There sure has been some goings on in the background here at the Timelapsed base of operations. Things that are more directed to bigger, mainstream content creators, but are having a bigger effect on the small time guys like us who do this stuff just for the fun of it.

So Meta, the Social Platform monger that owns Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Threads and probably others, decided that they don’t make enough money yet, and started charging it’s users money to use links in our posts.

Any post that has a link that takes you off their platform and on to a different website, blog, reddit or anywhere, now has a fee for the page/account posting them. And it’s not exactly cheap.

For those bigger streamers/creators, famous online personas or other corporate flunkies who are raking in a few grand or more a month, an extra $50 here or $100 there to keep the content coming is no big deal.

But for those like us at Timelapsed, who’s blogs, columns and social postings are just a hobby and make $0 money….. a substantial monthly fee just to link back to our OWN FREE content just completely kneecaps us.

And mind you these link fees are 100% unneeded as these companies are already collecting on your/their/my content already. Those ads you see everywhere on the socials nearly all of that revenue goes to Metas. The creators, (those who are set up for it anyway,) only ever get a minute slice of it. So now they want US to pay just for the ability to make THEM money on our content.

So what is happening now is that all of the hobby creators, the unique guys, the doing this for fun guys. who put out constant, relevant and quality material are getting essentially silenced on the Meta Platforms. And all that will be left are handful of single track minds who only cater to the cash flow or the ones under the wing and direction of the Meta.

They rich guys will now just keep getting more richer as this is effectively cutting out the competition and funneling all money to the remaining top few.

If we wish to stay on these platforms there really isn’t much we can do to get around this as we are already baked in with our followers and subscribers, and we all clicked those agreements posted.

So a lot of us are now trying to decide if we will stay on Facebook and Instagram. We are exploring the Blueskys, Mastodons or Twitters again. Is trying to reformulate how we present our material on certain platforms worth it?

So it’s going to be a rough patch for some of us for a little while. But Timelapsedgamer will still be putting out content at (not sure if this counts as a link so…) timelapsedgamer dot com, Twitter (X if we must) and Bluesky, search Timelapsedgamer

Sorry about the rant.. but this is bullshit.