As of this week, I’ve deactivated my Twitter account. I haven’t used it at all since before I made the leap to BlueSky, and the site has degenerated into a flaming trash-heap of disinformation and hate so I pulled the plug. It was past time.
I’m also taking a long, hard look at the various Meta apps I have accounts on. I hardly bother with Instagram now, except to keep up with a few folks I follow there. I’ve posted once in a year and a half, and to get the most out of the algorithm there you need to post frequently, preferably with video ::shudder:: (This is why I don’t do TikTok/BookTok. I hate being filmed.)
So that brings us to Facebook. I never really liked it much, and only kept my personal account so I could administer my author page, where I got a bit of interaction with readers. Again, changes to the algorithm penalised infrequent posting, and started de-prioritising posts with external links so what posts I did make there were no longer sending traffic to my blog (Meta *really* doesn’t like people clicking away from its ecosystem).
Plus there’s the whole evil empire thing, and the using-user-content-for-AI-training nonsense, and and and . . .
So this is where I am at. I’ll be sorry to lose the reader interaction on my author page, and there’s some accounts on Insta I’ll miss, but so be it. I have limited energy and I’d rather spend it writing books than jumping through hoops trying to stay one step ahead of the machine.
From the end of this month, then, the only social media I’ll be using is BlueSky, where you can find me as @elspethcooper.bsky.social. I hope to see some of you over there.
