In this episode Allie and Michelle discuss the discussion around moving the WordPress community from Twitter to another platform.

Check out Nyasha Green’s post about exploring Mastodon.

And Michelle’s Twitter poll.

Episode Transcript:

Allie Nimmons:
Welcome to the Underrepresented in Tech Podcast, hosted by Michelle Frechette and Allie Nimmons. Underrepresented in Tech is a free database built with the goal of helping people find new opportunities in WordPress and tech overall.

Michelle Frechette:
Hi Allie.

Allie Nimmons:
Hi Michelle, hi Michelle, hi Michelle.

Michelle Frechette:
So, guess what?

Allie Nimmons:
Oh, what?

Michelle Frechette:
I get to see you in-person next week.

Allie Nimmons:
I know, a week from today-

Michelle Frechette:
A week from today.

Allie Nimmons:
… maybe even a little bit less, because I’m arriving on the Wednesday. Today’s Thursday.

Michelle Frechette:
Me too.

Allie Nimmons:
Okay, cool. So, a little bit less than a week from today I’m going to be able to hug you and it’s going to be amazing.

Michelle Frechette:
And I’m going to hug you back.

Allie Nimmons:
Yay. I’m so excited.

Michelle Frechette:
Me too. This will be three times this year we’ve been in each other’s physical presence.

Allie Nimmons:
Do you believe, it’s almost like things are going back to normal.

Michelle Frechette:
Wouldn’t that be something?

Allie Nimmons:
Well, speaking of-

Michelle Frechette:
Oh, yes please.

Allie Nimmons:
… speaking of coming together and spending time with people you like, today I wanted to talk with you a little bit about this really interesting almost migration that’s happening right now. Or I should say we’re trying to migrate and I think we’re having a hard time as a community in WordPress right now, trying to figure out where we want to go, because a lot of people are feeling very anti-Twitter right now.
And we don’t have to get into all of the reasons as to why that is, but Twitter’s a sinking ship at the moment, which sucks because so much of the WordPress community thrives on Twitter without even really having to try, right?
There are Slack groups and communities that are run and maintained and organized by people, but just naturally so much of our community building and sharing of news and building our zeitgeist happens just naturally on Twitter. So, it’s weird to feel like, “Okay, well if we don’t have Twitter, what are we going to do? Where are we going to go?” And there’s been a lot of talk about Mastodon.

Michelle Frechette:
Yes.

Allie Nimmons:
Which I remember hearing about Mastodon years ago from David Wolfpaw, who’s really big on IndieWeb and stuff like that. Yeah, I think in Jacksonville he did a whole work camp talk about the IndieWeb, and he talked about Mastodon and stuff like that, and I always thought it was so cool.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
People talked about Mastodon, people have talked about LinkedIn, people have talked about Slack. A lot of people, including myself, were just kind of like, “All right, well, maybe we should just wait and see what’s going to happen before deciding that Twitter is completely dead.”

Michelle Frechette:
Right, right.

Allie Nimmons:
I myself have just not been very active on Twitter. I just got other stuff going on. I’m trying to be better behaved on Twitter, so it’s a little less fun. I get really ticked off being on Twitter and constantly seeing talk about Elon Musk and that whole situation, it’s just a bummer. You just sent me a poll that you posted on Twitter from November 28th. It has 250 votes. Geez Louise.

Michelle Frechette:
That’s a lot.

Allie Nimmons:
That’s a lot. That’s a good sample size.

Michelle Frechette:
Yes.

Allie Nimmons:
And you asked, “What is your primary social channel going forward?” I’m just looking at that. There’s a lot of comments here. I’m going to include a link to this tweet in our show notes, which I never update the show notes with links, but I will, because there’s a lot of interesting comments here.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
But the number one is Twitter. 66.5% said, “I’m going to stay on Twitter.”

Michelle Frechette:
Yep.

