Doctacosa

A recurring theme in my thoughts is all about communities and promotion: how to stay in touch with as many people as possible? Where to have an online presence in order to be visible and help the community thrive? The answer isn't always easy.

I commented on some of this earlier this year, on the topic of my personal visibility. The same applies to the online presence of the Creeper's Lab: where should we be? We're currently established on about a half-dozen social networks. These were picked either because they have a potential Minecraft player base, or because they're simple enough to publish content on and engage people.

In a parallel path, the latest issue of the Creeper's Lab newsletter (subscribe now!) included some of my thoughts on chat options. We've got a healthy chat environment thanks to the tight integration between in-game chat, Discord and IRC. These are the places where our players hang out, so it makes sense to have them all talk to each other.

That's what we have right now. The main challenge here is that it's possible I have blind spots and completely miss some fertile grounds to push on. On the social media front, Tumblr lost in popularity compared to 10 years ago, while TikTok had a huge rise. As chat systems go, IRC continues an apparent slow decline while Discord keeps moving upward. At least, that's my perception of it. Am I missing something that people aren't telling me, something I didn't encounter by pure luck, or not? Hard to say, sometimes!

There's also the flipside of this: something that I pay attention to yet few care about. With all the hubbub from Twitter lately, I've been keeping an eye on the global discussion about alternatives. A recurring one has been Mastodon, which I've been curious about for a while. I could join that, maybe get ambitious and run my own instance of it, see if anybody tags along. But then, it's far more likely than half of you reading this are thinking “wth is a mastodon?” Sorting this out is part of the challenge I have!

#social_media

– Doctacosa