Hika/Tam | HK★TMK (@hikatamika.mastoart.social.ap.brid.gy)

…and the way that makes me post is catching up to me. I joined Twitter in 2010 and started planning my escape in 2022. The whole time I never broke 400 followers, and I saw it as a failure on my part. (Truthfully, it was the enshittification of search and recommendations, but I digress.) The secret blessing of both being a nobody, and algorithms designed to keep me a nobody, was that I could always microblog the most silly, inconsequential things, and they’d never get completely swept up, blown up, into the algorithms. Being on Twitter for a little over a decade, microblogging has become part of how I think and write about my own thoughts and experiences. My paper journal is in microblog format. (Try it! Way easier than a full-day recap in the evening.) I write longer thoughts like this blog post by starting in tiny little bullet-point tweets and expanding on each one. I like being real and being funny… I don’t take myself too seriously, online. I’m not professionally in any creative industries, and I don’t make studio-apartment-level money being a content creator. So, I like to post as if I’m, Just A Person™, but I’m starting to get why the people I perceive as being above me, don’t. THESE DRIVE-BY REPLIES GO ABSOLUTELY CRAZY, LET ME TELL YA! If you post like you have 300 followers (but have way more, for better or worse), it goes a little something like this. <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li>Something you think of off the top of your head, a silly scribble you finished, whatever it is: something you think your m8s will get a kick out of: you make it.</li> <li>You type it into the post box, cause you wanna show your m8s.</li> <li>You post it. Especially with little/few hashtags cause discovery wasn’t the point.</li> <li>The post resonates with its intended audience. <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li>This is where, in an ideal world, I’m happy, I Win, The End, and the process stops, but nah it keeps going.</li> </ol> </li> <li>Your post gets swept up by some sort of algorithm or feed because algorithms decide it’s “a Universally Good Post™”. <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li>(NO IT’S NOT IT’S JUST FOR MY FRIENDS AND PEOPLE WHO GET IT—).</li> </ol> </li> <li>People who don’t know the context of you, your account, your vibes, your interests, your dislikes, your goals, your hopes, your dreams, etc. start leaving the most uninformed, “you wouldn’t say/comment that if you knew me”-type replies and quotes you’ve ever seen. 💀</li> </ol> Cause due to them finding your post out of context from like, the ✨Discover Feed,✨ or a ReSkeet 10-levels-of-mutuality detached from you: all the replier has to go off of, is the text (and embeds) that’s in the body of the post, not your full account history, or even a week of following you to figure out what you’re about. AND IT SUCKS, BRO, IT MAKES POSTING NOT FUN… I try to tell myself I don’t have to like or reply to the “ok, obviously you don’t go here” type replies and quote-ReSkeets but it’s hard, cause: <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li>it makes me feel like I’m ignoring people. I don’t like feeling ignored, so I project/sympathize.</li> <li>one of my least favorite things is being misunderstood, so I always get the instinct to overcorrect.</li> </ol> The Popular Internet Creative Guy™ solution to this is to just have a very boring, tidy, curated, professional account where you don’t post about what you think or feel, only posting about what you make. But that’d be the end of my growth online (which I need to maintain cause I don’t want to go back to my job at The Everything Store™) cause, I’m not an Art God! I can just tell that people follow me more for my personhood than any artistic skill. Sometimes you can just tell. It’s easy for me to tell because my yapping posts always wildly outperform my art posts!!!!! IDK what to do. I was first online in the early 2000s. Being online is my home, and being myself online is natural to me. Another Popular Internet Creative Guy™ solution is to ✨Make a Discord™✨. After working a draining retail job, my valuing of time has increased exponentially, and that includes how I value other people’s time. How many “Internet-Guy-That-I-Like” Discords can ONE PERSON join before feeling stretched thin? <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li>I don’t want to add to that stretching-thin of other people.</li> <li>Nor do I want to play Favorite Internet Guy™ Olympics against other Favorite Internet Guy™s over who gets to be the Internet Guy Discord server with active members in it. I don’t want to fight other Creators™ over Enjoyers™, if that makes sense.</li> </ol> Also saying this as someone that hit the max (free-tier) Discord-server-join-count and is only active in like 3-5 servers despite that. Like: it feels like a crapshoot going “hey, all the Real Ones™!! Join my Discord server!1!!1!!” But I feel with the growth of BlueSky and the resulting growth of Drive-By-Reply-Guy Behavior comes a desire for closed-off community with “the Real Ones™”, and I can feel it in myself too, but IDK how to properly facilitate that. The only thing I can think of for now is to still publish my (socially acceptable) thoughts and feelings in a way where there’s more of an upfront thought-barrier. Like, this blog post you have to sit down and read through paragraphs if you’re gonna respond to it, unlike tweets/skeets/toots where you can let your eyes glide over them and “reply” in half a second. Zines and comics are another form of communication where people have to actively engage with the work/thoughts, getting to know the mind behind them as they do, before they open their mouths (or wiggle their keyboard fingers). Maybe. IDK. WE’LL SEE, I GUESS. https://hikatamika.com/2025/01/24/in-my-mind-i-still-have-300-followers/