Click to vote for The Most Influential People in the Events Industry for 2024!
Dear colleagues and friends,
I hope you’re thriving in your event industry endeavors! I’m excited to share that I’ve been nominated again for the Eventex Index as one of The Most Influential People in the Events Industry for 2024.
This year marks my sixth consecutive nomination, and it’s all thanks to your continued support!
I would be grateful for your vote, which supports not just me, but also our shared commitment to participant-driven and participation-rich event design.
How To Vote
Voting for the Eventex Index is a straightforward process. Here’s what you need to do:
Cast your vote: Find my name in the list of nominees (it’s near the top!) and click to vote. Remember, you can vote for up to ten people, so please support other deserving #eventprofs too.
Spread the word: Spread this post with your colleagues, friends, and peers to encourage their support!
Your vote isn’t just for me—it’s for our collective dedication to innovation, excellence, and the future of our industry.
Thank you for your support, and let’s continue this incredible journey together!
On Tuesday, March 26, 2024, at 10:00 EDT I’ll sit down with Martin Duffy and Paul Nunesdea on LinkedIn Live for a deep dive into peer conferences: participant-driven, participation-rich events I’ve designed and facilitated for over thirty years. They’ve called it “Peer Conferences Unveiled: A Conversation with Adrian Segar”.
You will learn a lot from this free session if you’re a meeting industry professional and want to improve meetings. Our conversation will range from the big picture of peer conferences to specific details of some formats you can use to solve unique meeting needs. (And I’ll try to sneak in the story of how I was trapped in an elevator with a Nobel Prize winner somewhere 😀.)
Here’s how Martin and Paul describe our upcoming conversation:
“Join us for an enlightening episode of Talk to Your Meeting Doctors, where our esteemed co-hosts, Martin Duffy PhD and Paul Nunesdea PhD, engage in a riveting discussion with Adrian Segar, the pioneering mind behind Peer Conferences. In this third episode of our 2024 series, we delve deep into the world of innovative conference formats, uncovering the insights and inspirations behind Adrian’s groundbreaking approach. Whether you’re a meeting professional, an academic, or simply passionate about the evolution of collaborative gatherings, this episode offers valuable perspectives and expert knowledge. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to learn from the experts—tune in and explore the future of conferences with us!”
In the last two weeks, eXTwitter has become increasingly desperate to show you ads. Here’s what Elon did—and how to avoid ads completely.
We know eXTwitter was losing money before Elon bought it in late 2022 and took it private. Forbes reports that usage of ExTwitter dropped 30% in 2023. And though we no longer have public information on profitability, eXTwitter’s revenue shows a continued decline. Presumably, Elon, the owner of the growing dumpster fire that is eXTwitter, has noticed that he’s losing a lot of money. So he’s attempting to grow revenue by selling more advertising, eXTwitter’s dominant revenue stream.
Two ways to convince potential advertisers that it’s worth advertising on eXTwitter are to:
show ads in more places; and
make it harder to suppress them.
And that’s what Elon has done in the last two weeks.
After Elon’s purchase in October 2022, he made a series of decisions that alienated many mainstream advertisers. And recently, his endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory and eXTwitter’s placement of ads alongside white nationalist and pro-Nazi content has caused more blue-chip advertisers to suspend advertising on the platform.
Today, a glance through your eXTwitter timeline bombards you with low-quality ads from companies you’ve never heard of.
Here are the two ways they’ve recently got worse.
1—eXTwitter now includes ads in searches
Until a couple of weeks ago, eXTwitter searches did not include ads.
Now searches include ads.
Annoying!
2—eXTwitter adds another step to blocking advertisers
One way—probably ineffectual but somewhat satisfying—to send a signal to advertisers that perhaps they’re wasting their money, is to block them.
Here’s how that used to work:
Well, a couple of weeks ago, Elon decided to make this process more time-consuming. Here’s what you have to do now:
No, Elon, I don’t want the option to upgrade to Premium+ every time I block an advertiser.
Incidentally, for a few days, muting the advertiser avoided having to click through this new pop-up. Now it’s there for muting too.
Avoid eXTwitter ads altogether
For most of Twitter’s existence, I never saw a single ad. That’s because I used TweetDeck, “a series of customizable columns, which can be set up to display the user’s Twitter timeline, mentions, direct messages, lists, trends, favorites, search results, hashtags, or all tweets by or to a single user.” TweetDeck was free until July 2023, when Elon restricted it to Premium (paid) users.
As far as I know, there’s no way to avoid ads on eXTwitter’s mobile apps. But you can easily avoid them on some browser-based platforms—I recommend Firefox—by using an ad blocker, such as UBlock Origin (free, recommended) or Total Adblock (expensive).
I’m looking back on 2023. And, dear reader, get 20% off my ebooks until the end of the year!
2023 in review
I slowed down in 2023. Before 2020, I was designing and facilitating around a dozen in-person meetings and conferences a year. After COVID decimated the meeting industry, I focused on the design and facilitation of online meetings. In 2023, in-person is back! But our industry still faces ongoing challenges, such as:
These pressures impact the demand for value-add independents like me. Even though I significantly improve meetings and conferences with better design and expert facilitation, it’s tempting for stressed clients to “just do what we did last year”. So I designed and facilitated fewer in-person events this year, while my online business continues apace. And, you know what? Though I love my work, it was nice to reduce the number of high-intensity workdays booked in 2023!
To give you an idea of what my professional 2023 was like, here are three different in-person events I enjoyed immensely.
#1 • Las Vegas, April: The BizBash Leadership Summit
I always like working with David Adler! The Chairman and Founder of the legendary BizBash, David is smart, curious, creative, energetic, and fun to hang out with. He has stayed on top of new meeting trends and technologies for decades. I don’t know how he does it.
So I was honored when he asked me to design and facilitate a small three-day meeting for movers and shakers working in the events industry (including the heads of events for Google, Meta, Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, The New York Times, Dell Technologies, Fidelity Investments, and Delta Air Lines). And David gave me a free hand with the design. Thank you, David! (And thank you Michela Giovannotto for superb support!)
