More cyberpunk than this would be for the official author side to be a `.onion`, with a vanity subdomain that took a borrowed farm of GPUs a week to compute, and an RSS/Atom reader feed from that, plus a Fediverse/Mastodon account for the normies that you host yourself from an offshore data haven, paid for with mixed BTC, and a Reddit account just to keep some twerp from grabbing your name, all of which you access exclusively through Tor Browser, from a dedicated/compartmentalized immutable device. :)

But I'm sympathetic to authors feeling they have to be on the popular social media platforms. I don't know about big-name authors like Mr. Stephenson, but when I looked into writing fiction myself, the advice for new and less-known writers was to actively work marketing on all of Twitter/X, Instagram, especially TikTok (BookTok), and others.

(I decided it was too much demoralizing work, to not only write novels, which is grueling, but then to have to play games with TikTok influencers, if you want enough people to actually read the product of your suffering.)

Megacorp turf wars. It's silos all the way down.

There's always nostr.

That's designed for nerds. Like Matrix and the other platforms that will never see mainstream adoption because they lack product management and crazy distribution.

Normie design and hyper distribution always win.

Good to know. Didn't know I was following this many nerds over there.

Reminds me Shadowrun.

I loved this game! I still have the original rulebook. That my AD&D 2nd ed. books, Star Frontiers and Gamma World boxed sets may be my most prized possessions.

Throw a few Uncle Al catalogs on the pile and we’d have similar childhoods. Gamma World was actually pretty amazing.

Cool! I had to look "Uncle Al catalogs" up. I remember seeing ads for Car Wars, but never played it myself. There were so many neat games back then.

Gamma World was really neat and timely given how fearful we all were of nuclear war. I remember watching Road Warrior at the time and thinking that Gamma World could actually be the world we live in.

Dragon Magazine would occasionally have articles on Gamma World too. So much food for the young imagination.

Did you ever try the CRPG Shadowrun Chronicles games?

I did not. I didn't get into computers until much later. Though I did die of Typhoid a bunch of times on the Oregon Trail when I was in junior high.

I'm running a Cities Without Number campaign now, but I sure do steal a lot from Shadowrun.

People go where they’re treated best

Friend of mine complain about twitter and then turn around and send me twitter links.

Headdesk.

X is pretty lenient with the banning though.

It seems like the best of the worst.