Allie Nimmons:
Mastodon and other are almost tied. Mastodon has 13%, other has 15%, and then Tumblr with the other alternative at 4.8%. Which I think is really funny, because I remember seeing a lot of stuff from Matt Mullenweg pushing like, “Hey, Tumblr’s right here, maybe we should all go.”

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
I’m like, “Hmm. I wonder why you as the owner of Tumblr are recommending that?”

Michelle Frechette:
Pushing for Tumblr.

Allie Nimmons:
So I have a lot of feelings about it, I have a lot of thoughts. I mean, I tried to create a Mastodon account I guess, and I literally couldn’t figure it out and I gave up. So, that’s a barrier. My coworker, Naisha Green, wrote a whole blog post for Master WP about her trying to use Mastodon and feeling frustrated with that.
I don’t think I could go onto Tumblr, because I used Tumblr between the ages of, I’d say, 16 and 24. And I posted boy bands that I liked and angsty poetry about boys that I liked, and Harry Potter fan fiction. And I don’t really feel like going back to that.

Michelle Frechette:
It doesn’t preclude you from starting a new account though.

Allie Nimmons:
I know that, but Tumblr is just so specific. It’s like going back to your hometown after leaving for years and years and being like, “Yeah, it’s different, but I feel like I’m going to regress into a teenager if I spent time in Tumblr.”
So yeah, I wanted to talk to you about what your feelings were now that I’ve shared mine. And just talk a little bit about how important community, or how important setting is to a community, right? It’s very-

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah.

Allie Nimmons:
… it can be a very fragile thing if the setting around your community is disrupted.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. Well what’s interesting, so there’s… I looked at this from a couple different angles. So the first is, where do you just want to be communicate with people? Where do you want to go, and maybe tease Chris Wigman online or something like that. Troll Michelle Butcher, those kinds of things.
And so where are you going to go to do that? That’s the one thing, that’s the personal use. I mean, it’s all personal use of course, unless you’re under your brand. But for me, I just have a personal brand. I mean I manage a bunch of other accounts and those accounts will go wherever the customers are. And that’s the next question. If you are your personal brand and maybe you’re freelancing and you just have the one account, where are your customers? Are you going to stay on Twitter because that’s where your customers are?
If you go to Mastodon, great, but are your customers on Mastodon? Not that you use Twitter for advertising, but engagement is different than advertising. So marketing is different than advertising. Advertising is part of marketing. Just like German Shepherds are dogs, but not all dogs are German Shepherds.
Advertising is part of marketing, but not all marketing is advertising. So there’s different parts of how we do marketing and some of that is just social engagement. And I think back to back in the day, all right, so this is going to show my age, because this is what I used to go to the mall as a kid, there was something called the Pepsi Challenge. And we literally lined up for, it was probably 20 minutes, but it felt like four hours to a 14 year old, to take the Pepsi challenge.
And they poured Coke and they poured Pepsi into Dixie cups behind a wall. And then they would move the wall, box, or whatever and you had to taste them and say which one you liked better. And it was the Pepsi challenge because they were saying, “We just know that everybody in the whole world is going to think Pepsi’s better.” And so that kind of thing, I don’t like either Cola, I’m a Dr. Pepper girl, but that’s another story-

Allie Nimmons:
Yes, see, I was-

Michelle Frechette:
… we can talk about Dr. Pepper another time.

Allie Nimmons:
You all couldn’t see me shaking my head. I am a Coca-Cola girl through and through. I can’t stand… I will, no, I can’t stand Pepsi. So I would’ve not.

