‘Feeding the monsters’ is a phrase that came up in a conversation (online, of course) about 15 years ago, when using the internet – specifically, what we were still getting used to describing as social media – for promoting your product to a wider audience. A friend and I were discussing how much was too much in terms of establishing a presence for yourself. Back then, there was Twitter, and Facebook, and MySpace was still taken reasonably seriously. Tumblr and Pinterest were around but I never bothered with either, partly because I was a lot less interested in images than I was in text, and didn’t really have a good enough camera – or way of connecting it to my computer – to get involved.
Obviously, since then there has been a great deal of enshittification of the whole lot. There has also been wave after wave of anti-sexuality attacks on any and all platforms: racism and misogyny are still given fairly free rein, but kink-positive and filth-for-the-fun-of-it stuff is always the first to be clamped down on.
One of the reasons I never bothered to make the move onto Mastodon when many of my contacts did was the overwhelming impression of prissiness and respectability I got; it seemed more trouble than it would be worth in terms of finding audiences for naughty books. Interestingly, over the past few weeks, as a lot of people have fled TwiX for Bluesky, the book-loving, smutty-talking people seem to have decided to stick around there, finding a bit of room to breathe and connect while shunting aside the howling maniacs. I’m certainly planning to stay on there for the time being, particularly as a lot of the current exodus seems to be one big virtue-signal.
But it looks like I’ll be needing to feed a few more monsters, so if you want to come and help me out with any of that…
Threads (and insta) @zakjanekeirdsw
Bluesky @zakdsw.bsky.social
TwiX is still @dirtysexyworld of course….