"I realized this morning that your event content is the only event related 'stuff' I still read. I think that's because it's not about events, but about the coming together of people to exchange ideas and learn from one another and that's valuable information for anyone." — Traci Browne
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Most weekdays, my wife and I join a fifteen-minute online meditation offered by teachers at the Insight Meditation Society. The other day, teacher Matthew Hepburn introduced a dharma practice of meditating, not on one’s breath or body sensations, but on another person. As Matthew talked, I realized that I experience good facilitation listening as a meditation.
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Over the years, I’ve written frequently about associations, which are just one kind of social group. Our lives are defined by myriads of social groups, some self-chosen, some completely beyond our control. These groups have many origins and purposes, some beneficial and some destructive. Although individual value systems vary, I think it’s worth asking the question: What’s the highest meaning or purpose of a social group?
Columnist, essayist, and poet Jim Ralston offers this answer:
“The highest meaning of the social group is to foster the development of individual potential, for the community’s own well-being depends on it. When the goal of the group ceases to be the individual, that group goes into decline.”
—Jim Ralston, July 1991 correspondence with The Sun
I agree with this, perhaps controversial, answer. There are plenty of social groups—including many (but not all) political movements, companies, and religions—that champion their collective interests over those of other groups or individuals. Someone who believes in these groups’ goals, is likely to give them a higher meaning than the development of group members’ individual potential.
From the point of view of associations, however, I think this answer stands. I’ve seen many examples of associations’ tails wagging their memberships’ dog., i.e. staff running an association for their own benefit or organizational survival at the expense of the development of individual members. A classic example is the National Rifle Association, which journalist Tim Mak described in his book Misfire: Inside the Downfall of the NRA as having “a ‘Field & Stream’ membership with a ‘Fox & Friends’ leadership”. In my experience, such associations eventually either implode or—often reluctantly—radically restructure their administration or mission.
Novelist, essayist, and poet Barbara Kingsolver highlights a different perspective on the highest meaning of a social group: the tension between altruism and self-interest.
“Altruism was also part of our evolution, but, again, it was a very constrained altruism that would benefit our own descendants and nobody else’s. That’s the wiring we’ve inherited. And on this razor-thin leading edge of history, we’ve developed a civilization in which we generally acknowledge the benefits of cooperation beyond our immediate group. So we have charitable organizations and adoptions and nonprofits, and also international trade and NAFTA. But our nature is still pulling us back.”
—Barbara Kingsolver, The Moral Universe: Barbara Kingsolver On Writing, Politics, And Human Nature, interview by Jeanne Supin, March 2014
This is the same tension that plays out between association staff and membership wants and needs. Over time, if staff self-interest significantly outweighs altruistic motivations, association culture is likely to become increasingly introspective, rather than continuing to evolve to satisfy individual members’ wants and needs.
Some groups evolve to a point where they no longer serve the development of their members but concentrate on the survival of themselves as an institution. Such groups do little to benefit anyone but their staff. It’s likely that they served their purpose well at some point in their history, but that period is over. The best outcome is to close them down.
Jim Ralston and Barbara Kingsolver illustrate the importance of deciding the highest meaning of any social group, especially ones you manage. Your choice will determine the health and future of the group.
What do you think is the highest meaning of a social group? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Image attributions: Jim Ralston from The Sun; Barbara Kingsolver (2023, January 10) from Wikipedia.
In a typical in-person conference breakout session, participants divide into small groups to discuss one or more topics. Each group records members’ thoughts and ideas on one or more sheets of flipchart paper. At the end of the discussions, groups post their papers on a wall and everyone walks around reading the different ideas. Facilitators call this a gallery walk. Here’s a tip to improve breakout gallery walks.
In the past, it was common for small group work to be “reported out”: a representative from each group verbally shared their group’s work with everyone. If there are many groups this takes a while, and there’s typically a fair amount of repetition which makes it hard to maintain focus. In addition, if the groups are covering multiple topics, it’s likely that some or most of the reporting will not be of interest to attendees. In short, reporting out is tiring to take in and inefficient.
A big advantage of gallery walks is that participants can easily concentrate on the topics, thoughts, and ideas that interest them. If a flipchart page is of no interest, it can be ignored. Also, it’s simple to customize a gallery walk to meet specific wants and needs. For example, if there are experts on a specific topic, they can stand near their flipchart notes and answer questions or support discussion. In fact, gallery walks allow ongoing interaction around the captured ideas, something that isn’t possible during “reporting out” which is a broadcast-style activity.
And this leads to my tip…
You can improve the effectiveness of a gallery walk by adding one small step before it starts. Ask everyone to pair up with someone they don’t know and walk the gallery together while discussing what they see. When you do this, each participant:
In essence, pairing participants increases the reach and impact of the breakout session by extending connection and interaction into the concluding gallery walk.
As usual, lightly ask participants to pair share. I like to think of such requests as giving people permission to do something they might want to do but feel a little awkward asking for it. If folks want to go around with someone they know or have just met, or decide to walk as a trio or alone respect their choices.
A hat-tip to my friend, photographer Brent Seabrook, for inadvertently sparking this tip when we took a gallery walk together at the Clark Institute a few months ago. Looking at art together with Brent added so much to my appreciation of what we saw—and I got to know him better too!
Image attribution: Georgia State University, College of Education & Human Development
Meeting professionals rarely talk about status and power issues. This is unfortunate because the ways that status and power manifest at meetings matter. Why? Because a majority of those who attend most meetings have little say over what happens at them. Typical meeting formats are rigid, and attendees play largely circumscribed roles.
So, let’s explore the roles of status and power at meetings.
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Sadly, resolutions rarely work. In 2016 I wrote about what I call the New Year’s Resolutions Effect. [My example was noticing that thousands of people chose to read my old post about cleaning up email on your iPhone every January.] I shared Tom Stafford‘s suggestion for maximizing the likelihood that people will make good resolutions and keep them.
“…if you make a resolution, you should formulate it so that at every point in time it is absolutely clear whether you are sticking to it or not. The clear lines are arbitrary, but they help the truce between our competing interests hold.”
And I explained how this shapes my design for a closing session that supports participants making changes in their lives, based on what they’ve learned and the connections they’ve made at an event.
In this post, I’ll share a couple of additional perspectives about making resolutions.
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Last week I wrote about alternatives to Twitter, sparked by the rapid changes to the platform under its new billionaire owner. Focusing on our own professional community—the meeting (and hospitality) industry—I’d like to make a modest proposal for a social media platform that might meet our needs better. In other words: an #eventprofs alternative to Twitter. (And LinkedIn and Meta, too.)
Mastodon turns out to be an excellent social media platform that can connect you with your tribe while still giving you full access to posts and conversations over the entire network.
“[Mastodon’s] free and open-source software enables anyone to run a social media platform entirely on their own infrastructure, entirely under their own control, while connecting to a global decentralized social network.”
—from a Mastodon blog post
Think of Mastodon as a “galaxy of interconnected social networks based on a common platform”. To recap key points from my recent post:
The last bullet point leads me to my modest proposal. What if an industry leader like Freeman, RX, Cvent, PCMA, or MPI, to name a few, set up a Mastodon server for the event and hospitality industry?
“Mastodon is my favorite alternative to Twitter, and I’m spending more and more time on it. It feels like the early days of Twitter: a fresh, relatively uncrowded, environment where I’m continually meeting new interesting folks. I’ve had many more personal interactions on Mastodon than any of the other alternatives I’ve tried. If the future of Twitter worries you, I think Mastodon is the place to go.”
—Adrian Segar, Alternatives to Twitter
Up to now, the event and hospitality community has no single logical place to exist online. Communities are fragmented over Twitter, LinkedIn, Meta, and thousands of niche platforms and spaces. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have our own instance (or a few perhaps) where industry members could meet, connect, post, and converse?
The beauty of implementing such a community on Mastodon is the platform’s flexibility. Mastodon doesn’t lock you into one instance once you’ve joined it. For example, in the future people might decide to have separate servers for events and hospitality folks. Users are free to move their accounts, with all their posts and followers, to a new instance. Or even join both instances if they want.
That’s my case for creating an #eventprofs alternative to Twitter. I think that Mastodon offers just the right balance of a place for our tribe together with natural connections to a much larger Fediverse of communities. I hope this short post stimulates people and organizations to build a better place than Twitter, LinkedIn, and Meta for the #eventprofs community to meet, convene, and converse online.
Since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter on October 27, 2022, its status as a stable social media platform seems to be rapidly imploding. Reportedly, Twitter has restored thousands of accounts that were previously banned by the company’s own moderation teams, and half of Twitter’s top advertisers have left the platform. In response to these developments, I’ve been looking into alternatives to Twitter.
I joined Twitter in 2009 and have had ~8,600 followers for the last few years. Twitter has already transformed once, becoming more about breaking news than engagement as I describe in my post: Why 2017 was a tipping point for Twitter. ~150 of my followers have left the platform since Musk’s purchase five weeks ago.