The design
I designed and facilitated a classic peer conference. We ran The Three Questions on the first day and used the sharing to create three sets of participant-chosen breakout sessions. Something unusual happened, which is a healthy sign when participants create the agenda. The participants decided that the first two time slots would both be plenaries…
“Share the coolest ideas in meetings/events you’ve seen/experienced recently.” [Everyone had something to share, and we heard some amazing ideas.]
Generative AI: How do we use it and benefit from it in the world of events?
…with three simultaneous sessions for the last time slot:
Barriers to get to Yes.
How can events advance social justice and change the world.
Managing and incentivizing event and meeting teams.
The event was a blast, both for me and the participants!
“I raved about the format to my friends!” —Lesly Simmons, Head of Community Innovation, Amazon
“Thank you to Adrian Segar for getting us to think, share and collaborate – and personally making me step outside my comfort zone…The real tell as to how special this event was: at the end, we all asked for more time.” —Jessica Connolly, Head of Global Events, Meltwater
The above program was interspersed with interesting visits to venues and fun activities (e.g. David’s trademark Jeffersonian Dinner, helicopter flights over the Strip, and a private dinner on the Raiders Field at Alegiant Stadium). The conversations, connections, and learning were intense, and the group spective feedback was extremely positive.
I loved working on this event, and hope to do more with David and his crew!
#2 • Philadelphia, May: One-day association conference
The majority of my clients are formal communities of practice, aka associations. For over forty years, I’ve enjoyed bringing together groups of people with something in common and giving them the tools and facilitation to create the best possible peer conference for both individuals and the group.
A trade industry group celebrating its 50th anniversary asked me to design and facilitate a day-long conference, culminating in an evening awards gala. The design parameters were interesting. The association wanted to explore the possibilities of creating the future together in a highly dynamic and interactive way, effectively tapping the centuries of expertise in the room. To this end, they contracted a well-known futurist who offered a short opening keynote on how to think about the industry’s future, followed by a panel of leading industry experts who discussed how his ideas could be applied in detail.
Having given the 200+ participants a wealth of information and ideas, my job was to get participants to critically respond to what they had heard. This involved uncovering and processing:
what was already familiar;
what had sparked their interest;
questions involving deeper understanding; and
puzzles in need of solutions.
Luckily my process toolkit includes RSQP, a powerful method for rapidly exposing all this information and making it visible for all to see.
In 30 minutes, hundreds of categorized sticky notes were on the wall, and a subsequent gallery walk allowed participants to see what their peers were thinking.
While a set of predetermined breakouts ran, a small group reviewed this display and chose session topics and leaders for two more sets of breakouts. All the resulting sessions were well attended, high-energy, and gathered rave reviews.
A short creative session Let’s Design the Future!, led by association members, and an even shorter plus/delta closed the day.
Feedback
“I’m loving the concept of this conference. I think we’re getting a lot more interactive information, and the ability to participate and meet with others in the field is just wonderful!”
“The concept has been amazing, connecting with great people and fresh ideas. My brain is on fire!” —Testimonials from two conference participants
“This event was everything we dreamed it to be and more! We wanted our industry to talk about and confront the future, and did they ever! The conversations were so rich and so relevant! We MUST do this again! Stay tuned for [our conference] 2.0!” —Testimonial from the association CEO
Although I don’t usually get much involved in the logistics of the meetings I design, it was the first time this association had put together such an ambitious event. Consequently, I spent more time than usual helping with precon preparation and the real-time run of show to ensure things ran smoothly. The show must go on! But, as always, I loved helping make this event a success.
#3 • Rome, November: Workshop at Bea World – The International Festival of Events and Live Communication
It was exciting to end 2023 with an opportunity to lead a workshop in Rome at the Best Event Awards International Festival. This annual two-day event, first held in 2006, is an opportunity for event agencies from forty countries to present their best projects in person to juries and BEA World delegates. The winners receive the “Golden Elephant” trophy at a black-tie awards ceremony.
For this trip, the first time I’d been back to Europe since an Estonian meeting design conference in 2020, I decided to spend a week in Rome. This gave me time to get over jet lag before the workshop—plus a few days as a tourist!
Typical Participate! workshops last between ½ and 2 days. This one was a little challenging to design since I only had 75 minutes! That was just enough time for agreements, some human spectrograms to get to know each other, pair share work, a fishbowl sandwich, and a closing retrospective plus/delta.
The workshop was great fun, though it was over in a flash.
“Special thanks to the experts that made the Best Events Awards Festival 2023 even more valuable for me…Adrian Segar for an inspiring workshop about meaningful participation at events.” —Magdalena Olszewska, Brand Engagement Leader Maybelline NY & NYX PM | L’Oréal Poland & Baltics
“I brought with me new knowledge and skills that Adrian Segar conveyed so impressively in the “Meeting Design” workshop and inspired me to implement new event formats [translation from Lithuanian].” —Aurimas Kamantauskas, Director at ReKurai
I also immensely enjoyed the company of Serena Ferrari, whom I met by chance on Brandt Krueger‘s weekly EventTech Chat. Though we’d never met in person before, Serena, who once lived and worked in Rome, was kind enough to spend a weekend with me exploring the city. It was a treat to hang out with a local, and we became friends.
2023 wrap-up
Well, that’s my summary of some of my professional activities in 2023. I also continued to run a couple of small local associations, actively participated in local civic life, enjoyed plenty of visits with family, and snuck in a few short vacations too!
It was a good year, and I hope that 2024 will be at least as interesting, challenging (in a good way), and fun.
Happy Holidays!
2023 book sale!
(If you skipped straight here, I understand and forgive you 😀.)
I have a hard time offering a sale on my paperback books. Why? Because this blog has a global audience and differing distribution requirements, I can’t offer the same deal in every market. But since I’m the sole source for my ebooks, I’m happy to offer 20% off any ebook (including the already-discounted bundle of all three) until the end of 2023. [Note, only ebooks; this does not apply to ebook/paperback combo purchases.]
