itd be good if there was a social network for following lots of people who each only actually need to post every 1-5 years, like musicians or animators or whatever, where you don't want to see hourly posts by them but you DO want to keep tabs on them because you love their work. i guess maybe patreon etc. fills that niche? in theory you could just make social network alt-accounts. but nobody really seems to do that and "1 post every 18 months" isn't really how most stuff is supposed to be used
@jk very much agree
I get an email whenever someone I follow on itch.io or bandcamp publishes a new thing, but that's far from ideal, twitter/masto etc are useless for this because it just gets drowned by all the other stuff, blogs+RSS would fit the bill but that obviously hasn't taken off (meaning there are issues to investigate)...
it's also bad for people who produce stuff because the current solution (maintaining multiple social media accounts so the algorithms don't ignore your announcement post when you release something) is just unsustainable
@emptyfortress @jk What's actually wrong with mailing lists? I've always thought email was a decent solution to the problem.
@scale @emptyfortress @jk both email and RSS are great solutions to the problem but they are being deliberately strangled because they don't have the paid advertising platform capabilities that centralized garbage has
@shaderphantom @scale @emptyfortress e-mail and RSS are great technologies but i think the main weaknesses of both is that you can do whatever you want with them, very few restrictions for publishers and subscribers. the result is that there is no common expectation of the scale, frequency or purpose of what "publishing an update" actually means. this is intrinsically Good... but also maybe the reason Twitter got big is *because* there were a lot of restrictions that created clear expectations?