One of the worst, of course, was what happened to Twitter. The bird site was where a lot of independent creators spoke directly to their audiences, and where they made a lot of their online sales. And Musk, like any spoiled kid with an expensive toy, has been breaking it ever since he acquired it so that it's nearly useless for the purpose it was made for.
Enter our supposed savior... Blue Sky! A website that (supposedly) functions like social media was supposed to back in the glory days. A clean interface, a suite of perfectly normal features, and your feed is full of things from people you actually follow and subscribe to. It sounds like a perfect solution, but as we've learned well over the years anything that sounds too good to be true probably isn't.
So, what can I say about Blue Sky?
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| Well, I've been flying pretty high since I joined! |
Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!
Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!
What Has My Experience Been Like So Far?
I want to start with something of a disclaimer. I was never a heavy user on Twitter. I'm still technically there with just over 1,800 followers under @nlitherl, but I never really got much in the way of traction on that site. Even with participation in online follow trains, and being part of regular events like Self Promotion Days, I'm lucky to get any interaction at all on my posts over there. Usually 1 or 2 people will give something I share a heart, and maybe retweet it, but that's about it.
For comparison, I've been actually active on Blue Sky on @literarymercenary for a little over a week and change. I've had the account longer, but it was mostly dormant until recently when I started purposefully trying to expand it. At time of writing I've got only 72 people who are following me on there, but perhaps some folks reading this right now will be kind enough to push me toward triple digits. However, even with such a dramatically smaller audience, I'm finding that my posts are regularly getting a minimum of 4 interactions from people actually following me, and often it goes pretty well above that number.
So, absolute base numbers, Blue Sky is definitely showing promise, since it's outperforming the site it most resembles pretty much straight out of the gate in terms of people actually seeing and interacting with your posts.
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| Of course, those numbers are just one aspect of things. |
Raw numbers and interactions do not a social media website make, though. With that said, Blue Sky does have some other features going for it that I feel are worth mentioning.
One of the things I find most valuable is that it has no trouble generating previews of images from your posts. A picture is worth a thousand words, and if a post you make has a black box or no preview at all, then no one is going to stop their scrolling long enough to register what it is you're talking about. When I shared my recent blog entry World's Oldest Profession... Is The Third Time The Charm? on both Blue Sky and Twitter. On the former, folks got a lovely preview of the shiny cover of the supplement, while on Twitter folks just got a bunch of text, and no image at all.
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| Seriously, check this thing out if you're a tabletop gamer! |
In addition to this feature (which is pretty damn important if you're looking to expand your audience, make sales, etc.), Blue Sky has made statements that it won't allow content generated on the site to be used for AI scraping... which is something Twitter is apparently going to do. Blue Sky has an entire culture of blocking people who harass or abuse you without arguments and drama, unlike Twitter where not only is this kind of toxicity the day-to-day business, but there have been talks about modifying or outright removing the block feature.
Does this make Blue Sky perfect? No, don't be ridiculous. It's still a social media website, which means there are conflicts between users, there's technical issues due to the massive numbers of people they're onboarding, and there are going to be some features you want that aren't there, and there will be decisions they make you won't like. It's operating as an alternative to other websites out there, which means it is still a business.
With that said, if you're someone who has been dismayed at the state of websites like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. with regards to your promotional efforts, I would recommend at least reserving your place on Blue Sky. Whether you want to build up your following and use it seriously to try to reach a bigger audience, or you just want to keep it in your back pocket, it's certainly worth taking a little bit to set up your profile, and to reconnect with some folks.
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That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!
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