With Social Media Platforms Collapsing, Where To?

Normally I love a bit of change to mix things up and keep my days interesting, but there are an awful lot of changes happening at once in this author life of mine. When I was little I used to love to spin, spin, spin around until when I stopped the world would keep spinning. That’s what my days feel like now, go, go, go and when I stop at night all the things yet to be done are still spinning ’round in my head.

The first episodes of Storm Runners interactive book

and the Storm Runners game are ready for release.

So, I’ve been rebuilding the blog because I wanted something that would reflow nicely for all devices before the release. Meantime, my publisher released my rights back on my most recent books and games. You will likely find all those links are broken. I need to remove all the publisher’s promotional content from the books before I release under my name. I’ll redo the links when the updated content is uploaded.

To keep things interesting, G+ (the social media platform most of us virtual world geeks were hanging out on) is shutting down. So, I’m scrambling to keep up. Please be patient as I create new avenues for communication and content delivery. I’m also looking at switching to using Patreon instead of Amazon as the platform to make by books and games available to the public —because CockyGate made me realize trying to compete amid all the gaming of that Amazon marketplace is not worth the time it takes. Hopefully, it will only be another couple of weeks to get everything up and running as it should and I can get back to creating.

I’m also really frustrated with all the politics and angry posts flying back and forth on old social media standbys like FaceBook and Twitter. Going forward I will use blogging as my main posting platform to avoid the content censors and trolls. I’ll share links to these posts to all the social media groups and platforms I manage. This should also solve the problem of social platforms where posts can’t be shared to the public.

That said, these are the new places you can find me:

MeWe:

My Metaverse Authors group: mewe.com/join/metaverse_authors

We use this group for outworld interaction with Greyville, our virtual writers’ community. I also share articles on writing tips and tricks for authors. We will be expanding that to include tips on how we incorporate simulations in storytelling for games and books– be it video, graphics, or links from a book to a 3D scene.

The Adult Metaverse group: mewe.com/join/the_adult_metaverse1

Talla Adam and I are the admins for this group and our goal has always been to share resources and region reviews about content of an adult nature that might not be acceptable in general audience groups like Opensim Virtual. On G+ we always had regular postings of sensual artwork from artists in Opensim and Second Life and I hope that will continue. I will also share graphics and video clips from games and novels I have in progress, as well as tips related to NPC and creating interactive visual content for games and stories using Opensimulator.

My Personal MeWe Link: mewe.com/i/nara.malone

Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/cBH6MTP

I created the Discord server before I knew G+ would shut down. Originally, I was introduced to Discord through Mal Burns’ Hypergrid Explorers and Creators group. He made channels within the group for all the major grids and it’s a wonderful place to get started with Discord. The things that appeal to me about Discord are the ability to stream to your groups and screen share to small groups of users. There is an overlay feature that lets you chat with people through discord while you are inworld, which is particularly useful if you are hypergriddign with a group of friends or trying to demonstrate how to do something. We were able to figure all that out quickly. We can make similar posts in Discord as we did in G+ , but just as at MeWe I see no way to share a public post or show people content without them joining Discord. Nevertheless, I think Discord has features we will use a lot in the future.

And the old places:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nara_malone

A fine example of how invasive the politics are. I have a Paperli, Daily Passions, that automatically scans my twitter feed for the subjects I have tagged in my profile and generates a newspaper. I have no idea how politics winds up there and despite all attempts to filter that out, it keeps coming back. Still, the 1800+ followers there do share quite a bit of non-political content, and I will post blog links and pics there so feel free to follow and I will follow back.