Anyone else afraid of lots of followers?

general chillchatz
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Getting lots of follows used to be this great feeling, but post-cohost, I'm just really really wary, and it's not just that there's lots of bot follows on bluesky now. Bots aren't people, which is why we don't like them, but I don't necessarily worry about bots and their feelings and perceptions of things.

No, it's something else. It's this pressure to be what I'm not. Like here, there's lots to talk about but obv the focus is gamedev, that's a lot of our backgrounds or hobbies.

On bluesky tho, there's no focus whatsoever. I've had lots of great artists follow me back, which is a nice feeling, but because my interests are so broad, I'm seeing follows that makes me wince. Like, there's something comical about an astronomical observatory account following a gamedev account who also draws porn for a living.

I feel like the ship has already sailed on splitting things up, and I don't know if I have the energy anyway to manage separate accounts anyway. It was exhausting enough bouncing between Cohost/Mastodon/Bsky.

I just want to draw art and make games but I can't get over that feeling that I'm supposed to be a performer, like I need to livestream my creativity, show off time-lapse videos of making art, be omnipresent on social media as a personality, and no, this isn't a requirement per-se, but it feels like people way more successful than me are doing those things.

I guess the real worry is that as I gain more followers, I know I'm trending in a direction of being something that terrifies me.

But I dunno what even counts as "success" for me anymore, at least beyond putting food on the table for my family me. Maybe I just need to push through the anxiety and accept that life is just uncomfortable?

Anyway, Influx Redux is super pretty.

3 Likes
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Just this morning I woke up to a confused message from my fiancee about why a bunch of random people followed per (A new account with zero posts and prior to that, one follower, me)

I don't know why the majority of people on Bsky seem to follow random people and not ones in their circles, but yeah, when I stop to think about it, I have far more followers than a random unaccomplished gamedev/screening officer should.

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It's kind of interesting but the thing that helped me get over that was yeeting a third of my 1.5K followers when I made my Twitter account private. Combined with me stepping away from social media in general and using it mainly as a one-way thing (post, don't look) has done wonders to my mental health.

I have bsky blocked on my phone, I need to go out of my way to unblock it if I want to look at it. The panel I made for bsky in vivaldi stopped working at some point and that's another blocker that has reduced my looking at bsky.

If there's one thing I absolutely hate about bsky, and I am surprised that not many people are talking about it, it's that everything is public. You can't make your posts, likes, etc private like you could on Twitter and Mastodon.
I also think bsky should take some notes from Mastodon. One of my favorite features there is the fact that even with a public account with public posts, you can configure your account so people have to send follower requests and you have to manually approve them.

sorry if that was a little rambly, but i really am shocked that people seem to be fine with bluesky's nonexistent privacy settings outside of blocks. and no, blocking replies and quote skeets doesn't count for me.

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I get what you're feeling! It's a multi-faceted issue for sure. I think a big thing for you might be that you need to calibrate what you define as successful, and what your actual goals with posting are? It sounds like you're posting but haven't really thought about why.

Why do you want to post your stuff? Are you trying to build an audience? To what end? Why do you care who follows you, or how many people? If you consider your goals, that'll help you understand your feelings and how you should feel about it.

You could realize, yeah, actually, you do want to be a performer. And then maybe you'll have to reconsider why that idea bothers you. Or maybe you're just looking for connections, trying to network. Maybe you just fell into it because others do and it doesn't matter to you.

And to be completely honest, if you're posting on a public soc media platform, at its core you're performing, looking for attention. That's what it's for. The entire system is built around that. It's a slot machine, the purpose of which is to hold as many people's attention for as long as possible, and that's where you're putting your work. Maybe you're not necessarily being inauthentic, but that's the game you're playing. Otherwise you'd just show your friends, post on a priv platform, keep a journal, whatever. That could be what you'd prefer, even!

Those aren't people who are necessarily successful, those are people who have followers. If your metric for success is audience size, sure. But maximizing your audience generally means compromising certain areas and focusing on others that are more likely to get more eyes on you. That's kind of the whole thing. That's why evangelists exist.

But by and large, the majority of people who are successful, find themselves successful, don't have a following. A following doesn't align with their goals of success. It could be a project, it could be a career, whatever, but an audience dedicated to their persona isn't a metric for them.

Why? What is it about that number going up that means you're doing something wrong? If you're being authentic/true to your beliefs and goals, why does more people wanting to see that mean you're being something you're scared of? And if you're being inauthentic, what's the goal if not to make that number go up?

From personal experience, I actually did get a little weirded out when I jumped in followers. I felt a little bit like, that demographic followed me for a specific thing, so maybe I should gear my posts towards that? But then as I thought on it, it really started to dawn on me that I don't owe anyone shit. I'm happy to post whatever I like, and if they unfollow, that doesn't really concern me. We didn't make a deal, they chose to click the button. Simultaneously, I have private accounts because I want a space where I can be vulnerable without randos chiming in with opinions I don't care for.