Michelle Frechette:
And they literally taste all the same to me because I just don’t like them. But anyway, but we would stand there and do that, and sometimes your friend would be behind them and be nodding the direction that the Coca-Cola was so you could skew the data, all of that kind of thing.
That was social marketing in the day, because it was word-of-mouth and it was teenagers and people going, “Oh, go to the mall. They’re doing the Pepsi Challenge this week, Pepsi’s there.” And now we have social media to do that. Back then it was landlines and passing notes in school. We now have social media that takes the place of landlines and passing notes in school and all of that kind of good thing. Where are you going to go? You’re not going to the mall and saying, “Take the Pepsi challenge.” But they went to the mall because that’s where their users were.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
I knew that I had a point, I’m getting back to it. But if your users, your customers, your community is on Twitter, are you going to stay on Twitter where they are? Or if they migrate, are you going to follow them to their migration? And that is the question, is not so much where do I want to be? Where do I need to be, because where are my customers?
So it’s interesting. Over the years I’ve watched communities grow up around products. So yes, there’s community. Well, the WordPress community is not around a product that’s around an ideology really. It’s about this open source, and it’s more than just like, “Hey, how do you use WordPress?”
The community is about more than that. But let’s say a community around one of the products that’s under seller WP, like LearnDash for example. If I was going to put all the LearnDash users, or I would invite them all to a group where they could have discussion and it’s moderated and everything, where am I going to put that?
Well, that’s on Facebook. People have user groups now on Facebook, because Facebook made groups something that’s easy to use. Maybe I’m going to have a Slack instance, maybe I’m going to have a Discord server. But by and large, if you’re looking to join a group around some kind of a product or service, you’re looking on Facebook to see if that kind of group exists.
There’s elementary groups, there’s every plugin in the world, beginner’s WordPress, advanced WordPress. There are hundreds of WordPress groups on Facebook. Yes, we have said in the past, “Well gosh, I don’t want to use Facebook. What am I going to use?” There was Circle for a while and Polyword comes and goes and all of these other things, but to find a new social media to land on, that everybody goes shoom, and everybody goes over there. That’s not as easy as it used to be, right?
We all left MySpace to go to Facebook, but there’s nobody’s left Facebook to start something new that everybody stayed on. There was that Ello for a while. Do you remember that? When everybody was like, “Oh, join Ello.”
There’s Circle, there’s all these different things that you could do, but by and large Facebook groups are still the place to have communities. That begs the question then, where does an entire community built around an ideology go? That is a different thing than where do people go to learn about to enrich each other about a product?
And with a user base as big as WordPress is, it’s fractured as to where people want to be and where they want to go. It used to be that… I still post on Twitter quite a bit, but my engagement has fallen by 30 to 50% and I’m still getting about 100 to 200 users, followers a week.
I’ve almost a 12,000 followers. The follower count is going up, my engagement count is going down. And I’ve had people DM me and say, “You’re not showing up in my newsfeed. Are you still here?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I posted a couple times today, 251 people responded to my post two weeks ago,” or a week ago, whatever it was.
So yeah, I’m still here. But the algorithms changed, or something’s changed in the way that information is curated. And I have noticed that every single time I go on Twitter, the very first tweet at the top is always promoted now. It used to be that I’d have to scroll three or four or five before I’d start to hit that promoted content. There is a lot more promoted content. So clearly Musk and his group is trying to show advertisers some preference, some preferential treatment because advertising is down as well. And so there’s a lot that’s going on.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, that’s really interesting. I hadn’t really noticed. So like I said, I’ve not really been posting very much, but I have noticed every time I log onto Twitter, I have 5 to 10 new followers, which my follower account is decent. It hasn’t been 10 new people every single day. It may be that much per week, and every day it’s more people. And I’ve been feeling really confused about that because I was like, “Why am I suddenly more visible?” And I honestly haven’t looked too closely at these people, some of them honestly look like bots or fake accounts.

Michelle Frechette:
Some of them are for sure.

