ABANDON SHIP

Posted on by Paul Beakley

ABANDON SHIP

I’m closing in on my own post-Plus solution. It’s looking like the Indie Game Reading Club will be its own blog, and I’ll use the tools available to me to syndicate when I post to wherever I can. Mark Delsing posted about Indieweb recently, and that has some promise.

Anyway! Where are you going? I know these aren’t aaaaalll the choices. I left out Twitter because fuck Twitter. I just heard about ETER9 as of this morning. I do cute meme things occasionally but not enough to justify moving to Instagram. The ones with money angles, like Minds, Medium and Steemit give me a weird creep up the back of my neck. Patreon seems like a good tool to have in my toolkit for other reasons, but as a distribution platform for my work…ehhhh maybe not.

I promise I’ve been thinking about it! And the new April deadline has brought some needed focus to my efforts.

Published by Paul Beakley

I founded the Indie Game Reading Club in 2010. I've written and developed RPGs since the mid-90s, now I mostly talk about playing them.

0 thoughts on “ABANDON SHIP”

  1. I’d like to hear more about Pillowfort. The site is exploding so it’s hard to get a vibe from it.

    I do want to put this out there: wordpress.com allows you to create personal blogs, but it also has a Reader section to follow and discuss other wordpress blogs. Brad Murray, Jason Tocci, and others have blogs there and it’s super easy to follow them and read their content.

  2. Yeahhhhh.

    I”m a Drupal partisan (because it’s my business) but the community stuff they’ve built into WordPress is really compelling.

    Then again there’s already a nice set of Indieweb integration tools built for Drupal.

    Blargh I hate this so much. I hate how much (mostly emotional) bandwidth it’s taking up every day.

  3. Aaron Griffin Yeah loathe as I am to admit it, WordPress is its own complete social media platform and it’s pretty good. It encourages long form (which I like a lot) and has tools for cross communication that are really good. Pingbacks are especially nice, a feature G+ could have used.

    One might complain that it’s in the hands of Faceless Corporate Entity but right now I don’t see that as incredibly different from being at the mercy of Faceless Nerd Volunteer. I mean the actual abuses are different but honestly the corporate abuses are more predictable.

  5. William Altman I’m not really sure what it’s like either.

    I was tickled that I was able to land “Paul” as a username there, by bravely dodging and F5ing every time the page 500ed on me. Once I was in, it seemed like…a social media platform. Make posts, follow people.

  6. I have to figure out if I want to post much about gaming on Facebook. And I guess I’ll get accounts on the other sites the diaspora heads to, and see if any of them thrive.

  7. What the fuck is a Fediverse?

    I have no earthly idea what I will do. Probably dig a hole and lay in it for a year.

    I do have a FB account and that will continue because it’s my hookup to my Nords and the EU larp scene. Maybe Pluspora? I made an account to look at it, but never went back yet.

  8. Joe Beason I set up a Page so my gaming content would be separate from my family/friends/not-nerds content.

    I kind of hate that I have to do that on Facebook but I feel compelled to do so. Maybe residual nerd shame, dunno. Mostly I get worn out explaining wtf I’m talking about when I slip up.

  11. Mo Jave if you do Pluspora you’re in the Fediverse. It’s nerd shit (hence the gif), wouldn’t really worry about it.

    John Love Pillowfort kind of is that except you need an invitation. It’s an exclusive option to hide away from the internet indefinitely.

    Adam D yeah, I get you. This whole exercise feels like it’s casting a harsh light on the “consumer versus creator” thing, which I always wanted to be a bullshit distinction but The Powers That Be are inexorably pushing that distinction. Mostly, I think, to find ways to extract $$$ from both. Which requires different methods.

  13. Paul Beakley Hmm is there a hosted drupal solution out there? I’d be willing to play with the indieweb stuff. If there is an easy way for folks to hop on the indieweb reader train, I think that’d be ideal. But as I said in Mark Delsing’s post about indieweb, I don’t think the whole ecosystem is “complete”

  15. Aaron Griffin yeah this, although like the rest of Drupal it’s kind of more enterprise-focused. WordPress is, for real, a lighter-weight solution, especially since you can also do Indieweb stuff with it (whereas there’s fuckall in terms of community-building in the Drupal universe).
    acquia.com – Home | Acquia

  16. Adam D there’s another relentless pressure I’m resenting! Augh fucking video. Jesus. If you didn’t like my voice in a podcast you really won’t like watching me when that voice comes out of my face.

