Twice a week, 58 weeks straight. Not a single week missed.
I’ve been on a mission to maintain a consistent presence on non-mainstream social platforms – Mastodon, BlueSky, and X as a reference point – with the modest hope of getting some exposure and, who knows, maybe selling a zine or two.
The secret to never missing a week? Buffer. I schedule posts in advance, even when I’m on holiday or buried in work. I also have a strict no-browsing policy: I only log in to reply to comments on my own posts. No doom-scrolling, no rabbit holes. It keeps the whole thing sane, low-effort, and neatly plugged into my editing queue.
What did I learn?
- Good photos get more comments – but “good” means different things depending on where you post:
- On Mastodon (photog.social in particular), photos that tell a story tend to resonate, even without obvious visual drama.
- On BlueSky and X, the wow factor rules. Scenic, striking, scroll-stopping.
- Mastodon has a genuinely chatty community, if you lean into it. BlueSky and X are mostly likes and reposts – engagement without conversation.
- Opinion-driven posts get more interaction everywhere. Turns out humans like having takes. Shocking, I know.
- I gained far more followers on Mastodon and BlueSky than on X – assuming follower count means anything, which I’m not sure it does.
What did I get in return?
Honestly? Nothing. Not a single sale traced back to social media.
I wasn’t exactly surprised. I’m not a known name in photography, so expecting real ROI was always a stretch. Still, after a year of data points, one thing keeps becoming clearer: if you want genuine traction as a photographer on the web, the answer seems to be YouTube. Which is something I have absolutely zero interest in doing.
So what’s the point? If the return is the occasional comment and a handful of likes that don’t convert to anything, why bother – even when it costs almost no time?
Here’s what I keep coming back to: nothing beats handing someone a print, or watching them flip through one of my books. That’s where the reaction lives. That’s where photography actually lands.
Maybe social media is fine for what it is – a way to exist in the room, to quietly wave a flag. But it’s not where the work finds its people. For that, you need something physical in someone’s hands.