So, um, yeah. Crazy times we’re having, no?
Social media as we know it is imploding. There’s a boycott and mass exodus going on with all the biggies (Facebook, X/Twitter, TikTok and Instagram) hemorrhaging users as people delete their accounts. I’ve never seen anything like it. And while newcomers like Bluesky (and it’s IG clone cousin, Pinksky) have a lot of potential, it’s still going to take a while until the dust settles.
The irony of the fact that all of this is happening while I’m teaching several workshops about author platforms and social media is not lost on me.
I basically abandoned my socials during 2020 for many reasons I don’t feel like getting into right now. (One of the problems with not really blogging much for the last few years is that I feel like I need to do a massive lore drop to catch you up on the last five years and that’s just… super daunting and no wanna.) Even when I was ready to come back to social media, things had degraded so much at Twitter there wasn’t really any point in posting there again. (I left Facebook over a decade ago so I didn’t even consider going back there.)
It’s been a strange thing. Before the mass exodus began, I had over 5000 followers on Twitter. It was my main daily hangout for years, not only my biggest platform for engagement, but a social hub that served as my watercooler when I was losing my mind working from home and needed adult conversation. I met a lot of friends on Twitter, good friends I will miss. But as the platform became increasingly unpleasant (often it feels like there are no actually humans left on Twitter and it’s all bots) and engagement tanked, I finally realized I was only visiting it out of habit and there really wasn’t anything there for me anymore.
Bluesky has less people overall, but they’re all actual humans so there’s more engagement. It’s really recaptured the vibes of Twitter before it all went to heck and I’m excited about making new friends and finding old as we build up that community together. It has a lot of really cool features (such as starter packs of people to follow about certain interests and custom feeds that only show you curated posts on a given theme) that make me excited about what the platform could do in the future.
The custom feeds are especially great right now since, if I need an escape from doomscrolling, I can just look at a feed of cute animals or pretty art for a bit with nary a news post in sight! Way better than with other social networks where the happy posts and the stressful posts are all arranged willy nilly in the same timeline. It’s also been great to actually see posts from my friends and people I follow instead of ragebait posts by randos I’d blocked the algorithm wanted to shove in my face again for some reason. (I really didn’t realize how bad Twitter had gotten until I was free from all it’s terribleness!)
As for my old socials, for now, I’m leaving them up as announcement-only feeds. Links to my new blog posts will still auto-post, the occasional Buffer post might share (though I’m honestly joining the trend of pulling back on what I share on Meta and X because at this point posting there feels like endorsement of evil I do NOT cosign), but that’s it. I’m not deleting my accounts entirely yet, mostly because I want to see if it’s possible to strip all the old posts out first, but I’m also not engaging on them either.
That said, I did delete all my other Twitter accounts besides the main HillaryDePiano one. There just wasn’t really any point to keep them anymore. (It’s debatable if there’s a point to keeping the main one, if we’re being honest, and I go back and forth on just deleting it daily.) Facebook is trickier because I have to keep a personal account to be able to manage my pages (which include my local writing group) so I’m not really sure what I’m going to do there besides look into stripping out all the posts so I can just use it as an admin account.
For now, I only have the one Bluesky account. Will I eventually make one for all my pennames like before? Remains to be seen whether I’m active enough on there to make it worth it. For now, T. W. Seller and Hillary DePiano share the account.
And i have a separate one for my new secret penname but shh no one needs to know about that.
On a personal level, it’s all so crazy, especially for those of us that have been on these platforms for going on two decades. It’s emotional! That’s a long time and the sunk costs fallacy is in play big time. I know I really should have deleted during the first mass exodus but I kept hoping someone would come along and save the platform, though it’s clearly there’s no much left worth saving at this point.
Lots of feelings, especially mourning the loss of a great community, but nothing lasts forever.
Anyway, because I’m teaching so many classes about social media right now and very conspicuously not directing people to my socials, I felt like I owed everyone an explanation of why. You can, of course, always find me here and I look forward to eventually building a private community space on this site and getting back into more regular blogging again once my teaching schedule lets up.
In the meantime, see you on Bluesky and stay safe out there!
Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
