Hey! Just an invitatiion to everyone getting sick and tired of Meta, musk and all the other macho transphobes owning the platforms we all rely on to meet customers and keep up with each others work:
Join us on the bright side! It’s called “the fediverse”!
Would be so happy to see more framebuiliders migrate. I’m very much on instagramm these days to follow you all’s work but I’m also really fucking sick of the whole economy of for-profit some!
I just noticed this morning that Georgina Terry’s looking to make the jump to either Pixelfed or the upcoming picture site from Bluesky, called Flashes.
I’m going to wait a little while myself, I think, as I get a lot of work via Facebook bike Groups and Insta hashtags, but I’m sure things will change.
Assuming the agenda includes a desire to meet customers and show your work, some of my questions are how many units are you producing, how many commissions can you take at a given time without the internal pressure that comes with managing a backlog, and what are your business model’s goals?
Are you paying attention to your website? Is it updated routinely? If it includes a blog, how often do you add content? These are key issues to consider. Platforms come and they go. But your website is the only place that’s truly Ground Zero, and a destination where everything you have can be seen.
Why is this important? Your site is yours. You own it. And control it. Link it around on the various social media channels. Find ways to plant the links in order to gauge effectiveness. If you spend your energy in the places you loathe (or you loathe their owners,) remember that they’re transient. You’re not.
I barely do one social media, but maybe I’ll do two more? I’ve been pretty disinterested in ~posting~ the past couple years for similar reasons - I love the community aspect of social internet spaces, but really hate the appease-the-algorithm-tech-overlord-rat-race of it all. Especially these days thinking ethically of who my time and content and data inadvertently support and give money to.
I joined both of the newest whatevers, although I’ve done nothing with them yet. I have some time set aside next week to do a bunch of paperwork and catch up on computer things and I was planning to spend a little time posting and following and etc. in the new spaces. So see you over there maybe
The beautiful thing about Pixelfed is that it is a decentralized platform that uses an open protocol which means that you basically own your data and your profile just as much as you own your website (which is most likely also hosted on some server somewhere with cheap electricity).
If you don’t like the platform or the instance your data is hosted at you can always change and seamlessly migrate to a place that better suits you.
That is in my opinion why this is not just a new instagram!
If someone was more techy than I am we could even have a framebuilder instance (server) so we could all be interconnected and it would be so easy for customers (and other bike entuthiasts) to browse through and find the framebuilder they like the best.
That said I totally agree that websites makes a lot of sense to put energy into and is the only place you really have complete control of.
I’m just a hobbyist here but I am a big advocate for the federated internet, been using Mastodon for a while and the best part of being federated, you can use your pixelfed account to follow users and see content on other platforms. @Pans4hands@urbanists.social
