Facebook’s been leaning on me to do all kinds of wacky things with my business page. I’ve seen enough small biz folks bemoan changes in the Facebook algorithm, the Instagram algorithm, the Twitter algorithm, you name it, that I know better. I use FB to participate in plushie-making groups, and in groups related to particular pattern designers, and then only if I can do so as my Page. WordPress posts these entries to Facebook mostly-automatically (hi, FB readers, you can get these with a feedreader directly and not worry about The Algorithm), and that’s about all I do there. Technically I have a Twitter account as well, but that is also just WordPress auto-posts.

As you may have seen, I’m on Mastodon.Art, a fediverse instance (and even if you’re not, you can also subscribe to my account via a feedreader). That’s where I do most of my “chat” type posts. I don’t have full control there per se, but it at least fulfills the rule of “supported by user fees/donations rather than ads and sale of data.” And the fediverse is pretty good about letting you migrate your follows/followers if you change instances, so it’s not a full silo.

Still, I’ve debated about setting up some kind of self-hosted forum. I confess to not being exactly sure what the focus would be – plushie making? handmade-business running? stupid embroidery-machine tricks? – but I feel like the One Big Shared Space model of social media was a bad idea. Small spaces are where it’s at. Would you be interested?