For indie media types, earthquakes in a platform are a reminder of the value of a multi-platform strategy that includes cross-posting and cross-platform network activation. POSSE: Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. indieweb.org/POSSE

This isn’t a complete answer for the myriad uses of Twitter, and the multifaceted nature of Twitter is very much part of its appeal: I chat with friends, promote my work, and boost artists and ideas I like in the same medium. Is there a multi-platform strategy for those?

Can a multi-platform substrate of the Internet be used for all of the things we use Twitter for, in case Twitter gets worse at some or all of them? Maybe, though it’d probably take a ton of effort by all parties. A big part of Twitter is low-cost interaction.

Twitter is a flowing viscous fluid that carries our mental artifacts out and about, sometimes a few feet, sometimes far and wide. Link blogs used to be this: not (necessarily) curated statements of personal identity, but a sharing medium, a hand-pumped stream.

For the big stuff, multi-platform is mostly about putting stuff where people are, in front of possibly non-overlapping segments of audience. For the intimate stuff, I would need everyone I care about to be everywhere I might want to interact. POSSE to the rescue?

Lots of people reconsidering Mastodon today, just like the last big quake. Also thinking about Micro.blog again, a lovely little paid service. And RSS feeds, of course. Are these solutions greasy enough to form a flowing substrate? Or are they hand-pumped?

I suspect that however Twitter will change in the future, I’ll still be able to use it to say something that someone far away might hear. Whether it’ll be safe enough for people to remain present and conversational, or just degrade further into mere promoted messages, I dunno.

(Originally posted to Twitter on April 26, 2022. It received 4 likes.)