Where to go from here?

Twitter has been much of the driving force behind Crazy Ass Moments in Railroad History which I used as the launch pad for the Railroading Stinks webcomic. While there were plenty of signs that Twitter would have stability issues, I think nobody was expecting the website to come crashing down as violently and dramatically as it did on July 1st. With the new rules on 600 tweet views per day, I really can’t expect the site to be a long term sustainable path forward for the Crazy Ass Moments in Railroad History page and the small but fervent community we built up around it.

I do have some options on hand of course. This website as my own paid for domain is a great resource, and allows me to continue both the webcomic and other projects on my own terms; although it certainly has a smaller reach than Twitter had. I also recently opened up a page on DeviantArt; and I have considered other options as well. Those of you who know the origins of Sally Skunk know the character had her origins on Facebook with The Memelord Foamer Shitpost Hype Train. Moving to Twitter was in many ways my opportunity to take Sally “solo” and while I am certainly familiar with how to run a Facebook page, I do not want to end up in a situation where I am competing with my friends who still run that page. Facebook certainly has enough train meme pages already, and I am not looking to rush into it again.

I also want to be careful in selecting where to spread onto social media, I do not want this project to distract from my job, education and other “real life” plans. The comic itself is pretty time demanding, and much of the ease of Twitter was I could post nonsense there pretty quickly around my real work schedule; but trying to cross-post and cross-update on more and more social media websites to get around Twitter’s ailing health seems increasingly time consuming. The future home of Crazy Ass Moments in Railroad History needs to be chosen carefully.

Of course I could always take this all a more serious route, and maybe there would be a more stable solution in forming a community that is a little less-shitpost chaos and more focused on actual historical and artistic merits. That would take more work, and it is a possibility I might explore once I graduate college but for now it is an idea in the backburner of my mind. I don’t want to lose the community I got to know through Twitter though, but am not in a position where I could volunteer to create a large Discord server of my own manned with moderators and all that it would take to keep it running smoothly.

However, I can point to some great large railroad Discord servers that are worth checking out ran by other people (with a full mod staff) which I think my readers will enjoy if they aren’t already in them such as Hyce’s server (https://discord.com/invite/K5JgTrTDHQ ) and Lawrie’s Mechanical Marvels’ (https://discord.gg/dAS4UWd). While I do think there is a downside to having conversations happen in “walled gardens” I do think in many ways Discord is a great place to build the railfan community. Now that Twitter is limiting views to people outside the platform as well, it is rapidly approaching becoming a walled garden itself anyways as much of the terrible enshitification of the internet seems to push us towards.

Until then, the comic will continue to receive regular updates via this website and DeviantArt; and I will continue to try and use Twitter as long as it remains somewhat functional. I will try and figure out both with social media alternatives and possible changes to this site and its format how to continue the Crazy Ass Moments in Railroad History experience going forward. Thank you for your patience.

- The Author

July 1, 2023