Hello again. Yep, we’re back to this. Again.
When Twitter first went the way of the flighty billionaire, we attempted to diversify our reliance on it by setting up our own Mastodon instance. Because our audience is still much more established on Twitter, initially we simply pushed our tweets to Mastodon so that the users who flocked there would still have our feed without the bird. When the crossposting service we were using shut down back in February, we continued to host and pay for the instance, but have not used it since then.
As of now, we still don’t have a means of using Mastodon without completely abandoning the platform we’ve established on Twitter. We’ve noticed lots of people flocking to Bluesky; we don’t have an account there, and frankly, we’re not sure it’s worth our time to keep setting up accounts on whatever the new Promised Land is each month.
Accessibility has been one of the core reasons we do what we do. Regretfully, Twitter has gone out of their way to make their platform less and less accessible. Over the past few years, various directions from the services and companies we interact with have made our jobs as freelance, unaffiliated live lore journalists more difficult in small ways (nothing we haven’t been able to overcome… yet). With each added hurdle, the accessibility we provide to viewers is becoming less and less accessible to us.
So, what does this mean for CritRoleStats?
For tonight and the limited foreseeable future, tweeting will continue, since we haven’t yet experienced catastrophic failure. We’re going to continue to pay to host Mastodon as our backup if it appears that people aren’t actually able to view our tweets, if Twitter suddenly decides to shut us down out of the blue, or if they force us to start paying for the privilege to provide content on their website.
However, we are coming to the realization that if Twitter does become completely unusable, we’re less inclined now to jump from one ship to another and simply jump ship from livetweeting. If we come to such a decision, you will all know with plenty of notice before that happens, and what we’ll do until that day comes. Any exit we take will be graceful and with plenty of time for us tie up loose ends. We will continue to serve until that day comes.
So, summary! We’ll be on Twitter tonight, and will collect our tweets into our Livetweet article per usual. For everyone watching live or reading through before the article is up, please let us know if you have difficulty following along. If there’s enough negative feedback, we’ll likely be moving to Mastodon next week, and will announce on our usual platforms before then.
We love you very much. Please take care of yourselves, and… Hey, it is Thursday!