Allie Nimmons:
It might be other things. It might be other things that I’ve been doing that have gotten a promotion elsewhere. And so it could be a total coincidence, but I’ve definitely noticed that too. I haven’t looked so much in my analytics in terms of what engagement I’ve been getting on the things I have been posting.
And I think that it’s a mixture of people are using Twitter a little bit differently. And I would not be surprised if under the hood things have been changing. Because one of the things that I do know about this whole Musk thing is he fired a lot of really important people who know how these algorithms are supposed to be working. And so if the hypothesis is right that there are being changes made to the way that advertisers are promoted, that’s going to affect the entire rest of the way everyone else is being promoted.
So it’s very bizarre. And I want to go back to what you were saying before too, about the difference between communities for companies to consumers, versus community for community members’ sake. And I think it’s funny that I feel I’ve always thought of our WordPress Twitter community as both, because I know that… So today I retweeted from Master WP the workshop that we did this week and how you can go on and buy the recording of that. And I definitely use it to talk to people like you, and talk to friends, and talk to community members. But I do also use it to try to sell to other community members, because-

Michelle Frechette:
Likewise, as do I.

Allie Nimmons:
Right?

Michelle Frechette:
Yep.

Allie Nimmons:
And so I think it’s really funny that we are in this in between area and it seems like people are willing to go somewhere else if like you said, there’s a viable alternative, which there isn’t.

Michelle Frechette:
Right. I’ll tell you-

Allie Nimmons:
[inaudible 00:14:48].

Michelle Frechette:
… what alternative is not a viable alternative. My opinion is Truthsocial. You will not find me there.

Allie Nimmons:
Oh yeah. I don’t really know a lot about that one.

Michelle Frechette:
Oh, that’s-

Allie Nimmons:
Truthsocial?

Michelle Frechette:
That’s the Trump one.

Allie Nimmons:
Oh, that’s… Okay. I’m glad I didn’t know about it.

Michelle Frechette:
It’s not very underrepresented friendly, I’ll just say that.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, I can imagine. I Mean, yeah, we had stuff like Clubhouse and we had… I mean these platforms come and go. And I say that about TikTok all the time. People are so either in love with or terrified of TikTok. And I have had people reach out to me because I’m young, I know that that’s why, to say, “Hey, we want to build a WordPress community on TikTok for young people.” And I’m like, “I don’t think that’s-“

Michelle Frechette:
Good luck.

Allie Nimmons:
I mean, first of all, that’s not what I’d do. And second of all, I don’t think that’s a very good idea, because eventually that’s not why people go to TikTok, first of all. And TikTok is going to go the way of Snapchat, I think-

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah, oh, for sure.

Allie Nimmons:
… in about a year, you know? So, I don’t know. It’s a very interesting challenge to try to navigate all of these online social spaces for the right reasons. And I think we talked about talking about this couple weeks ago and I wanted to wait, because I felt like the conversation would simmer a little, and I think it has. I think Twitter as a product is leveling out a little. And I think honestly, I think things are just going to go back to the way that they were.

Michelle Frechette:
The caveat to that, of course, is unless something heinous happens, or cataclysmic happens with the product, with the platform itself, I mean they could scrap it could completely fall apart, it could stop working. I mean, there’s all kinds of things that could happen that would stop that. But all other things being equal, I agree. I think it’s going to continue.
And 65% of 251 people that responded to that poll agree that that’s where they’re going to stay. I created a Tumblr account recently. Okay, truth, I had one I didn’t even know it. I didn’t remember that I created one back in the day, and I’m not even going to tell you how embarrassing the handle was.
And I have changed the handle so you won’t know. And I deleted the original, I had one post on there, I deleted that. But anyway, and I signed up for Mastodon so that I have my name in both of those places. And as that I own an account there, but I’m not posting there yet. I’m not really doing much with it. I’m still working within Twitter myself. Once upon a time I was like the Facebook queen. My daughter’s like, “Oh my God, you post so much on Facebook, stop liking everybody’s things.”
It was crazy. And now she’s not on Facebook anymore. I’m on Facebook for business almost exclusively. And I pretty much live in the Twitter space. And I don’t know, what is the next thing? I spent a lot of time on TikTok as a consumer, but not as a creator. And that’s a hundred percent direct result of lockdown in 2020 and that part of the pandemic.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, that’s super interesting. I definitely, I operate professionally in the Twitter space. I have a LinkedIn and I work with LinkedIn, that is part of my work.

