In a recent episode of my podcast, I talked about the problems happening over at Twitter. Since then, the platform has been on some kind of death watch. Folks have been signing up to various other social media sites — and so have I, because we all need a Plan B.

Mastodon

I already had a Mastodon account. A quick email search for the signup confirmation email tells me I had signed up five years ago, in November. However, I kept forgetting about it and I barely posted anything on it. But since Twitter Death Watch, I’ve actively tried to find people to follow on there, even if they’re mostly people I know on Twitter. Also, I set up a cross-posting account so I can stay active on Mastodon even if I forget to post on it. It worked okay, but it didn’t port the alt text of my images so I disengaged it after a few days. I’d been posting on Mastodon the first week or so but I’ve dropped off the past week because, again, I forgot about it.

Pillowfort

I’d been meaning to get a Pillowfort account but I wasn’t sure if I could trust their website security enough to pay them the $5 entrance fee (which I thought was quite fair). The other option to get in was to grab an invite from members but everytime someone posted an invite code, someone would beat me to it. Finally, Pillowfort opened their sign-ups, albeit you had to get on the wait list first. But it turns out the wait list wasn’t too long so I was in within a day. Once signed up, I forgot about it too. (See the pattern?)

Hive Social

If you think I’m just signing up to every decent-looking social media account so I’ll be ready when we all finally decide which platform replaces twitter, you’d be right. Thankfully, I’ve only signed up to three so far. Hive Social was the third platform I signed up for.

Hive went viral on Twitter for a couple of days so people went on a mad rush to sign up on there. I already had an account by then but I wasn’t using it much, it was more an act of “let’s wait and see if this takes off”. Turns out there are still some issues, like multiple users having the same handle and this security/privacy issue. And I had a problem with the lack of the alt-text function for images, it doesn’t seem very accessible to me. But again, I’ll wait and see. Although I may hold off it for a bit until that privacy issue gets fixed.

I’m still on Twitter, it’s still the place I get my news and *whispers* writing community tea. But if it suddenly disappears, I’ll be okay. I feel that I’ll be able to find my tweeps again in the future, in some different platform. We found each other once, we can do it again.