Twitter won't work anymore
FinTwit is a great community around finance built on Twitter. But Twitter may no longer be a good home for the community:
- Sharing links is heavily demoted - making every discussion shallow. Imagine not being able to share a Buffett memo and then discussing it - because nobody will see it.
- So does deep dives that many publish on their Substacks or equivalents. The only way now is "threads" that kill interactivity and discussion anyway.
- The "tiktokization" of twitter - in the name of engagement, we are pushed so many irrelevant posts.
- Oh, and the entire thing with Musk. It doesn't matter where you stand politically - his decisions are bad for a community like "FinTwit". It may work for many other different use cases, but for FinTwit it just won't fly.
Mastodon
The best solution so far that will preserve the community is Mastodon.
Yes, there are other solutions but each will fundamentally change how the community interacts. Discord won't work, and I can't see a big fund manager joins your proprietary startup that share data from the broker.
Besides - Mastodon is so similar to Twitter that you can dance on both weddings. Build your network on Mastodon as an "insurance" while you still post on both through automation.
There is a crossposter tool that you'll just login with twitter and mastodon, and automatically all your tweets will be sent to mastodon. Capture the upcoming community even if you are not ready to leave Twitter!
How to join
Mastodon is a federated system. But you don't care. I'll cut to the chase:
A recommended general instance to join is this: https://universeodon.com
Once you join, you'll be able to follow and get toots from anyone in any instance. Don't worry.
What's different
There is no algorithmic feed, just a chronologic timeline.
So to be discovered, use hashtags more. Don't be afraid to add #investing #fintoot or anything like that to almost every toot.
Who to follow
To get you started, I created a CSV file of finance figures to follow as a kickstart.
You can download it here:
And then import it here: https://universeodon.com/settings/import
Voila. You have an elementary FinToot feed ready.
If you want to be added to the list, fill this form: