Social Media and our usage of it is constantly changing. With the exception of our own website and blog, Twitter/X and Facebook have been our primary social “homes” for a while, where we posted most of our updates. Both have been valuable to connect with our photographers and to receive direct feedback. Now, during the past months and years, changes on both those platforms made it harder and harder to actually reach an audience and the overall engagement decreased a lot.
We decided to leave Twitter/X starting from January 2025 – here’s why.
Engagement
Everyone’s goal with a presence on social media is to reach and interact with real people. When we started out on Twitter, we regularly got questions, replies and requests via DMs, some likes on our posts and the occasional retweet. This has vanished almost completely.
Toxic Environment
Since Elon Musk took over at Twitter, he made changes to its algorithm to reach his goal of “saving free speech”. We are very much for free speech, but if moderation is thrown out completely, the balance tips in the wrong direction and it becomes a breeding ground for disinformation, hate speech, harassment and other harmful interactions. This created an environment that is not safe for respectful dialogue or discussion, values we hold dearly.
Changes to the API
Early Twitter provided API access which allowed developers to build products around it, some of which we loved and used daily (like Tweetbot), as well as empowering people like us to build internal tools to publish, read or analyze things if needed. Most of this has been thrown out the window and the little bits that are still standing could face the same fate any day, which makes it frustrating and unreliable as a platform.
Spam and Bots
The blue badge with a checkmark meant you were “verified” in the earlier days of Twitter. This was introduced to make sure that you are actually the person you made out to be, which was extremely important especially for politicians or other public figures. This was as well watered down by allowing anyone with a few dollars to spend to just buy a badge. This opened the doors to an increased number of spam and bots on the platform and lead to more disinformation campaigns.
Branding Considerations
As Musk is reshaping the X landscape, he invited people back onto the platform that were previously blocked for promoting right-wing or even fascist ideologies. He did this in the name of free speech, but he achieved the opposite by doing so. Many other voices have been silences and meaningful, respectful discussions were made impossible this way. We don’t feel comfortable with our brand voice becoming background noise to hate and straight out harassment.
As we started to plan our social media activities for 2025, we decided that Twitter is not going to be worth the effort anymore.
Now what?
Luckily, we found new social homes on Bluesky and Mastodon a while ago – both platforms with high standards in terms of moderation and a welcoming culture so far – and we’ll also continue to publish on facebook as well, for the time being.
Apart from those more text based channels, we always wanted to try out some new things with video-content, which is why you might also find a new video or two on YouTube this year.
In the end, our true home will always be this very site, as well as our developer log and our own newsletter. All of which owned and controlled by us alone. Here you will always find everything from our official release notes, blogposts, our documentation, as well as many other insights and behind the scenes.
If you want to get in touch or follow us, please do so on one of the mentioned channels that works best for you.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
We’re looking forward to stay in touch with you.