Twitter Sucks When You’re not Popufur
When I was first setting up the Furry Chamber of Commerce, the first thing I wanted to do was build the network of professionals such as accountants and lawyers who could help Furry Business Owners with their normal business tasks.
I created 2 brand new accounts on BlueSky and Twitter - places where almost every furry artist and maker promotes their work. I wasn’t expecting it, but the drastically different experiences across both were pretty wild.
I made two posts:
BlueSky
On both, I asked a couple friends to reblog the posts to get them started as I had zero followers on my brand new accounts at this point.
On BlueSky, the post gained traction rapidly. The content itself was compelling enough to get people to like and reblog, and the social aspect of the social network worked… socially - following the connections people have between each other.
On Twitter, the post fizzled and died. There were a few reblogs, but nothing like on BlueSky. The algorithm saw a new account with no followers, compared that to the legion of well established accounts, and proceeded to surface the established accounts content over mine. The social aspect was… not very social. The platform wants me to spend money to promote the post in order to get more eyes on it.
I wasn’t expecting it, but it felt like a good microcosm of why it’s so hard for new artists to gain traction on Twitter. You’re always going to be swimming upstream of the algorithm and fighting it for eyes. But in a place like BlueSky where you just see the posts of the people you follow, you get human curation and not algorithmic.
I think the key takeaway is how important it is to treat different social networks differently. You can’t do the same thing on YouTube shorts as you can on TikTok, you can’t do the same thing on Twitter as you do on Instagram.
And, personal bias: BlueSky is the best. :3
