It’s SPOOKY SZN! It’s a busy weekend full of music & mayhem in Barrie & Toronto, so I’m just looking forward to dinner tonight bc it’s butterfly pasta with my homemade meat sauce, real parm, garlic bread, Caesar salad & I got Harry ice cream for dessert. Then my plan is to continue my annual Halloween horror movie marathon that I kicked off this week with season 6 of American Horror Story (Roanoke, meh). I just subscribed to Disney+, so I’m gonna see what horror movies are available there, but suggestions on D+, Prime, Crave & Netflix welcome! I own a tonne of horror movie DVDs & I’ve seen almost everything up until COVID, but I’m all about new stuff & good re-watches so lay ’em on me!

I joined Bluesky & the new BDSM social media site Submit this month, the latter in beta. Here are my thoughts!

Bluesky‘s pretty sweet, I like it a lot. People build/code their own feeds there, that follow a number of hashtags & you can choose which ones to follow, the way columns worked on TweetDeck. Plus, you can just see the people you follow, in CHRONOLOGICAL FUCKING ORDER, which I appreciate because that’s becoming more and more rare on social media platforms. There are still people who monitor social media and the internet enough to maintain 24 hour, chronological feeds of everything, trust me, and they’re on Bluesky.

Bluesky’s character limit is only 280, the way Twitter was pre-Elon, and essentially it’s identical to old Twitter, because it was sort of a side project of Twitter’s. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s ex-CEO, is on Bluesky’s board of directors, but i’s headed by some dude named Jay, which is just another digital overlord, if you ask me. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Somehow people host their own accounts there, but I haven’t figured that part out yet. Like right now I’m @sunnycrittenden.bsky.social but apparently I can use my own domain somehow. If anyone knows how that works, please contact me somehow and let me know, because I own a domain I’d like to use for it. Can I say “somehow” any more times in this paragraph? Jesus, Sunny! Also like that meme? I made it myself! My very first one!

My thoughts on Bluesky, Threads, and Twitter (I’ll never call it X, sorry Elon), are that I’m pretty sure eventually 280 character social media platforms are going to be a plugin for WordPress eventually, where website owners host their own social networks around specific niche topics, the way LiveJournal communities were, and how Facebook groups now are.

FetLife is a social network built around a specific niche, unlike all the other social networks, but more often than not, people are posting about their cats, their kids, their health, their mental illnesses, their periods, their parents – not kinky content. They want the community and the like-mindedness of BDSM folk, just as much as they like seeing nudes and photos of people’s toys & bruises.

People find community everywhere on the internet and always have, but it’s almost always around a niche or a person, as opposed to a platform itself. Patreon has capitalized on this, giving creators the tools to build their own community-based business model. It seems that the natural next step is people hosting their own social networks, the way we used to host forums on our websites. You can already sort of do this on Discord, using their threads feature, but I found it sloppy and weird so I haven’t really adopted it on my own server, and I don’t want to use a 3rd party app, whose template or experience for users I can’t alter, to access my own community.

I can’t fully formulate how I think hosting your own 280 character social media platform would work exactly, because I’m not super tech-minded, but I’m thinking people host their own feeds on their own domains like name.yourname.com, or on a domain like sunnycrittenden.bsky.social if you don’t have hosting, then all of your community members are congregated on one customized app, or one domain as part of your website. I hope that makes sense! And maybe I’m just talking out my ass here, and maybe that’s how the Fediverse is supposed to work, IDK. 🤷🏼‍♀️ I’ve done 0 research and there are so many social media platforms now!

Bluesky is still pretty quiet because it only reached 1 million users a week ago, and you need an invite to get in (and no, I don’t have any), but I’m posting there every day and slowly finding people to follow, so it’s getting better! I have high hopes!

As for Submit, the new kinky social media platform that’s supposed to rival FetLife, well, there’s not a lot to it and most things aren’t functional yet. But it exists! And new things are added every day! I’m about to go over there right now, fill out my profile, and add some media! Maybe I’ll see you there or on Bluesky!