Go to my Buy Books page and add the ebooks you want to your cart. Then use the coupon 2023ebooksale at checkout.
Join me in Rome next week (November 21 – 26)! On November 24 I’m leading a Masterclass at the 2023 Best Event Awards Festival. The topic? Creating and supporting meaningful participation at events.
There’s also an opportunity to meet with me in Studio Room 2 from 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM CET to explore questions and issues arising from the session or that weren’t addressed and tackle questions on how to solve your top-of-mind concerns. You don’t need to have participated in the session. You’ll determine what we talk about!
If you’re participating in the BEA World Festival or are in Rome on November 21 – 26 and would like to hang out, please contact me and we’ll get together! If you can’t be there but know an event professional who will, please introduce us!
Last week I wrote about alternatives to Twitter, sparked by the rapid changes to the platform under its new billionaire owner. Focusing on our own professional community—the meeting (and hospitality) industry—I’d like to make a modest proposal for a social media platform that might meet our needs better. In other words: an #eventprofs alternative to Twitter. (And LinkedIn and Meta, too.)
Mastodon
Mastodon turns out to be an excellent social media platform that can connect you with your tribe while still giving you full access to posts and conversations over the entire network.
“[Mastodon’s] free and open-source software enables anyone to run a social media platform entirely on their own infrastructure, entirely under their own control, while connecting to a global decentralized social network.” —from a Mastodon blog post
No one owns Mastodon, it runs on free, open-source software. There are no ads. The platform has currently about 8 million members, with more arriving daily.
Anyone can set up a Mastodon server (aka instance) that focuses on a specific community of any kind. (For example, as I write this, journalists are flocking to Mastodon after Musk banned some, apparently for writing critically about him. Already, people have set up a number of instances for journalists.)
Mastodon works like Twitter but with longer posts (up to 500 characters) and important design differences that discourage those who are trying to build their followers and influence by any means possible.
Each Mastodon server has its own community, rules, admins, and moderation. Mastodon’s structure and moderation tools permit a series of efficient and immediate actions against “bad” accounts or instances, where “bad” is defined by the instance administrators and community.
Running a Mastodon instance requires some work and a fairly modest amount of money. The cost rises with the number of users, so you can start small and see how popular your instance becomes. A server with five thousand users currently costs ~$150/month for hosting and bandwidth. Many Mastodon servers are crowdfunded, though server admins are free to come up with other ways to cover costs. Some organizations set up their own instances for their employees and associated community.
The last bullet point leads me to my modest proposal. What if an industry leader like Freeman, RX, Cvent, PCMA, or MPI, to name a few, set up a Mastodon server for the event and hospitality industry?
Mastodon: An #eventprofs alternative to Twitter?
“Mastodon is my favorite alternative to Twitter, and I’m spending more and more time on it. It feels like the early days of Twitter: a fresh, relatively uncrowded, environment where I’m continually meeting new interesting folks. I’ve had many more personal interactions on Mastodon than any of the other alternatives I’ve tried. If the future of Twitter worries you, I think Mastodon is the place to go.” —Adrian Segar, Alternatives to Twitter
Up to now, the event and hospitality community has no single logical place to exist online. Communities are fragmented over Twitter, LinkedIn, Meta, and thousands of niche platforms and spaces. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have our own instance (or a few perhaps) where industry members could meet, connect, post, and converse?
The beauty of implementing such a community on Mastodon is the platform’s flexibility. Mastodon doesn’t lock you into one instance once you’ve joined it. For example, in the future people might decide to have separate servers for events and hospitality folks. Users are free to move their accounts, with all their posts and followers, to a new instance. Or even join both instances if they want.
That’s my case for creating an #eventprofs alternative to Twitter. I think that Mastodon offers just the right balance of a place for our tribe together with natural connections to a much larger Fediverse of communities. I hope this short post stimulates people and organizations to build a better place than Twitter, LinkedIn, and Meta for the #eventprofs community to meet, convene, and converse online.
I joined Twitter in 2009 and have had ~8,600 followers for the last few years. Twitter has already transformed once, becoming more about breaking news than engagement as I describe in my post: Why 2017 was a tipping point for Twitter. ~150 of my followers have left the platform since Musk’s purchase five weeks ago.
Click the image for my post: “Why 2017 was a tipping point for Twitter”
Time will tell whether the exodus will become a rout, which could happen if Twitter becomes too toxic or unreliable.
Alternatives to Twitter
[Update: Post News shut down in July, 2024]
Alternatives to Twitter include Mastodon, Discord, Post News, Counter Social, Hive Social, and many more. Each platform offers a different experience due to often subtle design decisions.
In this post, I’ll share my findings and thoughts. This is not an exhaustive review (which would at this point need to be book-length). And it’s biased toward platforms I like. Regardless, I hope this summary will be a useful introduction. I’ve included references to helpful resources for you to learn more.
Before we dive into detail about individual platforms, it’s important to understand a few important structural factors that impact user experience and the long-term evolution of these services.
Ownership, openness, and profit
Most social media companies are for-profit corporations, whether publicly or privately owned. Twitter was a public company until Musk bought it. Meta (formerly Facebook) is a public corporation but Mark Zuckerberg controls over half the corporate votes. An anonymous individual, describing himself as an “American patriot” owns Counter Social. Post News, launched a few weeks ago, is funded by venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Scott Galloway, and others. Several large venture capital companies own Discord. Hive Social is owned by its founder, Raluca Pop, and an angel investor.
Of the above platforms, Counter Social is (probably) the only one that owners who’d like to make money don’t control. Meta’s and Twitter’s main income source is advertising, though both services also make money selling the data they collect to third parties. Since going public in 2013, Twitter has only occasionally turned a profit, and one has to wonder if the recent significant pause in advertising by its major customers bodes well for its financial future.
Why should you care? Ernie Smith explains why ownership and openness matter when choosing a social network alternative to Twitter.
Of course, the distinctive thing about all of these networks is that each ultimately is centralized, rather than being built on an open protocol. And that means that they are built to generate value for their founders. They are built for onboarding, not for long-term growth, which means that they lead with cool features, not with promises of sustainability.
And that’s where commercial networks often falter. The financial incentive has created problems over time that have helped to complicate the shape of social media. The immense value of any given social network has ultimately been in data, rather than by offering services to the creator. And that has meant leaning hard on data-mining or advertising-driven business models—and companies that don’t do that ultimately find themselves out of the conversation entirely. —Ernie Smith, Don’t Fall Into The Well
This brings us to Mastodon, which is different.
Mastodon is not owned by anyone; it’s free, open-source software written by Eugen Rochko and released in 2016. I’ll share more about Mastodon below.
As Ernie puts it:
[Mastodon] has a great lead feature that none of its competitors have yet replicated—its adherence to the open web. Unfortunately, alternative networks can throw marketing money at all sorts of other features trying to convince you that those features matter more. But the only feature that truly matters at this moment, even more than how “hip” a network is, is if it talks to every other network. If it’s open, even better.
Whether Mastodon survives and thrives remains to be seen. But its open network plus community ownership is a strong plus in my book.
Size
Size isn’t everything, but the network effect has its advantages. Ideally, we want our social media platforms to include our tribes. All other things being equal, a larger network is more likely to have folks we want to communicate with on it. Here are current estimates of various platforms’ active users. Take these numbers as a guide rather than a selection criterion, because a smaller niche network may fit you better. (For example, Discord’s members are mostly gamers.)
Network
Active users
Twitter
~240M
Discord
~140M
Counter Social
~160K
Mastodon
~8M
Hive Social
~2M
Post News
~140K
User experience
All social media platforms have their own web interfaces and apps that mediate their users’ experience. Platforms continually upgrade user interfaces, functionality, and features, generally (but not always) for the better. Most platforms aim to be as easy to use as possible.
However, there are four specific factors that affect a social media platform’s experience:
the prevalence of advertising;
content moderation policies and effectiveness;
how platform feeds display and prioritize posts; and
the platform’s search capabilities.
Advertising
Twitter (and Meta and Instagram) depend primarily on advertising. The other platforms mentioned in this post are blessedly free from ads.
Content moderation
Content moderation policies and their effectiveness on these platforms are huge and controversial topics. With Musk’s purchase of Twitter, reports indicate that content moderation has been gutted, with the firing of many Twitter employees and outsourced contractors. Musk has said that such work can be automated, but there’s widespread skepticism that this is possible. Meanwhile, the EU has warned Musk that Twitter faces a ban unless he abides by its strict rules on content moderation.
All social media platforms face this problem, and there are no easy answers. As we’ve seen with Twitter and Meta, what is acceptable to post is a moving target, one that’s intertwined with changing political, social, and cultural norms. As platforms like Mastodon, Counter Social, and Hive Social grow rapidly, they will also have to evolve and scale how they perform content moderation if they are going to meet their founders’ goals as a safe-enough space for conversation.
What you see on the platform
How much control a user has over what they see on the platform is an important aspect of the user experience. You have probably had the experience of seeing content (and ads) on Meta that you have no interest in, nor any simple way of banishing from your feed. Conversely, I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a post in my Meta feed but couldn’t find it later, or had to hunt for posts I’m interested in.
Twitter’s feed also has similar problems, though there are workarounds. The other platforms I’ve mentioned can provide chronological unfiltered feeds, so you don’t have to worry about missing stuff. And each platform has its own way of allowing you to focus on specific content, or block content you want to skip.
Search capabilities
Finally, search capability is one area where the monolithic platforms currently have an advantage. It’s easy to globally search for a word, phrase, or hashtag on them. Mastodon, a federated service, makes some compromises about search. If you search for plain text, you’ll get posts you’ve written, favorited, or been mentioned in, as well as matching usernames, display names, and hashtags. So, it’s harder to find things on Mastodon unless (as the help recommends) members use appropriate hashtags extensively.
Reliability
In the early days of Twitter, the famous “Fail Whale”, indicating that the service was down, was a common sight. For the last few years, the platform has been very reliable, with only a few glitches per year. Whether this will continue after Musk’s firing of a majority of the company’s employees is an open question.
In my limited experience, rapidly growing platforms Mastodon, Counter Social, and Post News have been doing pretty well coping with their explosive growth. (Post News is currently limiting new signups from its waitlist to handle the increased traffic.) But all three services can be slow at times, though I don’t see much difference in responsiveness between them and Twitter.
OK, maybe you skipped the above to see what I think about individual platforms. Remember, this is based on my experience to date, and everything in this space is evolving fast. I’ve listed the platforms in my most-to-least favorite order. Here goes!
Mastodon
Mastodon has been around since 2016. Unlike the other platforms mentioned in this post, anyone with a certain amount of technical expertise can set up a Mastodon server. Currently, there are thousands around the world. Though there are some servers with large general memberships (such as mastodon.social which I’m currently on), most focus on specific communities or interests, such as tech, gaming, LGBTQ, region, activism, art, music, journalism, etc. Mastodon is a federated social network of these servers (which are also called nodes or instances). This allows users on different servers to interact with each other. (Here’s a good explanation of how Mastodon’s federation works.)
Joining Mastodon
You have to choose a Mastodon server. Many popular articles about Mastodon describe this as a barrier to joining the platform. Actually, it’s not something that you need to really worry about unless you’re especially interested in immediately finding a server that reflects a community about which you feel strongly. That’s because you can change the server you’re on at a later date, bringing your followers with you.
If you do want to pick a community right away you can use the tool Mastodon Instances. Or, the official JoinMastodon page lists available servers, categorized in various ways, and shows you which ones are currently open to join.
To find out more about a mastodon server from the server itself, go to its “about” page at https://[server name]/about/more, e.g., https://mastodon.social/about/more. This page includes rules of conduct for the server, additional services provided, and other useful information.
Once you’ve picked a server to join, getting started is like any other social media platform. You create an account on the server and set up a profile. On Mastodon, profiles contain up to 500-character bios and you can add a display name, avatar, header image, and up to four links to relevant websites.
Things I like about Mastodon compared to Twitter
No one owns Mastodon, it’s free, open-source software
This is a huge plus in my book. The beauty of federated social media platforms is that they are loosely-joined collections of communities that are responsive to users’ wants and needs, rather than the dictate to make money, or the whims of an erratic billionaire. Mastodon servers run mainly on volunteer time, with infrastructure funding coming from donations. (I support my server, mastodon.social, via Patreon.)
Federated servers allow you to choose a community that fits you, while still allowing connection across all servers
I summarized how this works above. For more information, these Mastodon introductions, listed easiest first –> most comprehensive, (1, 2, 3) should be helpful.
No ads!
Currently, I avoid seeing Twitter ads on the web by using Tweetdeck. (Mastodon’s “advanced web interface” looks like Tweetdeck; turn it on!) But the mobile Twitter app is filled with ads, which I don’t appreciate.
(Don’t get me started on Facebook ads. They are only tolerable on the web because I’ve installed F.B. Purity, a labor of love that I recommend.)
500 vs 280 character limit
Twitter started with a 140-character tweet limit which was raised to 280 characters in 2017. It’s often still not long enough for me. Mastodon’s 500-character limit is refreshing.
Editable posts!
Twitter, which has become much more a site for breaking news than a place to converse has always, understandably, been concerned that people would edit tweets post-publication to change what they originally said if it later became foolish or embarrassing. Given that people can still delete their tweets, this doesn’t work very well.
Mastodon allows you to edit published posts. I like this a lot! This feature lets me fix typos, add better hashtags and images, etc. There’s one other advantage for me right now. Currently, I crosspost my tweets to Mastodon using the Moa Bridge service. Mastodon’s editable posts allow me to tweak tweets into Mastodon posts that are more “Mastodon-like”, which typically means adding and adjusting hashtags.
Tweetdeck-like “advanced web interface” that allows you to follow #hashtags and lists
Tweetdeck is my favorite way to access Twitter. Mastodon’s “advanced web interface” provides something very similar.
Content warnings when needed
I like this feature. It speaks to Mastodon’s commitment to providing functionality that supports creating safer spaces for users.
One feature that Mastodon provides…is the option to attach a content warning to your posts. When a content warning is included, the status content will be collapsed by default, and only the CW will be shown, similarly to an email subject line or a “read more” break. This can be used to add a summary or subject for your post, to collapse long posts, or to otherwise provide context or setup for the body of the post.
When media is attached, a checkbox appears to allow you to “mark media as sensitive”. This hides the full media behind a blurred thumbnail by default. Adding a CW to a post automatically marks the media as sensitive as well. —Mastodon documentation
Favoriting and boosting (aka retweeting or reposting) are two clearly different actions
On Twitter, you can “like” or retweet a post. Twitter displays publicly a count of a post’s likes, which makes the platform a place where many users try to get their posts liked a lot. You can also quote tweets, allowing you to add a comment to another’s tweet. This is often used on Twitter to publicly dump on a tweet you don’t like, perhaps boosting your standing with your followers.
On Mastodon, you can “favorite” or repost (aka “boost”) someone’s post. The favorites count doesn’t appear on post timelines, so it’s not a status symbol of how popular what you say is. The only people who know you’ve favorited a post are you and the poster. Favorited posts are thus a way for you to remember posts you like. They are searchable.
If you want to promote someone else’s Mastodon post, you repost it. There’s no equivalent of tweet quoting.
Mastodon’s design distinction between favorite and repost discourages the self-promotion that sometimes runs rampant on Twitter.
You can migrate your account to a different server
As far as I know, there are no social media platforms that allow you to export or import your posts and followers to or from another platform. But Mastodon makes it pretty easy to move all your account data from one Mastodon server to another. You might want to do this if you discover a server that better fits your requirements (for example, one for users who speak your native language and post mainly in that language) or because your server doesn’t have as many members as you would like.
You can have accounts on multiple servers, so it’s easy to try a new server and compare your experience there before choosing to change servers.
Mastodon conclusions
Mastodon is my favorite alternative to Twitter, and I’m spending more and more time on it. It feels like the early days of Twitter: a fresh, relatively uncrowded, environment where I’m continually meeting new interesting folks. I’ve had many more personal interactions on Mastodon than any of the other alternatives I’ve tried. If the future of Twitter worries you, I think Mastodon is the place to go.
Counter Social
I joined Counter Social—founded in November 2017—in April 2022 after the news that Musk might acquire Twitter became public. I like the platform a lot, though Mastodon has stolen my attention recently. There was some initial concern that Counter Social’s sole(!) anonymous(!) owner “The Jester” espoused right-wing politics and had a history of hacking targets that he felt threatened America in the past. However, unlike Musk’s recent brazen moves, I haven’t seen any sign of a political thumb on the posts I’ve seen flowing past on Counter Social’s “Community Firehose” stream.
Counter Social is free to join. It receives some income from $4.99/month optional “PRO” accounts but otherwise it seems that The Jester funds it himself.
Things I like about Counter Social
Counter Social members are darn nice!
This sounds silly and may change, but the Counter Social community currently comes across as the nicest large bunch of community folks I’ve seen on a social media platform. Now of course, what I call nice (a mixture of charmingly personal posts, eclectic artwork, restrained mainly left-wing statements, favorite music and movies) may not be what you think of as “nice”. New users are welcome. Browsing my feeds is…soothing. Can you say that about any other large social network?
