Shadow Ban Community Building
Hitting 10k followers is nothing really; unexpected, and yet when we think of the amount of time we have invested in this platform, and it all adds up. We’ve met so many people from here who’ve gone on to become real, lasting friendships—we also think that it may have been impossible to establish ourselves as a legitimate publishing entity without campaigning on Instagram for 3 years non-stop. Things are a bit different now, we work with bookstores directly, and we enjoy doing so a lot, we especially love visiting the bookstores who were brave enough to try selling our books… we started doing IRL events at the beginning of 2025, which led us to start meeting our authors and collaborators—instagram and reality merged a lot last year.
“guys, there’s no shadow ban”
Another thing that has changed, however, is that despite 10k followers, our visibility is lowever than ever—our game ran out. We hardly knew what we were doing back then, but 3-years ago you could have an Instagram shop for literally $5/month, the way posts circulated was very different, too. It was truly a golden moment to begin this kind of a project, but like anyone hustling for a living, you have to keep going west, following where the work goes. We don’t feel like we can do what works well with this algorithm, and we’re not under any illusion of entitled visibility, either—it is what it is. Instead, we look at the issue optimistically—we found 5–10k (depending on how dead our realm of the internet is) people who have some overlap in interest with us, and instead of worrying about how to get to 20k, 30k, etc., we’d rather just invest in connecting with the people in the room with us.
It’s almost ironic that this week we realised that none of our immaterials on the website are visible/being indexed by search engines—amateur problems, and amateur we are. We’ve somehow made it this far whilst in some perpetual state of shadow-ban (which is really just being algorithmically low-scoring and a poor use of meta-data).
“community building”
We get a lot of requests for alternative platforms, because the elephant in the room is that Instagram is insanely bad for our mental health. We’ve deleted it from most of our devices, to quite a dramatic improvement—but in doing so we immediately realised that we couldn’t message anyone, and the importance of figuring out alternative ways to be connected to people became clear. We’ve never done something like a discord channel before, but we figured we’d try, as it seems to be the most frequently/commonly used platform by the people we’ve spoken to.
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