I’m disappointed to hear that WordPress posts will no longer be able to be shared to Twitter automatically. It’s of course possible to do this manually, but it’s still frustrating for me, as someone who has used this blog for several years with this functionality. The reason is Twitter removing the ability for other platforms to do this without a charge. Given that these posts (not just me, of course) generate a lot of content for Twitter with no cost, it seems like they want one side of it, but not the other.

I keep thinking that my days on Twitter are numbered, but then this week the response to the Alexandre Koyré and a network of ideas post was far better there than on any other site. So I’m really reluctant to lose that community, but this feels like another step in the wrong direction. I’ve been trying to make Mastodon work, and there content has to be manually shared, as there isn’t a WordPress-Mastodon link as yet (it’s been long promised). But the engagement on Mastodon is very limited, even though I have quite a lot of followers – I sense a lot of people joined but their accounts are largely dormant. Recently the ability to post project updates on researchgate was removed. Email listserves are largely unusable these days. I see some other people are going down the Substack route, but I’m not sure about that.

I’ve long been aware that most people follow this blog for the information about other people’s work – recent books, conferences, etc. – rather than my own. But I could build an audience through that, and keep a record of stuff I found interesting, which also benefited my work. The advantage of automatic posting was that I could do one post here and it would be shared on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms I don’t use. But take that away, and the idea of manually reposting things across multiple platforms is much less appealing.

How are others who use WordPress going to deal with this?