Don’t sweat the network or medium.

It’s all tinkering at the margins! Serving at the pleasure of the algorithm! The core concern, the thing that really matters, is doing interesting things. You can literally forget about everything beyond that. Interesting can mean whatever you want!

— Aaron Francis, Reputation is portable

I could clip the whole article! 👏🏻

Networks come and go. Platforms come and go. Followers come and go.

Your reputation is portable. You take it with you wherever you go.

This works because the particular networks don’t matter (much) in the end. It’s the people! If a network has reached critical mass, and your people or scene are there, then you don’t need to think much about anything else. How you post to a particular network, or how popular you are on any given network, matters less than participating in the network at all.

What matters is doing and sharing the work. Finding the network with your people or scene. Telling people about your work. Supporting the work of others on the scene.

When you focus on the core, the craft, you’re free from the algorithms. Good tweet flopped? No worries, I’ve got plenty more. Bad tweet succeeded? Awesome, I’ve got plenty more. Keep doing things, keep hitting the publish button. By all means learn from your successes and failures. Adjust your strategy to meet your goals. But remember, you can afford to play the slow game. Building something durable takes a long time.

It’s tough to play the long game lately. In particular, because social networks (and news media) are primed to tell us the short game is everything.

Should my favorite social platform collapse tomorrow, I’ll take my reputation with me.

Granted, these networks can boost us in pretty amazing ways. But, we exist largely outside of them. At the end of the day, we are what we’ve done and who we’ve helped along the way. These networks aren’t built to track our value as people, so don’t sweat it.