Excellent interface
Like Mastodon, Counter Social uses a similar but more attractive “Tweetdeck-like” interface. Posts (aka “toots”) can be up to 500 characters, though you can’t edit them after you’ve posted them. You can’t see who has favorited or reposted a post until you click into it, and reply counts are shown as 0, 1, or 1+ which discourages people from writing posts solely designed to get lots of interaction.
Like Mastodon, searching is only on hashtags and usernames. There’s no plain text searching of posts like Twitter does. You get columns for friends’ posts and notifications and can create additional columns based on hashtag searches.
Counter Social has added to the interface a few features which you may like, such as a CNN ticker tape news feed and eight other news channel video feeds.
No ads and content warnings
Like Mastodon, as described above.
Praiseworthy, innovative approaches to reduce bad actors and disinformation
Counter Social has deployed a number of sometimes controversial anti-disinformation methods. The platform bans IP addresses from Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Pakistan (that’s the controversial bit), as well as a proprietary list of “over 100K VPN endpoints and Tor exit nodes that are known to be used by nefarious actors”. Counter Social has also teamed up with Bot Sentinel to reduce disinformation. And users can mute and block other users and flag posts for review.
I don’t know how Counter Social does it or whether my experience is typical, but the platform seems to do a great job keeping nasty stuff off my feed.
Concerns about Counter Social
Reliability
No one really knows if “The Jester” is actually one person. Even if he has a small team to help, the platform has been remarkably responsive, except when the service had to handle half a million new user signups in a few days in May 2022. Today it chugs along, though I wonder how many of its millions of registered users are actually active on it currently. Presumably, The Jester (or a hacker) could abruptly shut down Counter Social. What happens if The Jester has a heart attack or loses interest in supporting the platform? Such concerns have made me hesitant to invest significant time in Counter Social.
We don’t know the answer to these questions. On the other hand, what assurance do we have that Musk is not now rummaging through the vast hoard of data that Twitter has acquired over the years? Ultimately, you’re going to need to decide whether you trust using this service. My approach is that I don’t post anything that would embarrass me if (fat chance) it was widely publicized. And I don’t use private messaging on any service for vital information.
Counter Social conclusions
In one sentence: Counter Social is a really nice place to visit but I’m not sure I want to live there.
Discord
Discord is primarily an audio chat and instant messaging platform that became wildly popular with social gamers. So why am I including it here as an alternative to Twitter? Because Discord now makes it easy for communities to get together. In 2020, Discord shifted its focus away from video gaming toward creating and managing all-purpose public and private online forums for posting and chat. And in September 2022, the company introduced Forum Channels which support organized discussions, stored posts, and message threads: everything you need for an online community.
I joined Discord in July 2021, and currently use it in two ways. First, as a place for occasionally staying in touch with a small group of event production professionals, via a forum set up with four text channels. And second, as an interface for a Midjourney Discord server, which I use to create illustrations for some of my blog posts.
Discord is free to use for forums. Many gamer members spring for “boost” [$4.99/month] or “Nitro” subscriptions [$9.99/month], and Discord receives a 10% commission on games sold through game developers’ servers.
What I like about Discord
The Discord forum channel interface is easy to use. It provides a simple and attractive way to display and organize asynchronous conversations into threads. I like how a forum can have owner-created channels to cover broad categories of conversations relevant to the community. For example, the forum I mentioned above has channels for messages from the owner, requests for help, job opportunities, and general posts. My Midjourney public server has over a hundred channels that cover announcements, service status, rules, FAQs, getting started, polls, support for trial and paid users, various chats about the service, image showcase channels, and many channels where Midjourney images are constantly being requested and generated.
Concerns about Discord
As you might expect, Discord has been and can be used for nefarious purposes, such as cyberbullying, private use by extremists, and pornography and sexual exploitation. All social media platforms with private forums have these problems, which is why content moderation policies and the effectiveness of their implementation are so important.
It’s hard to beat Discord for a free, fully-featured, easy-to-use community messaging service of any size. Given its robust funding by gamers, I doubt that the service will fall out of favor any time soon. And because gamers who desire fast response time use Discord, the owners are likely to maintain reliable service.
Post News[Update: Post News shut down in July, 2024]
The “Chief Poster”, Noah Bardin, was the CEO of Waze for 12 years and the company is financed by well-known venture capitalists. The platform ultimately aims to be a place where big names, especially journalists and “publishers” will congregate and opine on issues of the day.
“Post News is trying to capitalize on the ‘virtual watercooler for journalists’ side of Twitter. The platform describes itself as a place to access ‘premium news content without subscriptions or ads.’ News publishers and independent writers are encouraged to share their articles on Post News under a paywall. The idea is that this would allow users to pay for individual articles from a variety of news sources. It’s an alternative, or a supplement, to paying for individual subscriptions to specific news sources.” —Amanda Silberling, Post News, a Twitter alternative, gets funding from a16z
Only a rudimentary payment system using points is available to date. Time will tell if subscribers are willing to pay for individual articles in sufficient quantities to sustain the service.
Concerns about Post News
Unfortunately, I have many more concerns about Post News than things I like. Pitched as a “fun” place that “introduce[s] you to big ideas and cool people” Post News is, so far, underwhelming. It has a bare-bones web interface that pales in comparison to Mastodon, Counter Social, and Discord. Perhaps that makes it easier to use, but I’ve found even the simple interface glitchy with minor annoyances that Post News will probably fix soon.
Accessibility features that are standard on Mastodon and Counter Social, like alt text image descriptions and content warnings, are missing. Post News is US, English only, has no app, and you can’t add a video or animated gif to a post. Like Twitter, you can’t edit a post once you’ve posted it. The interface only supports a single feed of everyone’s posts. Post News allows you to flag perceived trolls but is still working on muting posts and blocking individuals.
The platform vibe
Post News has a broadcast-style feel to it. The platform seems to be attempting to create a hierarchy of news producers and news consumers, and that’s probably a deliberate choice. But what I find depressing is that the platform’s consequent vibe is a curious mixture of the trivial and pompous/promotional. It feels like a place where people are mostly trying to impress others. You can comment on posts, but comments are rare and there’s little evidence of conversations.
