Hello, everyone! Long time no see! We have a lot of updates for you today!
SOCIAL CREATURES
The first one is the longest one: much like everyone who sees the writing on the wall and doesn't live near the river (de)Nile, we've scaled back our usage of Twitter. It's disheartening, given that it's the only site where our updates and promo have been the most successful but as of now, it's also competing with Tumblr for "least visibility"--and Tumblr is winning. We are worried that for our second future Aradia Beat venture, we may not be able to be successful but we'll cross that bridge if/when we get to it.
Unlike most companies or people, however, we have chosen to not be on Threads or Bluesky. It would be too many links to provide as sources, but Threads and Bluesky have too many risks for us to consider using them, not less being privacy and data concerns. (Bluesky even causes your blocklist to be public!) Instagram has become a "happy bots DMing us after every post" landscape, but there, the damage was already done long before Threads existed. As for Bluesky, we recognize that we are shooting ourselves in the foot, given that now everyone has chosen that to replace Twitter (for the moment) and thus, it's where all the "eyes and ears" are. Would it be useful for the second Aradia Beat and all future ventures to be on Bluesky? Yes, of course. But we truly do not feel comfortable being on Jack Dorsey's reroll at another Twitter. We also don't think that a site that hides your profiles and requires you to make an account in order to be able to see others' profiles is worth anything. If we cannot see what you can provide for us, is it truly really any good?