spoons but I finally blocked myself from reddit for "mush-brained, time-wasing reading" so I have to do other things, and reading my own stories takes zero energy. I know what's going on, I don't have to parse anything, but I still like my own words. I write them for myself first, after all, not for an audience.

On the topic of audience, though, and getting back to everything being on fire...

Twitter.

Yeah.

The memes have been impeccable, and watching Musky Boy burn 44 billion in real time has been fun, but, well, twitter is sort of all I've got right now. It's the one, sole, single platform that's got a good community for writing stuff, sewing stuff, fandom stuff, furry stuff, queer stuff, horror stuff... All the stuff I do, including and especially NSFW stuff. There's NO other social media platform where I can effectively advertise 100% of my stuff. Literally. None. And that's a bit of a problem, given I make my living selling all the above stuff.

All the places that at least allow most of it have various other problems, compared to twitter. Like, furaffinity allows most of it, but it's SHIT for the written word. Sofurry is a little better for writing, but it's very small and I've never gotten much traction there. AO3 allows all the stories, but no advertising that I sell them

And so on.

Here, of course, also allows All The Things, in a way I like even better than twitter's laissez faire "we don't bother to ban anything" approach. Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut I can hardly make a living if my marketing reach is counted in single digits. Not unless one of you wants to be my single fabulously-wealthy patron, a la the Medicis. :D Would I love to be a kept artist? Fuck yeah. Is that gonna happen? Fuck no. Alas.

So yeah. I'm feeling immensely stressed out by all this. I've been feeling that way for a while. Having twitter be my one and only functional marketing tool really bothered me for ages, and here's why. If it crashes hard enough, things are going to be hairy.

Also my social life will minorly crater? I am making a point to put up content and try to grab a following in a lot of other places. Postybirb is a nice tool for that, since I don't have to craft individual posts for all the places, I can just click a couple of extra buttons for each site I tack on. It's even gotten me using pillowfort again! But that's for posting, for hanging around and shooting the shit with people, twitter and discord are where I'm at, and so when twitter goes, there are people I like that I don't know if I'll manage to keep in touch.

One can have the best of intentions, but if one's social media use and theirs don't end up meshing, you lose touch. There's people I exchanged off-site contacts with when livejournal crashed and burned, and I'm still in touch with some, but I haven't talked to others in years.

The whole mess is annoying and stressful and I'm not happy about it, except for the bit where I can laugh at how stupid Musk is, and even that bit is frustrating, because he shouldn't have been in a position to buy twitter in the first place.

I'm always glad you fine folks are here to babble at! Don't get me wrong there! Just...a guy's gotta pay the bills, including damn expensive vet bills, somehow, and DW isn't the place for that. I don't know what will be, going forward.

P.S. If any of you do want to socialize with me in a more casual way, my personal discord server is here: https://discord.gg/PPumsuwT and I'm Aidan#7687

Comments

[ex_flameandsong751]

As someone who has never used the bird app and has an allergic reaction to non-DW social media - I think one of the things that's getting lost in the "I WANT TO SEE TWITTER BURN, FUCK ELON MUSK AND FUCK TWITTER CULTURE" glee is how much this absolutely is fucking over people like yourself: independent content creators who are running out of avenues to promote one's work. Patreon is imperfect and comes with a list of requirements - even if I didn't stand to lose my benefits from having a Patreon account, I write the kind of stuff that's against Patreon TOS and one of my friends got banned from Patreon a couple months ago for writing problematic fiction.

So while I hate Elon Musk as much as everybody else, I also can't be as schadenfreude about it as a lot of folks are because I know how this is impacting creative people trying to make a living who don't have a lot of places to go and pimp their work, and it fucking sucks.

I hope you can find a way to promote your work and generate more income, because yes, you need to pay the bills. [insert my rant here about how we need Universal Basic Income, but even so, I still think it's good for people to support artists, writers, etc] If I had money, I would throw some at you each month, y'know? I'm kind of dying to read that dominant Omega story because that sounds like one of those subversions that is RIGHT up my fucking alley.

[silvercat17]

I've been hanging out on Tumblr more. With the new community labels it's more open to adult stuff (but not actual sex acts or art with a focus on genitalia) - a lot of the fantasy dildo shops are mirroring on there. But it's much smaller than twitter and the new rules aren't 100% clear yet, at least to me.

I hate this whole situation and how it's going to end up affecting journalists, small businesses, creators, and everybody else. Communities are going to get fractured again and it pisses me off.

[greghousesgf]

One of my pony characters (and my icon on Meetup) is named Apple Records and her cutie mark is the Yellow Submarine. She also mostly speaks in Beatles lyric quotes.

[bladespark]

Hah! That's fantastic.

[cloudwrack]

I’m so sorry about the impact the Twitterpocalypse is having on you and other artists. I’m pretty inactive there, but know so many people who rely on it for advertising/commissions/etc. - it makes the fact that this is One Billionaire Boy’s entirely avoidable mess all the more infuriating. Crossing my fingers for a decent alternative.

[silveradept]

Oof. The current situation on Twitter is really rough. We're kind of hoping that the current owner realizes what kind of thing is going on sooner rather than later and passes it off to hands that are more capable than him, but how long that's going to take is a big unknown.

This would be the perfect time for something to step in and fill the void, but the closest thing that's going on to that has a specific culture to itself and, while it might not be totally hostile to doing a promo post here and there, it'll probably want you to be more hanging out than trying to get sales.

[zeeth_kyrah]

As I remarked in my last tweet, after the last few weeks, I understand better now that Cave Johnson isn't quite as much parody as I'd assumed.