Post News is like a party where the guests are awkwardly posing instead of just having a good time.
The future of Post News
It’s very early days. Post News may well eventually become a viable marketplace for folks with great interesting ideas and the capability to express them well to grow an audience and make some money in the process.
However, I’m skeptical that this will turn out well for folks who put their significant content on the platform. Because, as I wrote in 2017, posting your original content exclusively on someone else’s platform puts you at their mercy. Third-party platforms change their feed policies (Meta, Twitter, LinkedIn) all the time, and if they go out of business (e.g., Geocities, Vine, MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, Google+) your content vanishes from the internet. I still strongly recommend you maintain control over your content by posting it on a website you own. That’s my two cents.
Things I like about Post News
The two things that I like about Post News are that posts can be of any length and that it supports plain text search. That’s about it.
Post News conclusions
I am clearly not a fan of Post News in its current state. But it still has plenty of time to improve. To be fair, I will be checking back on how it develops, especially to see if it can attract significant numbers of interesting and influential thinkers and writers who chose to post exclusive content there.
Hive Social
I was going to explore Hive Social before I wrote this review, but it’s been down for a week for security updates. So, I’ll summarize here what I like and dislike about this platform based on what I’ve read rather than from direct experience.
Many users describe Hive Social as a mixture of Twitter and Instagram apps. It’s been downloaded about two million times, though the current week-long outage may reduce future growth. Like Twitter and Counter Social, the service allows NSFW posts as long as posters categorize them with a content warning.
What I like about Hive Social
Like Post News, Hive Social has no ads and no character limit on posts. I’m a fan of “neutral” feeds on social media platforms, and Hive Social only offers a chronological timeline. Like most social media platforms apart from Meta, you can follow another user without them having to “friend” you back. The owner says the platform has “zero tolerance for bigotry and hate”, though, like Post News, moderation is currently restricted to reporting by other users.
Concerns about Hive Social
Hive Social’s sole owner with a minuscule staff raises similar concerns to Counter Social; what if the service is shut down or its data misused? Perhaps due to the service’s rapid growth, there are reports that the app crashes and service can be slow at times. Hive Social has no web interface, which is annoying to old fogeys like me. Finally, you have to wonder about the problems that are bound to arise if Hive Social continues to grow, given it currently has no moderators, no security team, and no staff focused on regulatory compliance.
Hive Social conclusions
Hive Social (when it’s back up and running) is probably a nice place to hang out if you’re young and aren’t especially interested in maintaining a long-term history of your social media interactions.
Conclusions
Some parts of this review of alternatives to Twitter will be out of date in a month, while some will stand the test of time. (Now if I could only know which parts were which!) And there are likely to be still more entrants in the Twitter-competitor space, such as Spoutible which is due to go live in February 2023.
Currently, Twitter continues to be a useful place for sharing my content and connecting with meeting industry peers. But its future is uncertain, and having taken some time to explore alternative platforms I thought I’d share my findings with you.
I hope this summary review is helpful and welcome your thoughts, comments, and experiences with these alternatives and any new platforms that appear. Please share in the comments below!
For the 4th year in a row, I’m honored to be voted one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in the Event Industry in Eventex‘s annual poll. The award “recognizes event professionals who have left a mark on the industry with their creativity, vision, and capacity for innovation”. Learn more about me here.
Public voting entirely determines who’s on the list. Industry experts first get to nominate and then vote for those they believe have the most notable impact on the world of events and experiential marketing. This year, a total of 454 professionals were honored with a nomination. There were over 20,000 votes, and those with the most votes made the Top 100 list.
Many of my good friends and colleagues are also on the list; check it out.
And thank you to everyone who voted for me in the last four years (2019 – 2022) as one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in the Event Industry!
P.S. I’ve been working on a “mammoth” post on alternatives to Twitter this week. I expect to return to my normal Monday weekly publishing schedule next week!
My WordPress dashboard tells me I’ve written 750 posts since I began this blog exactly thirteen years ago. At least one new post every week since 2009. I have a few thoughts.
Surprise and delight
If you had told me back in November 2009 that I would be posting on this blog every week for the next 13 years I would not have believed you. I’d be sure that I would have run out of things worth saying. Yet I am still writing weekly posts — over half a million words to date! — with a healthy set of new ideas biding their time in drafts.
Did I underestimate my creative ability? Could I not see that my lifelong curiosity would guarantee the ongoing discovery of new things to write about? Did my initial difficulty putting pen to paper convince me that I’d never be able to keep up the effort to write something new week after week?
Probably all of the above. Educated in a Victorian-era environment, I was taught that creative people were artists and poets, not scientists like me. As a lifelong learner, I’ve always been curious and asked questions, so it turned out I will always be learning new things about the world and myself, some of which may be worth sharing. And after struggling for four years to write my first book, it was natural to assume that writing would always be hard for me.
So I’m surprised and delighted that I still have something to say. However, whether I would have kept writing continually since 2009 depends on an additional factor.
Gratitude
In 2009, about a million new blogs were started. As far as I know, no one was blogging about meeting design. There weren’t any obvious ways to let anyone know what I was writing about. Googling “meeting design” returned hits about meetings for designers. In 2009, this website received a mere 24,238 page views. Was I wasting my time?
Well, apparently not. The following year somehow brought in over 400,000 page views. The popularity of this website grew steadily, and it now gets about five million page views annually, putting it in the top one million active websites. Not bad for a niche site on a topic that few people ever think about!
And this growth has come about from tens of thousands of folks who have visited, subscribed to, and linked to my posts. ~1,300 subscribers get an email whenever I post. Social media, especially Twitter, brings significant traffic. And search engines are no longer flummoxed by the concept that people want well-designed meetings.
I am so grateful. Grateful to you: my subscribers, the folks who share my posts, and the thousands of people who have purchased my books. Without your engagement, support, and continuous encouragement, I would have given up long ago.
