If You Build it Again, Will They Come?

To Bluesky?

Hi friends,

I am now realizing how often I say “if you build it, they will come” in reference to social media (usually proceeded with a social media is NOT) and I’ve never seen Field of Dreams. Huh. I should probably do that. ANYWAY, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Twitter is over and Bluesky is the new thing. Some of you may remember other post-Twitter competitors like Mastodon and Post (lol), and if you don’t remember them, well, that’s all you need to know. I have been on Bluesky since May, 2023 (I also saw it at the Public) and was in the first 1% when they hit 10M users.¹ Now they have 20M. Am I proud that I go in on this early? Yes. Do I know I should not be proud of that? Also yes. Anyway, moving on.

Some of you may be thinking omgggggggggg I do not want to learn a new social media platform! And I hear you. Luckily, this one looks just like Twitter, so it’s easy to pick up. The main difference between the two is that blocking is STRONGLY encouraged. Don’t like some reply guy in your mentions? Block ‘em. Don’t like the cut of someone’s jib? Block ‘em. Know they’re just there to troll you and everyone you know? BLOCK ‘EM. No, this does not create an echo chamber. It’s moving lunch tables at the cafeteria, not ejecting someone from the premises. If that makes you mad, sorry! That’s just how we’re doing things over at Bluesky. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Bottom line, though, you do not have to come to Bluesky if you do not want to. If your readers aren’t there, if you used the decline of Twitter to wean yourself off social media and you don’t want to go back, you do not have to adopt the new thing, even if everyone else is doing it. If you want to migrate over to Bluesky and are bemoaning the platform you’re leaving behind, I hear you, too. There’s been quite a lot of chatter about how many followers one has gained in the recent user explosion over there, and I will admit that it has sparked some jealousy in myself. I had 30k followers on Twitter! I was verified when that was “cool!” Yes, I know how all this sounds! Let me live! Anyway, it sucks that I, we, spent so much time in the Twitter sandbox and it turned out to be the neighborhood litter box. So it goes. It might feel mandatory that you have to be on all the things if you’re a writer building a platform, but you don’t. You can do other stuff.

You do not deserve the same number of followers or level of attention you got on Twitter over at Bluesky. You don’t deserve anything on social media because that’s not how it works. You can, however, endeavor to rebuild what you had, now with the added benefit of everything you learned in the last decade+ (sob) you were possibly only Twitter. That’s what I’m going to do, and this is how I’m going to do it.

Use it Just as Much as I Want

I want a lot of followers on Bluesky, but in the same way I want all the MiniBrands Books. (Have you seen these????) With enough time, attention, and determination (/money), I could collect them all/get back to 30k followers on Bluesky. Probably.

But also? I don’t want to go back to spending hours a day on social media. The death of Twitter broke me of that habit, mostly, and I like it. I also could spend $$$ on MiniBrands if I wanted to, but obviously that is a bad idea and I won’t do that. Who cares if it’s dumb? It makes me happy. That’s my approach when it comes to Bluesky, too. It doesn’t matter in the long run, but I’m allowed to use it as much as I want regardless.

I’m Not Going to Engage With Engagement Bait

There’s lots of different kinds of engagement bait on social media. The biggest one on Twitter was Outrage Bait—omgggggg did you see this??????????? retweets and posts—and that’s part of what lead to its downfall, imho. We don’t do that (as much) on Bluesky. I mean, there are lots of things to be outraged about these days and that is definite discussed there. But there’s less dunking [purposefully reposting something a bad actor has said to show how bad it is] and less engagement-focused outrage posting overall there. And I don’t just mean misinformation or political clickbait headlines made to be reposted 1M times. Sometimes these posts are videos of cute otters giving rocks to people that turns out to be clips of many different otters spliced together to make a fake narrative. Or an AI-generated photo of the worlds largest squash or whatever. Those types of accounts are outed and put on block lists, along with the trolls, and honestly that keeps a lot of it out of sight. Just consider it a user-lead bad actor Roomba for your feed.

There’s also another kind of engagement bait that is more chaotic good than chaotic evil. The I’ll share one of my favorite books for every like this post gets! kinds of engagement bait are fine. They’re largely innocuous. They can actually start good conversations and help people find other like-minded follows. But, like, I used to jump on those right quick because it got (me) attention. Good attention usually! And now, I think I’ll pass most of the time. You should do it if it brings you joy. I just haven’t been feeling it lately.

I Will be Participating in Mass Joke Making Events

If we have another day like the 30-50 feral hogs day like we did on Twitter, you can bet I will be on there making as many bad/clever/already thought of jokes as I can. Those are the good days on social media! That’s what text-based microblogging social media platforms were made for! I am not above it.

I’m Going to Talk About the Things I Like

The primary way I plan to rebuild my platform is by talking about the things I like. I have the benefit carrying over about 10% of my Twitter platform over to Bluesky, so I already have a leg up. I have felt twinges of oh, if I just talked about query letters more I bet my follower count would go up. And that is probably true. I don’t mind talking about query letters. But also, I saw the most bonkers production of Sunset Blvd on Broadway last week, and omg has anyone else seen it?? More broadly applicable, I’ve picked up crochet again and am having so much fun teaching my 8yo how to do it, too! And I’m doing a lot of hot yoga and it feels so good! These are not earth-shattering topics of conversation destined to get me 10k likes and 20k new followers. So what? It’s more likely, however, to spark fun conversations with like-minded people which will make it more fun for me and make my experience better, which in turn may make me spend a little more time there, which then might increase my follower count. Again, I realize that I don’t need my Bluesky account to feed my family, now or down the road (though it certainly could help in the long run). I have this newsletter and instagram and other stuff to promote my book when it comes time for that. (Soon!) But even if I did rely on social media more to earn a living, it’s not something that I could ramp up quickly to pay next month’s rent. You can do other things to accelerate your platform building (use the site more, talk to other like-minded people, engage in ethical engagement bait, toot your own horn more) but it still takes a while to build regardless. Might as well make it fun while you do it.

Bluesky is not Twitter. It does not shuffle your feed according to an algorithm (long live the chronological feed!) so you can’t game it with hashtags or whatever people used to do at the other place. We don’t have enough data yet to know whether posting 5 times a day from 9-5am is better than posting 15 times from 3pm-1am. I don’t know if we’ll ever get that data, or if we should. It’s likely that your followers are active at different times than mine, even if we live in the same time zone. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If you are stressing out about building or rebuilding your platform on a new thing, try not to stress. It takes time for everyone. There are no shortcuts. You aren’t behind everyone else—we’re all if not in the same boat at least in the same ocean. Go have fun with it. Make it your own. Who knows when this one is going to sunset and we have to do it all over again again?

OXOXOXOX,

Kate

1. I only have one joke.