A Wee Bit of Mental Junk Food

I understand. I'm not happy with the lack of enthusiasm among those I tried to migrate here from MeWe last year. There's probably a few factors involved.

One is the sparseness of the UI; I suspect the retro styling doesn't have the nostalgic appeal for those who left FB, MeWe, Gab, Wimkin, etc. that it has for us.

Another related aspect is the learning curve for QTML, which is completely alien to those who never worked with apps like WordStar® in command line UIs. GUIs with highlight and format from a context menu or even the Markdown formatting language in MeWe are much easier to grasp for simple text formatting.

I've also noticed a dramatic decline in engagement with social media across several platforms. The dozen or so of my cohort who left MeWe in the Fall after the announcement of their intention to migrate everyone on that platform to Web3 universal social media ID have been spending less time online, expressing their desire to engage more in meat space. I personally have spent a LOT more time in the last year engaging in local politics, having formed a posse to monitor our county commissioners and trying to motivate the local GOP organization to get serious about local issues. In the last 6 months I've also taken to spending most of every day at the volunteer fire department.

I'm not advocating capitulation to mass market stylistic preferences. Just pointing out this platform has niche appeal. Rather than compete head-on with social media that relies upon casual engagement with triviality, consider targeting those who're migrating to publishing platforms like Substack or Medium or blogger hosting sites.

QTML help videos are on the way.

While QTML is a bit weird to those who aren't old school, it is ergonomically superior to the competition. Markdown requires using lots of hard to reach keys. Button based interfaces are distracting and require a bunch of hunting. Visual placement of images is challenging in every word processor I have ever used. Ditto for Substack.

Bicycle vs. tricycle.

I like the distraction free nature of writing in a text box. That big post on a new stock market was typed in directly. (First draft was on paper.) However I use the two-window feature for long posts. The preview with line numbers helps with the proofreading. (Proofreading is easier in a WYSIWYG editor.)

Engagement is dropping on Facebook bigly. Learning how to get around Facebook's curation algorithm is harder than learning QTML.

The other feature in the pipeline is adding titles to urls so when you share a link elsewhere it says something about the link. More SEO friendly, too. The current links look too much like early Wordpress links.

I'm perversely happy to read that. Zuckhead deserves all the heartburn that may come his way.

I just read your post on that. Good idea.