Time will tell whether the exodus will become a rout, which could happen if Twitter becomes too toxic or unreliable.
Alternatives to Twitter include Mastodon, Discord, Post News, Counter Social, Hive Social, and many more. Each platform offers a different experience due to often subtle design decisions.
In this post, I’ll share my findings and thoughts. This is not an exhaustive review (which would at this point need to be book-length). And it’s biased toward platforms I like. Regardless, I hope this summary will be a useful introduction. I’ve included references to helpful resources for you to learn more.
Before we dive into detail about individual platforms, it’s important to understand a few important structural factors that impact user experience and the long-term evolution of these services.
Most social media companies are for-profit corporations, whether publicly or privately owned. Twitter was a public company until Musk bought it. Meta (formerly Facebook) is a public corporation but Mark Zuckerberg controls over half the corporate votes. An anonymous individual, describing himself as an “American patriot” owns Counter Social. Post News, launched a few weeks ago, is funded by venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Scott Galloway, and others. Several large venture capital companies own Discord. Hive Social is owned by its founder, Raluca Pop, and an angel investor.
Of the above platforms, Counter Social is (probably) the only one that owners who’d like to make money don’t control. Meta’s and Twitter’s main income source is advertising, though both services also make money selling the data they collect to third parties. Since going public in 2013, Twitter has only occasionally turned a profit, and one has to wonder if the recent significant pause in advertising by its major customers bodes well for its financial future.
Why should you care? Ernie Smith explains why ownership and openness matter when choosing a social network alternative to Twitter.
Of course, the distinctive thing about all of these networks is that each ultimately is centralized, rather than being built on an open protocol. And that means that they are built to generate value for their founders. They are built for onboarding, not for long-term growth, which means that they lead with cool features, not with promises of sustainability.
And that’s where commercial networks often falter. The financial incentive has created problems over time that have helped to complicate the shape of social media. The immense value of any given social network has ultimately been in data, rather than by offering services to the creator. And that has meant leaning hard on data-mining or advertising-driven business models—and companies that don’t do that ultimately find themselves out of the conversation entirely.
—Ernie Smith, Don’t Fall Into The Well
This brings us to Mastodon, which is different.
Mastodon is not owned by anyone; it’s free, open-source software written by Eugen Rochko and released in 2016. I’ll share more about Mastodon below.
As Ernie puts it:
[Mastodon] has a great lead feature that none of its competitors have yet replicated—its adherence to the open web. Unfortunately, alternative networks can throw marketing money at all sorts of other features trying to convince you that those features matter more. But the only feature that truly matters at this moment, even more than how “hip” a network is, is if it talks to every other network. If it’s open, even better.
Whether Mastodon survives and thrives remains to be seen. But its open network plus community ownership is a strong plus in my book.
Size isn’t everything, but the network effect has its advantages. Ideally, we want our social media platforms to include our tribes. All other things being equal, a larger network is more likely to have folks we want to communicate with on it. Here are current estimates of various platforms’ active users. Take these numbers as a guide rather than a selection criterion, because a smaller niche network may fit you better. (For example, Discord’s members are mostly gamers.)
| Network | Active users |
| ~240M | |
| Discord | ~140M |
| Counter Social | ~160K |
| Mastodon | ~8M |
| Hive Social | ~2M |
| Post News | ~140K |
All social media platforms have their own web interfaces and apps that mediate their users’ experience. Platforms continually upgrade user interfaces, functionality, and features, generally (but not always) for the better. Most platforms aim to be as easy to use as possible.
However, there are four specific factors that affect a social media platform’s experience:
Twitter (and Meta and Instagram) depend primarily on advertising. The other platforms mentioned in this post are blessedly free from ads.
Content moderation policies and their effectiveness on these platforms are huge and controversial topics. With Musk’s purchase of Twitter, reports indicate that content moderation has been gutted, with the firing of many Twitter employees and outsourced contractors. Musk has said that such work can be automated, but there’s widespread skepticism that this is possible. Meanwhile, the EU has warned Musk that Twitter faces a ban unless he abides by its strict rules on content moderation.
All social media platforms face this problem, and there are no easy answers. As we’ve seen with Twitter and Meta, what is acceptable to post is a moving target, one that’s intertwined with changing political, social, and cultural norms. As platforms like Mastodon, Counter Social, and Hive Social grow rapidly, they will also have to evolve and scale how they perform content moderation if they are going to meet their founders’ goals as a safe-enough space for conversation.
How much control a user has over what they see on the platform is an important aspect of the user experience. You have probably had the experience of seeing content (and ads) on Meta that you have no interest in, nor any simple way of banishing from your feed. Conversely, I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a post in my Meta feed but couldn’t find it later, or had to hunt for posts I’m interested in.
Twitter’s feed also has similar problems, though there are workarounds. The other platforms I’ve mentioned can provide chronological unfiltered feeds, so you don’t have to worry about missing stuff. And each platform has its own way of allowing you to focus on specific content, or block content you want to skip.
Finally, search capability is one area where the monolithic platforms currently have an advantage. It’s easy to globally search for a word, phrase, or hashtag on them. Mastodon, a federated service, makes some compromises about search. If you search for plain text, you’ll get posts you’ve written, favorited, or been mentioned in, as well as matching usernames, display names, and hashtags. So, it’s harder to find things on Mastodon unless (as the help recommends) members use appropriate hashtags extensively.
In the early days of Twitter, the famous “Fail Whale”, indicating that the service was down, was a common sight. For the last few years, the platform has been very reliable, with only a few glitches per year. Whether this will continue after Musk’s firing of a majority of the company’s employees is an open question.
In my limited experience, rapidly growing platforms Mastodon, Counter Social, and Post News have been doing pretty well coping with their explosive growth. (Post News is currently limiting new signups from its waitlist to handle the increased traffic.) But all three services can be slow at times, though I don’t see much difference in responsiveness between them and Twitter.
Right now, Hive Social is currently offline due to security concerns. With only three employees and a sudden jump in new registrations, that’s perhaps not surprising.
OK, maybe you skipped the above to see what I think about individual platforms. Remember, this is based on my experience to date, and everything in this space is evolving fast. I’ve listed the platforms in my most-to-least favorite order. Here goes!
Mastodon has been around since 2016. Unlike the other platforms mentioned in this post, anyone with a certain amount of technical expertise can set up a Mastodon server. Currently, there are thousands around the world. Though there are some servers with large general memberships (such as mastodon.social which I’m currently on), most focus on specific communities or interests, such as tech, gaming, LGBTQ, region, activism, art, music, journalism, etc. Mastodon is a federated social network of these servers (which are also called nodes or instances). This allows users on different servers to interact with each other. (Here’s a good explanation of how Mastodon’s federation works.)
You have to choose a Mastodon server. Many popular articles about Mastodon describe this as a barrier to joining the platform. Actually, it’s not something that you need to really worry about unless you’re especially interested in immediately finding a server that reflects a community about which you feel strongly. That’s because you can change the server you’re on at a later date, bringing your followers with you.
If you do want to pick a community right away you can use the tool Mastodon Instances. Or, the official JoinMastodon page lists available servers, categorized in various ways, and shows you which ones are currently open to join.
To find out more about a mastodon server from the server itself, go to its “about” page at https://[server name]/about/more, e.g., https://mastodon.social/about/more. This page includes rules of conduct for the server, additional services provided, and other useful information.
Still worried about this step? Here is an invite from me to the largest mastodon server: mastodon.social. Even if this server is currently closed to new accounts, this invite will get you in!
Once you’ve picked a server to join, getting started is like any other social media platform. You create an account on the server and set up a profile. On Mastodon, profiles contain up to 500-character bios and you can add a display name, avatar, header image, and up to four links to relevant websites.
This is a huge plus in my book. The beauty of federated social media platforms is that they are loosely-joined collections of communities that are responsive to users’ wants and needs, rather than the dictate to make money, or the whims of an erratic billionaire. Mastodon servers run mainly on volunteer time, with infrastructure funding coming from donations. (I support my server, mastodon.social, via Patreon.)
I summarized how this works above. For more information, these Mastodon introductions, listed easiest first –> most comprehensive, (1, 2, 3) should be helpful.
Currently, I avoid seeing Twitter ads on the web by using Tweetdeck. (Mastodon’s “advanced web interface” looks like Tweetdeck; turn it on!) But the mobile Twitter app is filled with ads, which I don’t appreciate.
(Don’t get me started on Facebook ads. They are only tolerable on the web because I’ve installed F.B. Purity, a labor of love that I recommend.)
Twitter started with a 140-character tweet limit which was raised to 280 characters in 2017. It’s often still not long enough for me. Mastodon’s 500-character limit is refreshing.