  17. Ha! I like your voice fine. I just didn’t expect it! Based on your photo, I expected you to have a big booming sound, mostly because of the mountain bikes, and also because you appear to be 7-feet-tall in all your pictures… but you sound like… well, like me.

  18. There is an RPG-specific Friendica instance starting up here, if you want to give it a try. (Friendica is a distributed social network with a handful of features that approximate some G+ features, including support for communities.)

  22. Mark Delsing Facebook will also scrape your posts wherever you make them if you set up a Page to do it.

    Lester Ward a side note re Friendica for folks who aren’t committed nerds on this stuff: it’s another Federation thing. I’m not sure if the below is the Federation “home” but it’s got some information if you want to fill your head with it. On the landing page, you’ll see a list of some very familiar-sounding names.
    the-federation.info – The Federation – a statistics hub

  23. Paul Beakley I care less about blurring the lines between groups these days, but I also am unenthusiastic about spamming cousin Kathy with lots and lots of gaming talk.

  24. Joe Beason it’s pretty important that cousin Kathy understands when she’s in author stance tho. Otherwise hooboy those agenda conflicts are gonna diegetically express themselves.

  27. I had a domain I wasn’t really using, and my provider has insta-wordpress, so I set up a WP blog. I might set up shop in a couple places to announce blogs and comment on everyone else’s stuff.

  28. WordPress.com ain’t perfect, and it is another thing owned by a for-profit company, but giving tools and space for long-form posting is its whole schtick. It’s not a little experiment on the side like this place is for Google, and it’s not a startup with a questionable future and unproven business model. It’s easy to export the posts with their built-in tools, so you really get to feel like you own your content. WordPress.com hosted sites are a hell of a lot easier to set up and maintain than hosting your own site (says the guy who maintained multiple hacked WordPress blogs over the years). And I have to admit that the social features they’ve added are kind of neat (even if I am getting a little inundated with Brad Murray’s and Aaron Griffin’s posts through social media, AND my RSS reader, AND WordPress’s reader … I’ve gotta sort that out).

    Add all that up, and I’ve been way more prolific since starting the blog than I was before. I’m finally finishing up projects I’ve been working on for months or even years just because I know they’ll be easier to find now that they have their own coherent URLs, in my own easily searchable space. It’s strangely liberating. I imagine any blog would give that feeling, but I’m happy enough so far with the platform I’ve chosen.

    I’m over at https://pretendo.games. Looking forward to seeing where others end up.

  31. No idea. MeWe is probably the top of my list though I’m not really excited about it. FB is my reluctant 2nd choice just because of other people I know there.

  32. WordPress hosted blogs seem like enough of a minority, even of blog content, that relying on it as a social media interface would be extremely limiting. (I’ve been on WordPress for a long time, since 2013 I think.) I’m not sure I see the advantage over using a feed reader, some of which also now have integrated social features. Some people I follow seem to love inoreader, but I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet.

  33. None of the choices really appeal to me. My own blog probably makes the most sense, but I’m actually planning to let the hosting lapse on the site my “current” blog is technically on since I haven’t been posting to it and tend to get such little traffic that it’s not worth the expense. Starting a new blog on a free blogging site feels like a real uphill climb and I’m not super eager to undertake that.

  35. 1) I’ll keep blogging, but it’s not really a way to keep in touch with people.
    2) I’m on Discord, Instagram, Facebook and Tumblr. I prefer to keep my gaming of FB, Tumblr is kinda dying (and is also more of a blog platform than a social network), Instagram is just pictures, Discord is for chatter, not great for discussions. I have a twitter account but I never use it and I dislike the format (also not good for discussion), same for Mastodon.
    3) No idea what fediverse or pillowfort are, but I’ve been eyeing MeWe. If people decide to migrate to one of those sites en-masse, I’ll probably follow.
    4) I think creating a subreddit for the sg/g+/rpg diaspora might actually be one of the best possible solutions right now, if someone had the patience and willpower to set it up and maintain it.

  38. Also totally agree with Jason Tocci. I’ve been happy with WordPress, in all its circa-2000 php glory. I just think it solves a different problem, or serves a different function (long-form pseudo-publication) than Google Plus/social media does.

