Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have noticed that I’ve stopped auto-posting links to these blog posts every Friday. This is because Twitter’s made some API changes that have caused the app I used to auto-post links to my Friday blog posts to stop working.
In theory Twitter allows you to sign up to a free new service for app/API access that would allow me to keep on posting automatic links as before . . . sadly, this would require me to verify my Twitter account via a phone number, which I haven’t been able to do for years since Twitter has a long-standing issue with refusing to recognise phone numbers from India or the UK. The whole thing is one of those annoying tech support messes with one issue piled on top of another and at this point I really don’t have the patience or time to take however many hours it’d take to sort the whole thing out, so auto-posted tweets aren’t going to be working for a while. I’ll probably just manually tweet links to my more important posts and ignore the less important ones for the foreseeable future.
There are lots of auto-post options for Mastodon. You also don’t need to disclose a phone number. As a bonus, there’s also no Musk but a vibrant literary community…
My US editor from Penguin Random House tried Mastodon and said it made her brain hurt. I want to spend LESS time making my social media accounts work, not more. (Also, I don’t particularly hate Elon Musk, it’s just tech support I dislike.)