Twitter, which has become much more a site for breaking news than a place to converse has always, understandably, been concerned that people would edit tweets post-publication to change what they originally said if it later became foolish or embarrassing. Given that people can still delete their tweets, this doesn’t work very well.
Mastodon allows you to edit published posts. I like this a lot! This feature lets me fix typos, add better hashtags and images, etc. There’s one other advantage for me right now. Currently, I crosspost my tweets to Mastodon using the Moa Bridge service. Mastodon’s editable posts allow me to tweak tweets into Mastodon posts that are more “Mastodon-like”, which typically means adding and adjusting hashtags.
Tweetdeck is my favorite way to access Twitter. Mastodon’s “advanced web interface” provides something very similar.
I like this feature. It speaks to Mastodon’s commitment to providing functionality that supports creating safer spaces for users.
One feature that Mastodon provides…is the option to attach a content warning to your posts. When a content warning is included, the status content will be collapsed by default, and only the CW will be shown, similarly to an email subject line or a “read more” break. This can be used to add a summary or subject for your post, to collapse long posts, or to otherwise provide context or setup for the body of the post.
When media is attached, a checkbox appears to allow you to “mark media as sensitive”. This hides the full media behind a blurred thumbnail by default. Adding a CW to a post automatically marks the media as sensitive as well.
—Mastodon documentation
On Twitter, you can “like” or retweet a post. Twitter displays publicly a count of a post’s likes, which makes the platform a place where many users try to get their posts liked a lot. You can also quote tweets, allowing you to add a comment to another’s tweet. This is often used on Twitter to publicly dump on a tweet you don’t like, perhaps boosting your standing with your followers.
On Mastodon, you can “favorite” or repost (aka “boost”) someone’s post. The favorites count doesn’t appear on post timelines, so it’s not a status symbol of how popular what you say is. The only people who know you’ve favorited a post are you and the poster. Favorited posts are thus a way for you to remember posts you like. They are searchable.
If you want to promote someone else’s Mastodon post, you repost it. There’s no equivalent of tweet quoting.
Mastodon’s design distinction between favorite and repost discourages the self-promotion that sometimes runs rampant on Twitter.
As far as I know, there are no social media platforms that allow you to export or import your posts and followers to or from another platform. But Mastodon makes it pretty easy to move all your account data from one Mastodon server to another. You might want to do this if you discover a server that better fits your requirements (for example, one for users who speak your native language and post mainly in that language) or because your server doesn’t have as many members as you would like.
You can have accounts on multiple servers, so it’s easy to try a new server and compare your experience there before choosing to change servers.
Mastodon is my favorite alternative to Twitter, and I’m spending more and more time on it. It feels like the early days of Twitter: a fresh, relatively uncrowded, environment where I’m continually meeting new interesting folks. I’ve had many more personal interactions on Mastodon than any of the other alternatives I’ve tried. If the future of Twitter worries you, I think Mastodon is the place to go.
I joined Counter Social—founded in November 2017—in April 2022 after the news that Musk might acquire Twitter became public. I like the platform a lot, though Mastodon has stolen my attention recently. There was some initial concern that Counter Social’s sole(!) anonymous(!) owner “The Jester” espoused right-wing politics and had a history of hacking targets that he felt threatened America in the past. However, unlike Musk’s recent brazen moves, I haven’t seen any sign of a political thumb on the posts I’ve seen flowing past on Counter Social’s “Community firehose” stream.
Counter Social is free to join. It receives some income from $4.99/month optional “PRO” accounts but otherwise it seems that The Jester funds it himself.
This sounds silly and may change, but the Counter Social community currently comes across as the nicest large bunch of community folks I’ve seen on a social media platform. Now of course, what I call nice (a mixture of charmingly personal posts, eclectic artwork, restrained mainly left-wing statements, favorite music and movies) may not be what you think of as “nice”. New users are welcome. Browsing my feeds is…soothing. Can you say that about any other large social network?
Like Mastodon, Counter Social uses a similar but more attractive “Tweetdeck-like” interface. Posts (aka “toots”) can be up to 500 characters, though you can’t edit them after you’ve posted them. You can’t see who has favorited or reposted a post until you click into it, and reply counts are shown as 0, 1, or 1+ which discourages people from writing posts solely designed to get lots of interaction.
Like Mastodon, searching is only on hashtags and usernames. There’s no plain text searching of posts like Twitter does. You get columns for friends’ posts and notifications and can create additional columns based on hashtag searches.
Counter Social has added to the interface a few features which you may like, such as a CNN ticker tape news feed and eight other news channel video feeds.