And, of course, I’m grateful for the friendships that have grown between us, the in-person and online experiences we’ve had together, and the community that we’ve developed over the years.
Love
Speaking of community brings me to love. Yes, love. We don’t talk much about love in the professional sphere. Isn’t it a little unseemly? Expression of pleasure and happiness is okay, but being genuinely effusive about loving your work might be awkward.
And, sure, most of us—me included—have spent time or are still spending time doing work that we really don’t fundamentally love. Which is a shame, even if it’s virtually unavoidable.
I have been blessed with finding work that I truly love to do.
(No, not every minute of every day of course. Writing posts, for example, isn’t always the most pleasant activity when you’re driven to share something new just about every Monday morning.)
For the last thirteen years, designing and facilitating hundreds of events, writing books that have influenced how meetings are thought about and held, and sharing a growing body of (now) 750 posts have been a privilege and a pleasure!
I love what I’ve done, the community that has made it possible, and the possibilities of an unknown future.
Since 2007, Jane Hart has compiled an annual Top Digital Tools for Learning List from the results of public surveys. Looking at the trends over time provides a useful overview of the tools that people are using to learn. In addition, her lists and annual analyses allow readers to discover new useful tools. Here’s my contribution: my ten top digital tools for learning in 2022, with brief descriptions of why and how I use them, plus some additional tools I’d sorely miss and a promising newcomer.
Although the glory days of Twitter have passed, it still remains my best source of breaking news and interesting content from interesting people. It’s also the social media platform where I have the most visibility, with 1,000 – 10,000 tweet impressions per day.
And the tool I use to tweet and read is the web app TweetDeck. It’s a set of customizable columns that I’ve set up to show the tweets of a private list of accounts I follow, mentions, notifications, direct messages, and several customized search results for my various Twitter accounts. I love how easy it is to create temporary custom columns on the fly and tweet (immediately or scheduled) with automatic URL shortening.
Here’s a screenshot of five of the columns’ contents while I was writing this:
While there are plenty of ways to work with Twitter, TweetDeck is my favorite.
I use the RSS web feed reader Feedly to stay informed about new posts on many different websites that interest me. Feedly lets me know about new content, so I don’t have to check the sites to see if anything has changed. I use it on a web browser and the IOS app.
For the last 16 years I’ve posted one, occasionally two, blog posts per week on the privately hosted WordPress website you’re reading now. Sharing my thoughts by writing about interesting things is probably the best way I learn.
Interacting with my readers on the 700+ posts via 1,800+ comments to date, plus our online conversations on Twitter and LinkedIn is a great way to build connections and explore content deeper. WordPress plugins allow me to sell my books and workshops on the site. No question, WordPress is an invaluable tool for learning, sharing, and controlling your content.
Over the last couple of years, Zoom has become the standard way, at least in the circles I travel, to connect with others online in real-time. It’s rock solid and has the core functionality I need to chat with a group or lead an online workshop. And just about everyone who goes online knows how to use it.
I am interested in so much, and can’t remember more than a tiny fraction of what I read and see anymore. When I read an interesting article about meeting design, facilitation, a technical hack, or a tasty-looking recipe, I know that I’m not going to remember how to find it again in a week, month or year. So I capture it in Evernote. When I want to make chimichurri sauce again or remind myself about the myth of learning styles, it’s easy to retrieve that saved URL, set of client meeting notes, diagram, or memorable quote with a few keystrokes.
Sometimes, humble operating systems contain little gems. In my opinion, Apple’s Preview is one of them. I like to illustrate my blog posts with pictures, and Preview is the core tool I use to manipulate and convert images. Yes, I use other tools, but Preview will do most of what I need.
The web browser. Can’t do much with the internet without it. I have both Chrome and Safari open all the time on my desktop Macintoshes, but I use Chrome more.
Merlin, what’s that you wonder? It’s the latest addition to my learning tools. I live in the countryside and am surrounded by birds. Yet despite years of trying to visually identify them I am simply incapable of remembering birds from one week to the next. The Merlin app has a visual guide to identify birds, but I don’t use it. Rather, I use its wonderful Sound ID, which listens to the birds around you and shows real-time suggestions for what’s singing.
I love using a different learning modality in place of an old one that hasn’t been very effective for me.
For a long time, I’ve needed to live in a world where my digital data is available to me anywhere and anytime. Where it’s protected from device loss or damage or hacking (I hope). I keep cloud and onsite backups of my desktop computers via a separate service, but Dropbox is the digital tool I use to store and access my critical data at any place and time.
Runners-up…
Here are four more digital tools that I frequently use.
Sometimes Evernote is overkill; it’s a big slow-loading app. I use Apple Notes to quickly store and retrieve common information that I can’t load permanently into my brain.
When I walk in the woods surrounding my home I often see flora I don’t recognize. (After 40 years living here, I’ve learned the fauna pretty well!) The Seek app is great for visually identifying plants.
A very recent addition to my toolkit is Midjourney, which I’ve started to use to create illustrations for my blog posts (including this one).
…and a promising newcomer
I’ve occasionally used Slack over the past few years for event planning and real-time production. Midjourney (see above) is integrated into Discord, which I’ve started to enjoy using for group synchronous and asynchronous chats. Time will tell if this becomes one of my top tools for learning.
Now searches include ads.
I’m looking back on 2023. And, dear reader, get 20% off my ebooks until the end of the year!
I always like working with 
Last week I wrote about 
Since 
In the early days of Twitter, the famous “Fail Whale”, indicating that the service was down, was a common sight. For the last few years, the platform has been very reliable, with only a few glitches per year. Whether this will continue after Musk’s firing of a majority of the company’s employees is an open question.
For the 4th year in a row, I’m honored to be voted one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in the Event Industry in 
My WordPress dashboard tells me I’ve written 750 posts since I began this blog exactly thirteen years ago. At least one new post every week since 2009. I have a few thoughts.
Since 2007, 
While there are plenty of ways to work with Twitter, 