Nice addition to Talkr: we can now post "shorts". These are small posts that are smaller than blog posts. This is one of them.
@Talkr
Write something beautiful
Why I deleted my Twitter/X, and Bluesky accounts.
Last week, I made the decision to delete my Twitter, X, Bluesky and LinkedIn account. I did so with good intention: I was tired of social media as it stands today.
1,000 followers is just a number
What does a 1,000 follower number mean, if there is no real connection? Not much, I found out. At the time of deletion, I had around 1,000 followers on each of these aforementioned platforms. Even with such numbers, there was no guarantee that anyone would actually see my posts. I did some math, and it quickly became apparent that the chances of reaching a small percentage of my followers were slim. I found that there's roughly a 5 to 10% chance that a follower will see any post I made. Even if someone does happen to see it, the likelihood that they will engage by liking, sharing, or commenting, drops even further to maybe 0,1%. This realization made me question the purpose of posting at all. These numbers mean actually nothing when there is no real connection made. It is a mere gamble. Of those 1,000 followers (and I also followed them back) I had little to no real connection, I was missing a deep connection and felt like a number as well. Within a year of having those accounts, I had only two real interactions. Social media feels like a gamble: hoping to get connection out of something that gives you little to nothing in return.
Algorithms.
Most social media platform use algorithm to favor those posts/tweets that are already seen. They boost the most popular so that you'll get buried beneath. The only way for us to be seen on social media is by having a lot of likes or shares, like a viral tweet for instance. There isn't a random discovery function on those platforms, where one can discover someone by accident. Such a function would be fun, and organic.
Too political.
Another factor in my decision to leave these platforms was political divide. I've never been one to engage much in politics, and yet, it seemed impossible to escape from the political discussions on X and Bluesky. There was political debate in almost every thread. X felt increasingly aligned with right-wing perspectives, while Bluesky appeared to lean left.
Talkr.
Talkr was created out of the frustration I felt on regular social media. Our platform does things differently and aims to be a good alternative to Twitter, X, Bluesky and even Linkedin.
If you want to join us in creating something beautiful, then signup:
Why Talkr is the best blogging platform for Writers.
1. Free blog
Talkr is a free blogging platform that allows users to write blog posts with a maximum of 10,000 characters. This is in between Medium and Twitter X and a sweet spot for longer posts without endless length of normal blog posts.
2. We are writers ourselves
We love writing and writing longer blog posts instead of just status updates.
3. In your control
There is no corporate oversight, Talkr is build by users like you. Micro creators who like to share their writings, art, music, poems or short essays. It is all possible on Talkr.
4. Same functionalities as social media
Talkr has similar functionalities as a social media platform. You can make connections, friends and follow them. To avoid vanity metrics, we hide the number of follows so that you can focus on writing instead of metrics.
5. Safety
Talkr is a safe place that has a great focus on security. We locked our server down with the latest and great security measures. Your e-mail, for instance, is encrypted just like your password. We cannot know it or see it. All your data is therefore secure.
6. Privacy
Talkr values privacy first, we do not show any ads nor have any tracking cookies. We do not monitor user behaviour and we certainly do not sell it. At Talkr, you can be safe and private. We also have a privacy feature that let you hide your writings from search engines, if you really want to have a 100% privacy.
7. Your handle is still available
We know, signing up to other platofrm can be disapointment when you discover your handle or name is already taken. Since we are a open source start-up, your handle is probably still available!
8. Micro creators
We love micro creators and that is why we created a space for them to blog, write and post great writings, art, music and much more.
9. Markdown
Talkr supports markdown on all posts and writings. This gives you more control of how your writings will be shown and published.
10. Talkr is the best blogging platform for micro creators and writers who want a free blog without the distractions of traditional social media.
Write something beautiful.
Join Talkr today early, and start sharing your writing, art, and ideas with a community that values your voice:
Since we launched our website, we submitted our website to Google and Bing. Once we did, we noticed Google and Bing visiting, which is no surprise. What was a surprise is that AI bots were visiting not that long after our pages ranked in both Google and Bing, indicating some sort of cooperation between the AI companies and the search engines. Maybe they get a list of newly added domains, or is data sold to AI companies? we do not know how they found us, but it is interesting for sure to notice how quickly the AI crawlers visited once we were placed inside Google and Bing. At Talkr we do not block AI bots, they can train on us if they want.
Below are the bots that visit our site to train their AI models. From our access log:
Meta AI
meta-externalagent/1.1
Amazon AI
Amazonbot/0.1;
OpenAI
GPTBot/1.0;
The future of decentralization is here
Decentralization is trending and growing by the day. Think of Mastodon as a good example of decentralization of social media. While in it's infancy, it has great potential to break the monoculture of the tech giants. Next to mastodon there are other alternatives to big tech and most notably are decentralized search engines. We found a few that might be of interest to anyone who is interested in privacy first and want to limit the influence of big tech on their lives. Decentralization is here and it is the future of many new webprojects.
A list of decentralized search engines we discovered:
Presearch
Presearch is a free decentralized search engine. Search securely, receive better results and customize your experience with the presearch decentralized search engine, powered by blockchain technology.
Yacy
YaCy is free software for your own search engine.
Kagi
Liberate your search. No ads. No tracking. No compromise. Just deep, powerful search. (This service is paid)
Marginalia
Maginalia prioritizes non-commercial content, No AI.
Mojeek
Mojeek is a growing independent search engine which does not track you. Not fully decentralized.
These are interesting alternatives to investigate further. If you have any more interesting open source or decentralized projects you know about, let us know in the comments. We surely are interested in what you think about the future of decentralization?
Talkr promotion
Help spread the word about Talkr, share us on your favourite social media platform such as twitter X, facebook, instagram, threads and mastodon. We created a nice promotional image for sharing. Since we just started we need all the promotion we can get, so that people know about Talkr. Join us early in created the best blogging platform there is. This is just the beginning of something beautiful. Talkr, write something beautiful.
10,000 Characters
Talkr likes to do things differently, and since we are a blogging network/platform, we like to write more than on microblogging websites where posts are usually restricted to about 250-300 characters. Which makes it impossible to write longer and beautiful texts loved by our team and userbase. Talkr, therefore, now has a post limit of 10,000 characters. We upgraded it from 4,500 to ten thousand. Which is about 2 to 3 A4 paper sizes of length. In this way it is easier to write longer articles, but at the same time limiting it to 2-3 A4 pages, the average of a small essay and blog post.
Write more and write something beautiful on Talkr.app !
Welcome to Talkr!
We launched today after doing some serious testing. Many bugs have been resolved and we are live. Join us on Talkr.app, and write something beautiful!