How do you use social media?

Social media is very different today from when I first started with Myspace 20 years ago.

I went from Myspace into Facebook during high school, with Myspace being abandoned after only a few years. Facebook was the core of my social media use for the majority of all this time. At first I was using it to seem interesting and garner the attention of my peers (like most teenagers and young adults in college did) while staying connected with them and my family. That has long since changed. Now I don’t even post anything on Facebook, or hardly use it at all, except to stay connected with family and very select friends.

When Twitter (I refuse to call it anything else) came along, I didn’t jump on it right away. When I did eventually start using it I hadn’t yet started streaming on Twitch, but that is what it ultimately became. My connection and attempts at increasing engagement. Just like everyone else. Instagram went much the same way when I finally took the plunge into that territory. The difference being that I had also begun shifting into painting miniatures, so I was trying to share my work while advertising my Twitch channel.

Somewhere in the mix of all of that I also started writing again. I had the grand idea of trying to mesh writing together with all of those platforms. I tried to create engagement with my Twitch audience by allowing requests for me to write something for them based on points. All of that was supposed to be shared here on the blog, and I did good at first but obviously that didn’t go anywhere and I still have a backlog of requests.

At some point I backed off of streaming because of the amount of time and effort it required, which I was struggling to afford when work was taking up a lot of my mental and emotional bandwidth. I tried to continue using Instagram to share my work with painting the miniatures, and I still do that today to a small degree whenever I finish something and feel inclined to share.

Now there are some other social media platforms out there, like Threads, which I have reserved my typical username on but I never really use (just like all the others.) Instead, I’ve been focusing on writing here on the blog and in my private note space for the stories I’m developing.

That should cover my history and current usage of social media. Maybe it will change again in the future, but who knows?