Reputation is portable

Many are migrating to BlueSky, the new Twitter-like social network. With every new platform launch, there’s a rush to amass followers simply by being early. Gaining followers as a result of being early is a sort of temporary advantage. It's a quirk of timing. It's tinkering at the margins.

There is a whole cottage industry built around tinkering at the margins of getting new followers. On every network there are tools to schedule posts, to auto-retweet, to check analytics, to analyze the times where your followers are most active. There are gurus that have the answers to all your questions! They hold all the secrets. They want you asking questions like:

• What day should I post?
• What time should I post?
• Do I have to post every day?
• Should I retweet myself 12 hours later?
• Should I put links in the top?
• Should I use hashtags?
• What should the OG image look like?

It's all tinkering at the margins! Serving at the pleasure of the algorithm! The core concern, the thing that really matters, is doing interesting things. You can literally forget about everything beyond that. Interesting can mean whatever you want! Maybe you primarily share quotes from philosophers or maybe you make high-effort visualizations of complex topics. Whatever it is to you, focus on that. Put your energy into making things of value.

Post the article on a Sunday.

Post a good idea at 2 a.m. when it comes to you.

Put the link in the first tweet.

Who cares.

As long as you produce valuable content, the rest is just tinkering. It'll all come out in the wash. Followers are a second-order effect. Followers are an outcome, a representation of an underlying reality. The underlying reality is that you are making something that people want to consume. It's entertaining, it's valuable, it's thought-provoking, it's something. There is something that resonates with people.

When you focus on the core, the craft, you're free from the algorithms. Good tweet flopped? No worries, I've got plenty more. Bad tweet succeeded? Awesome, I've got plenty more. Keep doing things, keep hitting the publish button. By all means learn from your successes and failures. Adjust your strategy to meet your goals. But remember, you can afford to play the slow game. Building something durable takes a long time.

You're building up a body of work. You're building up a reputation. When you've built a reputation, you can wander over to another network and immediately get several thousand followers.

Networks come and go. Platforms come and go. Followers come and go.

Your reputation is portable. You take it with you wherever you go.

I know exactly what I want my reputation to be. Hard-working and persistent, thoughtful and kind, someone with good taste, an effective educator, a present and delighted husband and father.

Should my favorite social platform collapse tomorrow, I'll take my reputation with me.