Over the years I have found social media a valuable way to locate information, contact people with an interest in a particular subject, and contribute my adding my own information back so that more people can see it. Social media can also be a terrible waste of time as there is often so much to wade through, and it has a bad habit of dragging you into discussions that you soon realise are without value or even making you annoyed.
In the last few years, the two largest media types that I used – Twitter (now called X) and Facebook – have, as far as I am concerned, have ceased to be fun. Increasingly, they swamp you with advertising; fail to address a flood of bigoted, racist and sexist comment by users; and in the case of X is now the favoured home of a rabid right-wing extremism and for conspiracy theorists. It’s now no home for anyone trying to talk to a Great War-interested community. Or any other subject, really. I have stopped using both, and judging from user statistics that you can find online, I am not alone. X has lost one-third of its UK user base since being acquired by Elon Musk.
So in the hope of finding a valuable alternative, I have tried Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky. The first two have their place, but were not doing it for me. Bluesky, on the other hand, has been going for a while but recently exploded with the exodus of similar-thinking people from X and there is now a very healthy and active history and genealogy community.
So I now only use Bluesky: you will find me at 1418research.bsky.social
You will find it at https://bluesky.app. Why not give it a whirl?