Michelle Frechette:
Same.

Allie Nimmons:
But I use LinkedIn basically never. I can’t remember the last time I posted something on there on purpose. And I use Instagram as, like you said, as a consumer, not a creator. That’s how I maintain all of my friendships with my friends who live in different states. We send each other reels all day long. And that’s the extent of that. And yeah, you know, if Twitter-

Michelle Frechette:
Well I use it as just, that’s my photo album. That’s my photo album, is Instagram. If it goes away, I lose all those pictures, but whatever.

Allie Nimmons:
If Twitter disappeared tomorrow, it’s funny, I’d feel like I would be able to find everyone if I needed to talk to a certain person, I’d be able to find where they are. But it would just be so much more difficult to promote our podcast, for example.

Michelle Frechette:
Yep, exactly.

Allie Nimmons:
After I edit this episode, I go to Twitter, I post it, I retweet it for my account. And that’s how we get, I think, the majority of our listens to this show. I don’t know what I would do if Twitter vanished.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah, it would be-

Allie Nimmons:
It’s interesting to think about.

Michelle Frechette:
… like, remember that game we played as kids in the pool where one person closed their eyes and everyone else was moving around?

Allie Nimmons:
Marco.

Michelle Frechette:
Marco Polo, right? It would be like operating the [inaudible 00:19:25]. I’d be like walking up in my yard going, “Marco,” and hoping that Allie answered from from Texas, “Polo.”

Allie Nimmons:
Polo.
And I mean, the timing of it is pretty ideal, because, I mean, things are definitely opening back up. We were just talking about we’re going to see each other next week. We’re also going to see each other again in February in Thailand for Word Camp Asia.

Michelle Frechette:
Yep, exactly.

Allie Nimmons:
Events in our in-person community is coming back together. I think 2023 is going to be huge for the resurgence of our in-person events. And so if Twitter disappeared, we’d be able to go back to that. I think it was so important for us during the pandemic to have Twitter for all of us to be together. So yeah, I think it’s an interesting thing to think about. I think it’s interesting for companies to think about. Our main communication is on Twitter. If Musk burns Twitter down, where do we go?

Michelle Frechette:
Right. Yep. Exactly. Exactly. And for underrepresented folks, we haven’t really pulled that aspect into it yet, those are even smaller communities within the larger community. How would that operate and where would you find people? I know that there’s Slack groups for different communities and there are Slack channels within Liquid Web, for example. There’s Slack channels for women and non-binary. There’s Slack channels for disabilities, things like that. And I know that in other Slack groups there are those same kinds of things. But that’s not open to everybody, and that isn’t a way to communicate what’s happening in the world with one another like we do on Twitter with hashtags. So yeah, it’s an interesting time.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
It’s an interesting time for sure.

Allie Nimmons:
So I’ll put in the show notes, the link to your tweet. Let me make sure I have that. And I’m also going to put in the show notes a link to Naisha Green’s article about Mastodon at the risk of doing some kind of self promo since I work for this company. It’s a really, really good case study. She goes through the whole process of using Mastodon for the first time, and gives her thoughts and has screen caps and stuff like that. And I think it’s a really interesting look at an underrepresented person’s experience trying to migrate to a new platform and the challenges that she encountered, and the things she liked about it. And it’s just overall good read. So highly recommend everyone checks that out well.

Michelle Frechette:
Absolutely, yep. That’s a good read. I read it myself.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. All right, well, thank you so much for listening to us yet another week, and next week, we will have a super special episode about our experience at State of the Word, so please make sure that you tune in for that. Might get spicy, who knows? Not sure, but we’ll see.

Michelle Frechette:
Time will tell.

Allie Nimmons:
Okay.

Michelle Frechette:
Bye.

Allie Nimmons:
Bye.
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