Like Mastodon, as described above.
Counter Social has deployed a number of sometimes controversial anti-disinformation methods. The platform bans IP addresses from Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Pakistan (that’s the controversial bit), as well as a proprietary list of “over 100K VPN endpoints and Tor exit nodes that are known to be used by nefarious actors”. Counter Social has also teamed up with Bot Sentinel to reduce disinformation. And users can mute and block other users and flag posts for review.
I don’t know how Counter Social does it or whether my experience is typical, but the platform seems to do a great job keeping nasty stuff off my feed.
No one really knows if “The Jester” is actually one person. Even if he has a small team to help, the platform has been remarkably responsive, except when the service had to handle half a million new user signups in a few days in May 2022. Today it chugs along, though I wonder how many of its millions of registered users are actually active on it currently. Presumably, The Jester (or a hacker) could abruptly shut down Counter Social. What happens if The Jester has a heart attack or loses interest in supporting the platform? Such concerns have made me hesitant to invest significant time in Counter Social.
Reading The Jester’s Wikipedia entry does not give me a reassuring feeling about the guy. Given that an anonymous individual (assuming that’s true) controls Counter Social raises obvious questions. Is the site secure from hackers stealing users’ personal information, login credentials, or private messages? Can we trust The Jester’s statement that the platform only collects IP and email addresses, and does not “collect information that identifies, relates to, describes, references, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer, household, or device (‘personal information’)“?
We don’t know the answer to these questions. On the other hand, what assurance do we have that Musk is not now rummaging through the vast hoard of data that Twitter has acquired over the years? Ultimately, you’re going to need to decide whether you trust using this service. My approach is that I don’t post anything that would embarrass me if (fat chance) it was widely publicized. And I don’t use private messaging on any service for vital information.
In one sentence: Counter Social is a really nice place to visit but I’m not sure I want to live there.
Discord is primarily an audio chat and instant messaging platform that became wildly popular with social gamers. So why am I including it here as an alternative to Twitter? Because Discord now makes it easy for communities to get together. In 2020, Discord shifted its focus away from video gaming toward creating and managing all-purpose public and private online forums for posting and chat. And in September 2022, the company introduced Forum Channels which support organized discussions, stored posts, and message threads: everything you need for an online community.
I joined Discord in July 2021, and currently use it in two ways. First, as a place for occasionally staying in touch with a small group of event production professionals, via a forum set up with four text channels. And second, as an interface for a Midjourney Discord server, which I use to create illustrations for some of my blog posts.
Discord is free to use for forums. Many gamer members spring for “boost” [$4.99/month] or “Nitro” subscriptions [$9.99/month], and Discord receives a 10% commission on games sold through game developers’ servers.
The Discord forum channel interface is easy to use. It provides a simple and attractive way to display and organize asynchronous conversations into threads. I like how a forum can have owner-created channels to cover broad categories of conversations relevant to the community. For example, the forum I mentioned above has channels for messages from the owner, requests for help, job opportunities, and general posts. My Midjourney public server has over a hundred channels that cover announcements, service status, rules, FAQs, getting started, polls, support for trial and paid users, various chats about the service, image showcase channels, and many channels where Midjourney images are constantly being requested and generated.
As you might expect, Discord has been and can be used for nefarious purposes, such as cyberbullying, private use by extremists, and pornography and sexual exploitation. All social media platforms with private forums have these problems, which is why content moderation policies and the effectiveness of their implementation are so important.
In June 2022, Discord introduced an automated service to help forum moderators deal with inappropriate content. Discord also provides resources for administrators in its Moderation Academy. Otherwise, Discord relies on user reports to catch service violations.
It’s hard to beat Discord for a free, fully-featured, easy-to-use community messaging service of any size. Given its robust funding by gamers, I doubt that the service will fall out of favor any time soon. And because gamers who desire fast response time use Discord, the owners are likely to maintain reliable service.
The youngest social media platform in this roundup is Post News. It’s so new there isn’t even a Wikipedia entry for it yet. Launched hurriedly last month (November 2022), the platform currently has 400K users on the waitlist and 140K who have been invited in and activated their accounts. I joined Post News a couple of weeks ago and have been checking it out.
The “Chief Poster”, Noah Bardin, was the CEO of Waze for 12 years and the company is financed by well-known venture capitalists. The platform ultimately aims to be a place where big names, especially journalists and “publishers” will congregate and opine on issues of the day.
