For many reasons that I will not enumerate here at the current moment, I am pulling back much of my social media presence. I have deleted the content of my Twitter account, and I am in the process of doing the same with material on the META platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
I do not take this step lightly. Over the years (almost decades with Facebook) I have built friendships on these platforms, enjoyed seeing the photography of many colleagues and friends, and learned a lot.
I greatly appreciate the thousands of people who have followed my photography on those platforms, and I’m grateful for their support, friendship, likes, comments, and shares.
A part of me feels badly about what may seem to them like I’m cutting them off. I deeply regret that, but please trust that I have principled reasons for taking these steps.
One follower wrote, “I’ll miss seeing your photographs!” But there’s good news! You don’t have to miss them! You can still see the photographs and descriptions and more and you can comment, too at the following:
- HERE at gdanmitchell.com, of course. (Click post titles to read and comment. Subscribe using “subscribe” box below and on each page.)
- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/gdanmitchell.com where a dynamic photography community is building.
- Mastadon: https://sfba.social/@gdanmitchell
- Substack: I post daily substack “notes” with photos at https://gdanmitchell.substack.com/notes.
- Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gdanmitchell/ where two decades of my photography is available.
Hope you’ll follow me here and/or at one or more of these!
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I, too, am rethinking my social media accounts. For years, I mainly used Meta’s Facebook and Instagram. I also had a Twitter account (now X) that had not been used with any regularity for some time long before it became X. I have since deleted my X account. About three months ago, I opened an account on BlueSky, and at first, I was hesitant if it would be worthwhile, but in the last month or so, it has started to show some promise, and I seem to be having more interactions with the photography and art community.
I think, for now, I will keep the Meta accounts until I can figure out where I am going with my social media activity. Since there are few real magazines or books to get one’s work out there, social media seems to be the only course to follow. I don’t want to make having a bunch of “likes” the main thing, but I also want to get my work “out there”.
With Facebook and Instagram, my interactions have slowly been going down year by year, and perhaps some of that could be my own fault as I may not have been posting as regularly as I should have on Instagram, but on Facebook, I post pretty well every day. Currently, I supposedly have 4943 “friends” but my daily posts only reach a small fraction of those people, I added up some numbers, and over 9 days, my posts reached an average of 241 “friends” a day which is about 4.87% of my “friends” and out of those I average about 17 “likes” per post or 0.34% from my “friends”.
I have tried Flickr and have an account there, but I have had little or no success, which might be partly due to the fact that I have a free account.
Thanks for visiting and commenting. I agree that creating and tending to a social media presence is very important these days. That is where most of the discussion happens, where most work is seen, and even where the online publishers interact. That makes it tough to completely disassociate from some of the main social media networks — to some extent they have replaced our old-school “real world” networks.
I’m going to keep my accounts alive on the services that I back off from. I have several reasons for doing that rather than simply deleting the accounts. One is that the account names are associated with my “brand,” and I don’t want to lose control of those names. Another is that I still harbor a faint hope that some of the services might reform at some future point — and if they do I want to be able to renew my presence quickly. I did literally delete my X/Twitter account, but I was able to create a new one using the same username/handle. There’s nothing there, but it is mine and I gives me access to the service if I do need it.
I’ve watched my connections wither on Facebook over the years, too. I mostly chalk this up to Facebooks intentional transition from what made it successful at first (lots of free content rewarded by “organic reach” that brought many of us multiple thousands of active followers) to a service that is mostly about algorithmic clickbait. I don’t see the people I joined to connect with any more. Meanwhile my main FB page is filled with stuff I’m not interested in and clickbait designed to trigger interaction. It is really nothing like what we thought it would be.
Flickr is an oddity. I would not say that I have a lot of interaction there, and it has also been declining. I pay the small fee to have full access because of the many thousands of photographs I have shared there over two decades, and because it has ended up having an important role in my social media posting workflow. At some point I’ll likely revisit that and probably kill off the Flickr account.
Dan
I will certainly seek and find you, Dan! :)
Thanks! I will consider myself sought and found! ;-)