  39. Honestly, I’ll follow the herd. I’m usually posting annoying shit over the quality content of others, so I just need to know where to bother people. 😉

  40. I feel like I should add (though I’m pretty sure I’m just echoing somebody else): I am not planning on blogging to be my only venue for these kinds of discussions. It’s just the best outlet for longer-form stuff, for me. I end up sharing links to those posts on social media (like https://dice.camp), which is also where I post short, ephemeral stuff. Also, most especially in-depth, back-and-forth conversations I have about games actually happen in the Gauntlet Slack (and I suspect I’ll have some in whatever post-G+ space they move to).

    In other words, I get so little face-to-face gaming time these days that I am cramming game discussion into every other nook and cranny of online life I can find. Blogging is just one part of that.

  42. Jason Tocci so is there an all-in solution for seeing and replying to both long-form and short-form content from folks? I guess that’s what Feedly (or something like it) is for?

  44. Also using NewsBlur or Inoreader for blog reading and community sharing/comments. Haven’t decided which for final yet. Love NewsBlur but seems like Ino is catching up and has more RPG readers.

  45. Brad Murray are there pingbacks between .com and .org installations? I’m trying to nail down what you get, and give up, based on which version of WordPress you go with.

  51. I’m on Facebook posting my art for now. Creating a blog/website is daunting. I don’t have an audience that’s larger than two dozen or so (who normally interact with me), so spending more than ten minutes on a post seems ridiculous for me. Thus, creating a site/blog for said stuff seems equally dumb.

    As it stands, I don’t know if I’m going elsewhere. If everyone who is someone in the gaming scene is blogging, I’ll follow blogs, but I see little point in creating my own. I’m not sure how that will affect my ability to interact with creators at this point. Probably not much! I don’t have much to say about games outside of “OOOOO!” and “Huh?”

    Honestly, the whole “The sky is falling” thing is more tiring than trying to find a solution. The indie games community has always been pretty disparate in how the disseminate their games/info/writing/whatever and who they interact with. At least from the position of someone who only jumped onto the band wagon during the lifespan of G+. You needed to subscribe to various newsletters, sign up for sites, create new profiles regardless of G+ being a (kinda) hub.

    I don’t think it will be much different going forward. /2 cynical cents

  52. The more I think about it looks like I’m jumping to MeWe for board games and a couple other discussion groups. If I feel more social FB seems to be the devil to turn to. I don’t know that I care to much.

  53. I followed the tidal-wave to MeWe at first, but I really just hate it. Combine that with their fascist-friendly policies and no faith that they’ll still be operating in six months, and I find that I haven’t even loaded it into a tab in three weeks.

    I also loaded up story-games.com and started reading there. Maybe that’s my “solution”?

  54. Paul Beakley I don’t know that a perfect all-in-one system exists if for no other reason than that not every platform communicates with every other platform, and folks are scattering now. But yeah, as Brad and Aaron mention, there’s commenting on posts, and pingbacks on post links. And yes, pingbacks work between all WordPress sites—used to get them all the time on the WordPress sites I hosted myself (one of which, geekstudies.org, I have since moved to WordPress.com just so I don’t have to worry about hackers anymore).

  56. I don’t post a ton anyway, and very little of it is creative. I’ll blog follow with inoreader (which looks pretty good) or feedly, maybe friend some folks I want to keep up with on FB (and possibly poke around at friend lists on there to that end), throw out some tweets sometimes, and use discord and slack in some cases. I’ll be paying attention to where I should be lurking, though.

  62. I have a dormant WordPress blog I ought to revive.

    I’m there on Facebook but don’t use it for much except for flippancy and politics if that makes sense. I’m on MeWe but struggling to maintain interest.

    I might just mostly fade away when it comes to starting nerdy discussions, since I’m not sure I have it in me to blog properly, it doesn’t work for me on Facebook, and I don’t actually trust MeWe enough for a decent discussion. And it’s missing an awful lot of the interesting people I regularly talk to on G+.

  64. I know fascists are everywhere, but I still feel extremely uncomfortable with MeWe and the widespread acceptance of it as a viable alternative.