“Post News is trying to capitalize on the ‘virtual watercooler for journalists’ side of Twitter. The platform describes itself as a place to access ‘premium news content without subscriptions or ads.’ News publishers and independent writers are encouraged to share their articles on Post News under a paywall. The idea is that this would allow users to pay for individual articles from a variety of news sources. It’s an alternative, or a supplement, to paying for individual subscriptions to specific news sources.”
—Amanda Silberling, Post News, a Twitter alternative, gets funding from a16z
Only a rudimentary payment system using points is available to date. Time will tell if subscribers are willing to pay for individual articles in sufficient quantities to sustain the service.
Unfortunately, I have many more concerns about Post News than things I like. Pitched as a “fun” place that “introduce[s] you to big ideas and cool people” Post News is, so far, underwhelming. It has a bare-bones web interface that pales in comparison to Mastodon, Counter Social, and Discord. Perhaps that makes it easier to use, but I’ve found even the simple interface glitchy with minor annoyances that Post News will probably fix soon.
Accessibility features that are standard on Mastodon and Counter Social, like alt text image descriptions and content warnings, are missing. Post News is US, English only, has no app, and you can’t add a video or animated gif to a post. Like Twitter, you can’t edit a post once you’ve posted it. The interface only supports a single feed of everyone’s posts. Post News allows you to flag perceived trolls but is still working on muting posts and blocking individuals.
Post News has a broadcast-style feel to it. The platform seems to be attempting to create a hierarchy of news producers and news consumers, and that’s probably a deliberate choice. But what I find depressing is that the platform’s consequent vibe is a curious mixture of the trivial and pompous/promotional. It feels like a place where people are mostly trying to impress others. You can comment on posts, but comments are rare and there’s little evidence of conversations.
Post News is like a party where the guests are awkwardly posing instead of just having a good time.
It’s very early days. Post News may well eventually become a viable marketplace for folks with great interesting ideas and the capability to express them well to grow an audience and make some money in the process.
However, I’m skeptical that this will turn out well for folks who put their significant content on the platform. Because, as I wrote in 2017, posting your original content exclusively on someone else’s platform puts you at their mercy. Third-party platforms change their feed policies (Meta, Twitter, LinkedIn) all the time, and if they go out of business (e.g., Geocities, Vine, MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Google+) your content vanishes from the internet. I still strongly recommend you maintain control over your content by posting it on a website you own. That’s my two cents.
The two things that I like about Post News are that posts can be of any length and that it supports plain text search. That’s about it.
I am clearly not a fan of Post News in its current state. But it still has plenty of time to improve. To be fair, I will be checking back on how it develops, especially to see if it can attract significant numbers of interesting and influential thinkers and writers who chose to post exclusive content there.
I was going to explore Hive Social before I wrote this review, but it’s been down for a week for security updates. So, I’ll summarize here what I like and dislike about this platform based on what I’ve read rather than from direct experience.
Many users describe Hive Social as a mixture of Twitter and Instagram apps. It’s been downloaded about two million times, though the current week-long outage may reduce future growth. Like Twitter and Counter Social, the service allows NSFW posts as long as posters categorize them with a content warning.
Like Post News, Hive Social has no ads and no character limit on posts. I’m a fan of “neutral” feeds on social media platforms, and Hive Social only offers a chronological timeline. Like most social media platforms apart from Meta, you can follow another user without them having to “friend” you back. The owner says the platform has “zero tolerance for bigotry and hate”, though, like Post News, moderation is currently restricted to reporting by other users.
Hive Social’s sole owner with a minuscule staff raises similar concerns to Counter Social; what if the service is shut down or its data misused? Perhaps due to the service’s rapid growth, there are reports that the app crashes and service can be slow at times. Hive Social has no web interface, which is annoying to old fogeys like me. Finally, you have to wonder about the problems that are bound to arise if Hive Social continues to grow, given it currently has no moderators, no security team, and no staff focused on regulatory compliance.
Hive Social (when it’s back up and running) is probably a nice place to hang out if you’re young and aren’t especially interested in maintaining a long-term history of your social media interactions.
Some parts of this review of alternatives to Twitter will be out of date in a month, while some will stand the test of time. (Now if I could only know which parts were which!) And there are likely to be still more entrants in the Twitter-competitor space, such as Spoutible which is due to go live in February 2023.
Currently, Twitter continues to be a useful place for sharing my content and connecting with meeting industry peers. But its future is uncertain, and having taken some time to explore alternative platforms I thought I’d share my findings with you.
