In my search for new social media sites to use, one that started popping up was CounterSocial. I’ve looked into a few others and because of it’s intention to keep privacy good (and the stories of Elon Musk buying Twitter making the site suddenly popular), I finally found some info on it.

FYI–this writer has the best detail and review for it I’ve seen yet (and rather recent) in this article here.

I guess it really was meant for those used to Twitter or other short-form social media users. I’m not up on my sites and all, and I’ve never used Twitter a day in my life, but heavens, it was so bloody complicated that I think I messed it up.

It took me 30 minutes this morning (after a quick sign up yesterday) to even find how to edit my profile so I could delete it. I think this is a platform that works well with tablets more than anything, because as I moved further to the right on the web browser, I couldn’t figure out how to go back left (and there’s no scroll bar at the bottom to help). So, I refreshed the page in order to do it. I didn’t like that and ended up deleting a few columns so everything was visible on one page.

Well, somehow that knocked off a toolbar to the right that would’ve helped me out. And this morning, as I looked through the user guide, I kept seeing where “Edit profile” was supposed to be and it wasn’t there.

Maybe they have a few more bugs to work out, but the layout was so intimidating to me (you tend to “pin” things, too, so I guess it’s a Twitter/Pinterest mix of a sort… again, don’t know how Twitter works). At least when I finally–accidentally–found the right area to get to “preferences”, which then opened everything up, I was able to delete the profile.

Well, that sucked. But I’ll take it as a learning moment and slow down a bit.

I have joined a few social media platforms in the past week or so, but I have to admit it’s a bit intimidating to have posts pop up in multiple languages (often German, which is where a lot of the servers on the block-chain seem to originate from). Wish the google translator would try to translate the page for me sometimes, because I could probably learn oodles from those folks, but oh well. What’s intimidating me more is there’s a lot of techies on the threads and I feel super out of place, though some “basic” convo does occur, too. I feel like it’s “instant immersion” with me, a real sink-or-swim thing in dealing with unfamiliar tech, language, and other opportunities. And considering how tech savvy the world is becoming, I need to just bury and destroy that bloody “boomer mindset” about tech and not needing it. Yeah, I might’ve been okay without it for ages, but I’m shooting myself in the foot and falling behind.

Just to be clear, it’s not some FOMO thing; it’s more a “you’re too young to act like a dinosaur that’s going extinct” thing because tech and the digital sphere changes so damned rapidly. I’m already several years behind, and if I want jobs, I’m gonna have to communicate and learn from those who are already out there… which can’t happen if I can’t find the tools to reach out, or learn how to speak to them on multiple levels and platforms.

It’s weird also because there’s one I use that’s like a Twitter replacement and I guess my ignorance there shows. I mean, when you look at what the community is posting, it feels like walking around a room where 20 different conversations are going on and you have no clue what the focus is in any of them. It’s like going to an online game and looking in the server chat window. Random snippets of people talking and you have no idea who is responding to who. Very odd, but I’m trying to figure it out, or just focus on who’s talking to me specifically and leaving the rest. I got another site I use that is a bit like Facebook and the conversation is MUCH easier to follow… and it will mostly translate pretty accurately. If I can’t read it, I just move on for a bit and come back later. Dunno how to get that damn browser to translate consistently, but oh well. Maybe I’ll become a polyglot just from browsing other folks’ posts.

I always did want to learn German… along with a few dozen other things.

So yeah, that was my first major misstep in the social media sphere. I can’t offer much to a tech-related chat, but perhaps I can ask a trillion questions (once I know what the hell they’re talking about). But there’s enough casual conversation to go around (and yes, enough anger about SCOTUS that it was easy to make some friends outright–hee hee), so even though my posts just feel weird in some respects, I’m figuring that I can use each site for different things, so that’ll help me expand and absorb info. Kinda makes sense, anyway, because I have a billion interests, so it’ll take a few sites to really help my knowledge base flourish.

I’ll give CounterSocial credit for a couple of things, though. One, it looks neat as hell (if you can figure out how to navigate it). Two, there’s no dilly-dallying on closing your account. Crazy easy and nothing’s going to be held hostage or take weeks to do. I’m good with that, because that makes me feel a level of trust. Perhaps someday, when I’ve gone through a few more sites and get to understand how they design their sites and all, I’ll give CounterSocial another shot. I think because of the surge of users, there’s some bugs that need fixing and that might’ve contributed to the issues I was having. Besides, if I manage to get good enough at writing that I start using a penname, I’ll need some places to go to make my persona and try it out. Though this does bring up some extra questions, now that I think about it…hmm…

Either way, glad there are more options out there than freaking FB or Twitter, and plenty of them are looking more and more interesting.