If you follow HaldeCraft on any of the six thousand places I try to keep up with on Socials, you might have noticed I’ve been taking a break. Nothing is wrong, other than me just not feeling the social media love these days.
How do I do social media? I have a folder on the cloud service I use (pCloud) where I save pictures I think might be good social media pictures. This is a combo of pictures I take while working on things, and product photos. Then I’ll choose what I want to post for a week and shuffle those photos into a folder marked for that week (so I don’t forget I posted a picture and then post it again), a combination of “this is what I’m working on” and “these are some finished things for sale” and also “I’m a real human with pets and sunsets and food.”
I’ve gone through a few different programs for posting to different platforms – if you try to post four or five times a day to four or five different places and you have to do each one by hand, that’s a full-time job right there. I’ve used hootsuite and buffer, and for a while I used the Facebook Business Suite but it only posts to Facebook and Instagram. So right now I’m using a program called PaddyPost, and it posts to Facebook (business pages, not personal), Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon. I can also post to TikTok from there, but since I don’t really do videos in those other places often, I just post directly to TikTok when I’m going to do that, and still use Business Suite for posting videos to FB and Insta. I could also post to Pinterest from there (but I quit posting there, since it seems my Shopify site does that automagically… or my Instagram posts go directly there? I can’t remember and honestly don’t care enough about Pinterest to figure it out). There are a few other places that can be posted to via PaddyPost, but you can look into those if you’re inclined to use them.
Typically I like to post three to five times a day (maybe six, if it’s close to the holidays or I’m having a busy week), six days a week. I know, that’s a lot, but the thing about social media is that you never know when someone is going to see your post. Just because someone is following you, there’s very little guarantee that they will definitely see your post. So I opt for scattershot and hope for the best. Some platforms I use more for being social than ‘advertising,’ and for those platforms I don’t post all the things I do for, say, FB and Insta, because places like Mastodon and Bluesky are full of actual real live people, and I don’t want to be businessy-boring there. I’d rather meet people and make friends, really, than feel like I’m advertising to people.
It can take upwards of half an hour to do all the posts for a day – writing the alt tag for the picture, writing the text for the post, and so on. If I do that every day, though, I feel rushed and like I have to get started early and as if it takes up a good chunk of my morning. So I tend do try to do all the posts at once, and set them to post throughout the week. That can take about three hours, and I tend to do that on Sundays. But that also means that a good chunk of my Sunday is spent doing that, and… it’s just draining, is all. Even if I get them all pre-written and set to post on Sunday so I don’t work on them the rest of the week, pretty soon Sunday comes around again and suddenly I have to spend three hours doing it again. And honestly it’s not like I get so many likes and comments that those three hours always feels … justified. A lot of times I feel like I’m screaming into the void. Or, throwing pottery into the Grand Canyon, hoping one piece will bonk somebody on the head, haha.
But now, a lot of things are changing with social media, because of Ai (speaking of Ai, I have written with em dashes for the majority of my life, and I hate Ai just as much for making me look like I use it as I do for it destroying the environment). Some places – both social media platforms and also ecommerce platforms – are changing their TOS to include language that, if you agree to it, makes it OK for them to train their Ai programs on your posts and photos. And I am not, not, NOT ok with that. Not at all. Not one bit.
It’s confusing, so I put together a chart of places I (currently) use, in order to wrap my head around it:
| Platform | Trains Ai on your content | US available opt-out | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bluesky | No | N/A | Publicly states it doesn’t train generative AI on user posts, but because it is an open/public network, third-party scrapers can still scrape public posts. |
| Etsy | Yes | No | According to the updated TOS, starting 12/16/26, Etsy grants itself and authorized third-parties the right to use seller-uploaded listing photos and text to train it’s Ai (at the same time, prohibiting unauthorized outside companies from scraping). |
| Yes | No | Meta uses public posts, photos, captions, and comments to train its Ai. US users can be excluded only by setting accounts/posts to Private/Friends Only. | |
| Yes | No | Meta uses public posts, photos, captions, and comments to train its Ai. US users can be excluded only by setting accounts/posts to Private/Friends Only. | |
| Mastodon | No | N/A | Instances prohibit training generative AI in their TOS, but third-party scrapers can still scrape public posts. |
| Patreon | No | N/A | Does not use or sell creator posts/images to train generative Ai. Paywalled posts block public crawlers, but free/public posts can still be scraped by third-party scrapers. |
| Yes | Yes, but you are opted in by default | Trains its generative Ai and Machine Learning Models on uploaded pins/images and text. Prohibits third-party scraping, but public pins are public and can be scraped by third-party scrapers. It is possible to opt out of internal scraping via settings and it does cover previously posted pins. | |
| Shopify | No | N/A | Merchants retain full ownership of photos/text. Strictly prohibits third-parties from training Ai/MLM on data without explicit written consent. |
| Threads | Yes | No | Meta uses public posts, photos, captions, and comments to train its Ai. US users can be excluded only by setting accounts/posts to Private/Friends Only. |
I really feel like the easiest thing for me to do (morally, because of my anger over companies using my hard work to train their bullshit Ais) is to ditch everyone in the above list with a “yes” answer in that second column. But financially, that’s a blow, because the two places HaldeCraft gets the most traffic from is Facebook and Instagram.
