When a disney villain took over twitter, twitter died for me.
I found it very sad because I had spent so much time putting my work on twitter, and building friends there. It allowed me to build the community that I’m now part of today.
I didn’t want to support a platform that platformed hateful views. But I didn’t want to move somewhere else. Something had to budge.
I stopped posting my work on twitter, and I immediately felt ten times better.
Though it always was a little sad. I definitely felt some FOMO from time to time.
I started posting on mastodon instead. At first, I hated how much worse it worked. But funnily enough, that has now become part of the charm for me.
Huge waves of my communities moved there too, and we’ve all stayed there ever since. I love it. It feels like home.
I used to wish that more people would come and join in too. But I don’t want that anymore. Mastodon feels hidden from the rest of the internet in some way. I don’t want people from twitter to join it.
It felt like twitter was ripped out from under my feet. I completely relied on it for my community, my income as a creator, and networking, and more.
I put my full trust in an american company that only cares about profits. I mean, looking back, I feel like an idiot.
It was a valuable lesson to not rely on a single pillar. So I decided to build my own part of the web, that didn’t do that.
The tadi web lives on, even if the pillars underneath it die.
I used that approach to build todepond dot com, which you’re reading right now!
It has brought me nothing but joy and opportunity!
I still post to twitter, but I don’t put my work there anymore. Instead, I send people here, to my house!
I treat my twitter like an advert, or billboard, or portfolio, for myself. Kinda like a linkedin. So I never host my personal work there.
I have an exception for if it’s punching up. Punching up, and satire, and ‘protesting’ has always been ok for me.
And I often prune my timeline, so that certain posts rise to the top.
I’m now ‘building in public’ on mastodon. That’s where I put all my todepond stuff.
But really, I’d like to rely on mastodon less.
I can’t build in public on bluesky because they don’t have gifs.
I post all of my videos to youtube.
I get a tiny tiny amount of ad revenue from it, but the main value in the platform is that they promote my video for me. That’s nice, but I currently rely on it. I’d like to have my videos somewhere else as well.
I get most of my creator income from patreon and patreon is okay I guess. It gets buggy and clunky sometimes, but it usually resolves itself. I wouldn’t like to rely on it though.
I also get some money from substack. I regret setting that up, because it’s now become a nazi bar. I’ll shut it down one day.
I also get some money from liberapay.
The reason I can take money from various places is that I handle supporter rewards myself now. I use a combination of val.town and trust for that.
I’d like to make it extremely easy to pay me.
I would set up a stripe link today if I could. But I’m worried about not getting all the tax right.
I’d also like to let you pay me anywhere, like youtube, github, and so on. But I need to set up better tooling for myself before I do that.
Eventually, I’ll add bigger tiers as well, for people who want to pay more. I’ll add those after the next video comes out, because I need the current tiers in-place for storytelling purposes.
It was sad at first, but it ended up turning into something better.
Thank you for visiting my website today,
All the best,
Stay safe out there,
Lu x
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