    I expect there will be a challenging two to three years until something more valid turns up that most will be able to agree is a ‘good’ place to be. Until then, the online gaming community if going to have a strong post-Uther/pre-Arthur vibe going.

  67. So far so good on MeWe. There have been no fascists/Nazis/Alt-Right/”Russian Money” to report.

    There’s been a good vibe – the G+ housecleaning has seemed to stir up folks’ gaming juices a bit. Lots of various gaming communities to fit your fancy.

    MeWe’s stated various improvements for next year, including some of G+’s distribution tools, and various options to make your post open/public or not.

    If anyone comes over and wants a hand on where the gym, restrooms and sun deck are, don’t hesitate to look me up: mewe.com/i/seanphelan
    Cheers

  68. MeWe and several pods in the Fediverse. Still trying out stuff. There’s a lot on Discord too. Too much in fact. Just hate this diaspora that’s happening now.

  70. Matt Wilson Does the wordpress cms allow for multiple bloggers now? I had WP originally, got frustrated (lack of customization at the time) and moved to Drupal and then WP became really popular, probably should have hung on. I’ve not enjoyed my adventures in Drupal or Joomla.

  73. WordPress does allow multiple contributors to the same blog, including on free WordPress.com accounts.

    (I was one of four bloggers on each of two WordPress blogs for years roughly a decade ago, and I just set it up on one of my new blogs recently, so nothing new there. Maybe I’m misunderstanding the questions, though.)

  75. Pillowfort is a lot like Tumblr (easy to post images and extensive text, easy to repost to another journal, discoverable through tags), with threaded comments on posts (no follow-up like Tumblr), plus communities that can host both posts and discussion topics. You can get an invite by sending them $5 on PayPal. Right now, they have some serious scalability issues, so I think they’re right to be in closed beta.

  77. I’m probably going back to Dreamwidth despite the lack of mobile. (A bad combination with my often mobile-only state, but I like the company otherwise despite its lack of mobile.)

    I might look at Pillowfort but I am intensely pessimistic about new stuff because I see too many noobs repeating some really ancient mistakes. Not really interested in watching growing pains especially if it’s possible they’ll get acquired by freaking Yahoo later. I’m tired of having to abandon Yahoo acquisitions. (RIP Flickr, I loved ya.)

  82. I saw Levi Kornelsen posting on Friendica. I joined, looked at the community posts… EDIT: Long story short, gross person I want to block is there.

    I figured just like G+/FB/Everything Else I could just “block/unsee” them. Turns out that in Friendica, you have to “Connect”/”Friend” someone first. THEN you can block them.

    So nope there. Big nope.

    But, I do want to read what Levi writes, so hopefully the aggregation engines will push all over the place!

  84. Yeah, I was scratching my head on it, clicking on that person’s name going “How the f do I never see anything from this person ever again, like I can on any other social platform?” After googling a bit, it looks like someone in charge of the server Friendica is on has to install a few community-made plugins for blocking; otherwise, the only way is to Friend them (“Connect”) first, and then Block them.

  85. As for myself, I’ve taken my “slice of life in Japan” posts to Instagram, I’ll be continuing to post about gaming in Japan to the j-rpg dot com blog (starting it up next year again), and likely going to create a new Vanilla forum just to discuss Japanese RPGs in a forum format, the forum companion to our Discord server: All the new platforms basically recreate G+ or FB or Twitter, and I’m looking for something more forum-like ultimately for my discussion groups; something better than “just go to reddit!”

    I admit, WordPress as an option is also pretty interesting. I’m going to see how people are tinkering with it to make it more forum-like before I boot up another Vanilla forum…

  86. Andy Kitkowski, the Blockem plugin is installed on rpgtable.top, but using it isn’t all that intuitive. Instead of, say, right clicking on the user and saying “ignore”, you have to go into your own settings, get to the “Add-ons” section, go to the “Blockem” section, then add the person you want to block to a blacklist.

    There is also a content filter plugin installed that works similarly, but using keywords instead of users.

  87. Lester Ward Do you know who owns that node? One of the problems with the Fediverse can be if you need support, and my activation e-mail for that one never arrived…

  89. Lester Ward Thanks! I made a comment there, and hopefully he will see it. I looked at making my own pod, but it seems that there are so many going up now, I’d just like to throw my support behind one dedicated to the RPG space that I could join in on.

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