I hope this summary review is helpful and welcome your thoughts, comments, and experiences with these alternatives and any new platforms that appear. Please share in the comments below!
For the 4th year in a row, I’m honored to be voted one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in the Event Industry in Eventex‘s annual poll. The award “recognizes event professionals who have left a mark on the industry with their creativity, vision, and capacity for innovation”. Learn more about me here.
Public voting entirely determines who’s on the list. Industry experts first get to nominate and then vote for those they believe have the most notable impact on the world of events and experience marketing. This year, a total of 454 professionals were honored with a nomination. There were over 20,000 votes, and those with the most votes made the Top 100 list.
Many of my good friends and colleagues are also on the list; check it out.
And thank you everyone who voted for me in the last four years (2019 – 2022)!
P.S. I’ve been working on a “mammoth” post on alternatives to Twitter this week. I expect to return to my normal Monday weekly publishing schedule next week!
Last week I shared five ways explicit communication improves meetings. If we lived in a world where sharing a clear message guaranteed that every recipient received it and took it to heart—well, our lives would be a lot less complicated.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world. So here’s a guide to explicit communication mechanics that increase the likelihood that people receive and act on your messages.
To maximize the likelihood that people receive and act on a message you send:
Think about the best channel(s) to communicate your message. Here are some examples.
Before you choose from available channels, consider timing and repeat messaging factors, as described below.
A mistake I’ve made more than once is to try to share information at the end of a session while people are starting to leave. Typically I’ll indicate that the session is over and then remember there’s an announcement I forgot to make. Unfortunately, listening to me becomes a low priority when attendees have already turned their attention to standing up and thinking about where they’ll go next.
To maximize explicit communication in such circumstances, what I try to remember to do is:
Part of a communications plan, therefore, includes choosing the best times to prep folks for receiving and then delivering your messages.
Having a plan is important, but not necessarily sufficient. You also need to monitor the real-time environment and be prepared to alter your plan. As a facilitator I sometimes change the processes I’m using to meet uncovered participants’ needs. Or a portion of a session may take more or less time than expected. When such things happen, you may need to change the timing of your communications on the fly.
Obviously, if people don’t understand your message your communication will fail. Whenever possible, test the clarity of a message in advance. For example, I try to test instructions I’ve developed for new group work processes with a small group before using them with 600 people. And don’t forget that messaging isn’t restricted to verbal communication. I remember a maze-like conference center that had a totally inadequate printed floor plan. Even though I spent the day before the event familiarizing myself with the layout, I still had a hard time figuring out how to get from one room to the next. Not surprisingly, many attendees got lost and were late for sessions during the meeting.
In addition, to make sure your message is clear, check for understanding right after delivering it. Saying “are there any questions?” and giving people enough time to respond before continuing is the least you should do. For maximal communication use Ask, Tell, Ask, where you ask what questions people have, share your answers, and then ask what they understand.
One of the best improv exercises I’ve done really brought home the importance of checking whether people have received a message. In 2016, I played the game “You” at a five-day improv retreat held by Mindful Play, Playful Mind. Here’s what I wrote about playing “You”, though, like all improv, you have to experience the game to fully get its point.
What the game vividly illustrates is that you have to get people’s full attention before you send a message, and then check with them to make sure they’ve received it. Make sure you do this!
Finally, remember that repeating messages appropriately increases the likelihood people will receive and absorb them. Despite your best efforts, there are countless reasons why folks may miss a message. A potential recipient might be immersed in a side conversation, worrying about a family situation, on a bathroom break, etc. Repeating messages, especially important ones, makes it more likely people will hear or seen and act on them.
How often to repeat a message depends on its importance, the environment, and the level of attention at the moment you share it. There’s no right answer. Some people are great at receiving messages; some need to be hit over the head with a stick. In general, it’s better to repeat a message a little too often (with the risk of annoying some) rather than not enough (with the risk that many won’t receive it.)
If available, use multiple channels for your messages. For example, communicate a schedule change with session announcements, in-app messages, and meeting signage. People will generally understand your desire to get the message out in various ways, and it’s more likely people will receive it successfully.
You can’t please everyone. However well you fashion and deliver your explicit communication, some people won’t get the message or act on it. (It’s sobering that despite media saturation of the message that voting is important, about a third of registered U.S. voters don’t vote.)
Nevertheless, maximizing the likelihood that people will receive and act on your messages at meetings is important. I hope that this post gives you some ideas for improving communications at your meetings.
Do you know other ways to improve explicit communication at meetings? Share them in the comments below!