And it’s not like the olden days, when you could just… take out an ad in the paper, or in a magazine. I mean, I guess you still can, but how many people get the actual paper any more? And physical magazines? You can take out an ad on their websites, but the cost on that is astronomical (last time I looked into getting an ad on my favorite feminist magazine’s website, it was $300/month) and most people tune as many website ads out as possible. So things like that are a deep financial cost that I can’t guarantee a result on… whereas social media platforms I post to are a time cost that sixteen years of experience tells me I actually do have a return on.
So what do I do? I don’t fucking know, y’all, and that’s why I’m kind of frozen on social media posting right now. Facebook and Insta get me most of my traffic. I started off on Etsy, outgrew it pretty quickly, but now use it basically as an advertising platform and I keep about a dozen or so items up on it (but I don’t want to, if they’re going to use my hard work to train their Ai). Keep posting on Bluesky and Mastodon, for sure. Get my shit together and post more on Patreon… but only my tiered posts there are ‘safe’ – public posts can be scraped by third-parties. But only public posts are going to let people get to know me and decide if they want to throw me a couple dollars a month. But… Etsy? Facebook? Threads? Insta? I don’t know what to do, y’all. I just don’t know.
I’m not asking for advice, only I can figure out what is best for myself. If you’re going through this too, though, I’d love to hear your thoughts or musings or what your plan is. But I’m not looking for “have you thought about” or “well what you should do is.”
Every business is different, especially, small operations. That covers you and what I have done in the past.
For myself, I just ignored the stuff I didn’t want to deal with. You may not be able to afford to do that. I had that luxury (sort of).
Managing all this is one of the things that drag down real small businesses who are often just one person trying to act as entire departments simultaneously.
I could not do it so I focused on what I could do and do well and did my best to make it awesome (and profitable) with mixed results.
Add in (under the musings category) the idea that meta is a garbage collective designed to extract and move on. I’ve left both facebook and IG in ther last two months because, well, enough is enough but I could afford to do this (as a retired person). For me, I can work some evil corporations but I choose to not work with them all. That is a luxury.
I am always here to help if I can. Please do not be afraid to ask.
And yes. I already miss you and your aunt and uncle on facebook. Life sucks sometimes.
I think that’s why it’s hurting me so much to try to think through all this – I’m on my own. I don’t have anyone helping me at HaldeCraft, it’s all just me. I think up the things, I make the things, I glaze and fire the things, I photograph the things, I write the listings for the things, I decide the prices of the things, I do the social media for the things, I pack the things and mail them when they sell, and then I remake them. I do the accounting, the social media, the customer service, the inventory of packing material and boxes and office products. I do the research on new glazes and clays when things I’ve been using get discontinued or go out business. I look for classes when I want to learn something new or a technique I don’t know. I vet craft shows and if I want to apply to them I do the picking out of what to take and packing and hauling. I do the research on ecommerce platforms and stay on top of their changes. I’m… exhausted. And now all of that time and sweat and brain power and love and frustration and physical work that I put into this… is going to train some mega-billion-dollar company’s Ai? That’s some BULLSHIT right there. They have the money, fucking hire a person! Gah. Anyway, thank you for getting what I was saying.
And I tried a couple of years ago to get Uncle Joe to blog, like this – all he’d have to do is take what he was writing anyway and copy/paste, but that never came to fruition. I wish it had, because I feel like people are going to be leaving Facebook in trickles and droves.