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.

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I (maybe unsurprisingly) don't really feel most of what you describe here, I don't think, except sort of indirectly. I'm not sure if I have an atypical relationship to this stuff.

I don't feel any pressure to be something I'm not, except that sometimes who I am is poorly received, and that isn't normally enough to make me want to act differently, but I know some people see that as a huge personality flaw, and that sometimes worries me; that there are people who worry about me and think I'm fucking myself by not changing myself enough to appeal to folks who don't like how I normally am, and I don't think that's right, but it does come from a more caring/real place than the other thing, so it doesn't feel right to dismiss it entirely.

But in general, the way I approach this is like the way I approach making/marketing games: I see the whole thing of trying to anticipate the responses of others and optimise for them in advance as a sinkhole and I go around it. How am I supposed to prioritise all these people and their conflicting responses to me and do whatever I came here for? I can't please everyone, so I'd have to pick one person over another, and at that point I might as well pick me. Make what I want, post about what I want to post about. If some famous writer (of books) follows me, I'm not going to get a pang of doubt next time I post about some obscure Unreal thing; they followed me. Whatever this is, you asked for it! I feel this way about angling for any kind of "success" online: selling a game, starting a website, trying to be a youtuber. It's such a moving target as to be all luck. If you do it, that doesn't mean you did it.

Of course, again, I don't know if this is a normal way to be. It used to be, that's what a blog or a livejournal or a forum was, you would just go be there and do your thing. The other day I did (to use your example) post a time-lapse video of me making something, but in my own mind it wasn't to Be A Performer or anything. I thought it would be helpful, I wanted to raise awareness of Scythe, but the main thing is I just wanted to. Posting it was its own thing for me. Like my blog: it pleases me to post there. It pleases me separately when people engage with it in some way, I desire that, but if that never happens, that's fine. Why should I do things just to please (or not displease) people I don't know? I have too many things in my life already that are not their own reward.

I guess another way to sum up would be that I only really have one "mode" (unless I'm at work, being paid to have a bad time) and it's not really worth entertaining the idea of trying to target an audience because I don't have it in me, I just wouldn't post/create/do anything.

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I think mostly I don't want to be perceived and I haven't really found a great way around expressing stuff without being considered a source for the stuff-expressing, like if I could make a game that just kinda sits out there on its own completely separate from me for people to enjoy then that'd be great, but people love to dig in, right? They want to know who made what so they can support the current and future whats, which is nice, but not for those of us who are afraid of light, I guess.

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I think that's why cohost really worked out for me because I never really got much engagement there; it was typically a small few who would rechost or whatever, and no consistent pattern of comment responses, so the audience felt super limited, and that could be narrowed down even more by leaving stuff in drafts and linking those drafts to specific people. It was about as close to having a personal web site as I've had in a while, and I really should just finish the one I've been working on for ages.