Writer's Grove

I invite you to tsu

A rambly social media post! Beware! YOUR LOINS! GIRD THEM.

Fairly amused/hopeful once more that we might have an alternative to Facebook. It’s called tsū and it’s kind of a Facebook/Twitter combo which you can connect to those platforms, along with Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr. The interface is easy and familiar. But no requests for games! Yay! And there’s a Friend/Follower distinction that I like. More details below but here’s a link to get you started if you’re the type that just likes to jump in and get going.  Oh, and here’s what the top of my profile page looks like…you’ll see the similarity to Twitter/FB right away.

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried other social media. I tried Google + but dang, nobody’s there when you post except for like three crickets. Got a tumblr but I don’t see much interaction there either (I’m probably doing it wrong). Signed up for ello and that’s also kind of dead for the moment; it might pick up and catch on but I don’t think their interface is ideal and lots of their functionality isn’t there yet. Tsū still has some functionality to add (see below) but it’s much more ready to go I think—they have a mobile app at least.

Why am I so looking forward to some viable alternative? Facebook’s privacy concerns and monetization strategy have long been a turn-off for me and many other authors but I’ve basically had no choice but to remain there since that’s where the readers are. I use my author page to stay in touch with peeps but don’t do anything at all on my personal page because damn if I’m going to let Facebook monetize my life. I talk to my friends via other means than Facebook. Meanwhile, on my author page, even though I have 18K followers, they don’t all see my posts. Facebook purposely throttles my posts to make me pay to reach people who are already following me. *wet fart noise*

Twitter’s pretty fun though—I socialize with people there quite a bit. I also get news there fairly often. However, its effectiveness as a marketing tool is limited; there’s a lot of noise there and your tweets get lost easily. To make it work you have to be clever so you’ll get lots of retweets or you have to repeat yourself often and get kind of spammy and GAH, that’s work. I’ll do a little bit of business there but mostly I’m on Twitter to be a nerd with other nerds.  It keeps the lonely writing business from being so lonely.

So: Tsū. (An aside: I wish it was Tsü because umlauts are cool.)

They’re making money by selling ads. Yep. But so far it’s not the super creepy kind that Facebook or Google does where they mine your emails or searches and then tailor ads to you. You’ve had that happen, right? You search for a knife because you’re researching something for a story and then all you get are ads for knives everywhere you go. Nope, the ads I see in tsū have nothing to do with my interests and that’s great.

I also do not see yet (though of course it may change or I’m simply wrong) that they’re curating your feed. If you follow someone then you see their stuff in your feed—that’s it. How refreshing of them to assume that if you follow someone you’d like to see their posts!

The interface is easy. You have likes which display as heart doodads and you have comments and you can reply to them. You can have private messages. There’s no learning curve here like with ello. Behold, a screenshot:

So that post has 56 likes, 61 comments from people saying howdy, and I guess that 2 represents shares? Anyway, it displays the first couple of comments and then you can click to view the others if you wanna. I clicked “like” on the comments there and you see it gives ’em a little heart to the right.

I dig it so far. It’s easy to use, unlike ello, where you spend a bunch of time in the white space looking around like Neo in the loading program and have to wait for Morpheus to explain the Matrix. Get on tsū now and you might be able to snag your actual name before the other people with the same one! :)

The Friend/Follower distinction—well, you can use that as you wish. For me, a friend is someone I have met and know personally and have had beers with. And, as I mentioned earlier, my friends and I tend to communicate via other methods than social media. Mostly I’m around to say howdy to readers and be silly about tacos.

Is it perfect? Nope. Tsū has work to do.
1. They really need a clear harassment policy and a way to deal with trolls. Because there are a lot of people on the Internet who do not follow Wheaton’s Law (“Don’t Be A Dick!”) and you have to be able to deal with them. People need a safe space. Twitter has absolutely sucked at this. First social media to find a way to make people feel safe wins! Right now tsū is a bit confusing on the issue. Under FAQs, first you see this:

And then, a bit further down the FAQs, you see this:

So I guess they rolled it out, maybe, but didn’t update their FAQs? Or is there a distinction between “member” in the first screencap and “user” in the second one that I’m missing? Hmm. I checked it out. I went to someone’s profile page, found the three dots, and clicked on it.

That’s a start! They have a way to report or block people. But what exactly they do when you report someone isn’t clear. That policy needs to be worked out and we’ll have to see how they handle it.
2. Adding more servers might be good; it’s a bit slow at times. Growing pains, easily fixed.
3. They have this thing where you’re supposed to earn money somehow. The idea being that if you’re going to monetize a social network by selling ads then the people in that network should be getting the money. Their algorithm thingie looks like a pyramid scheme to me but WHATEVS. That’s not why I’m there. I’m there because it’s Not Facebook and they’re not holding my followers hostage with a “Boost Post” button. And if I do happen to make money somehow then I’m donating every penny to charity. What I do know is that tsū didn’t ask me for any money or a credit card number or anything. So if they wind up giving me money that I can then give away, that’s cool; I’m not doing anything for it but goofing around online. What would be really cool is if they let you donate that money directly to a charity of your choice in your name. Don’t know if tax people will let that happen, but there it is: The Dream.

Anyway—give it a shot if you wanna. Totally understandable if you’d rather not. Regardless, thanks for saying hi to me wherever you do it!