Gonna show my prejudices a bit here...
So, apart from the inestimable TP (which as a contact of mine pointed out, doesn't support full screen images), we have the big 3: farcebook, instagrunt (I don't do either of these) and t***ter. All have their problems for photos. More recently we have Glass emerging, looking for a place; Vero has been around for ages but is having a teensy revival, and now Grainery (which is at least aimed at our particular community). And behind and (maybe) above all these (with its own problems) is flickr.
The first thought I've had is, no way could I keep up with posting to even half of these. At the moment, I'm posting images mainly to twitter (carusb). I have an ongoing thread "at least one image per roll of film", but because twitter doesn't really matter I'm often posting half a dozen images per roll, and this means I can post pretty much one a day, and still not catch up. Which is a good thing, because it takes me weeks to process a roll physically, scan it, post process and keyword it, and make selections on what's reasonable. The "one a day" format gives a tiny boost of approval, I guess, from the 2 or 3 people who do like them, which is sufficient reward to keep posting them. But that seems to use up most of my motivation to post, so I've been neglecting posting in the "Show us yer..." thread, or flickr. No way could I post even the better ones to even more platforms on a regular basis. The only way that would work would be to have some sort of auto posting mechanism, and you have to have a Pro account for that to work on flickr (AFAIK).
BTW Film Twitter is actually quite good. Not a many on here are active (
@dmb is the main one I've seen, plus occasional posts from
@RaglanSurf ). If you try the hashtags #filmphotography, #filmisnotdead, #believeinfilm etc, you should find some interesting people. As an example, I've found out a lot about trichromes, which have occasionally surfaced on here, but are showing up some very interesting effects when coupled with long exposure (eg pinholes) and subject movement (eg clouds, shadows). Also, there's a lot about pinhole there, and panos, including pinhole panos! And someone persuaded me to try HP5 in HC110 dilution E rather than B...
One thing I find mysterious is when a post shows up with (say) 30 replies, and I can only see a few of them. I get that some might be "private" posts visible only to sender and a small group, but I don't think that's very common. And the replies are from a wider group than those I follow. I assume "the algorithm" declines to show them to me, which is a PITA.
An advantage of film twitter (as here) is that it's active, so there's always something interesting happening. And it's worldwide, so I'm interacting with filmies from UK, Europe (!), US, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong... that is really something interesting. And there seems to be little of the usual twitter unpleasantness in the Film Twitter bit, and easily dealt with by block or mute (eg anyone with .eth in their username is an automatic block for me, and I have Nasty Flaming Things reasonably well muted).
I do have a FB account but each time I open it (usually around the time of my "official birthday") I'm completely baffled by it. I cancelled my IG account as uploading photos was too hard (don't have these sort of photos on my phone), and by all accounts it's abandoning stills.
So, flickr. I'm getting a bit of activity round my images there now, which is nice. But the social aspect seems very weak. There's rarely a useful "conversation" in image comments. The discussion in Groups is quite sporadic; many of the Groups I belong to have "last posted" messages from a year or more ago. I can't see a usable way of getting an "un-threaded" feed from those groups (so the "social" aspect is fragmented into dozens of tiny separate areas). And several Groups seem to have weird (but maybe necessary) limits on the amounts you can post at any time. I started using it mainly as a host for images posted on TP, after PhotoBucket went all weird (still get daily threatening emails from them, BTW!), but as mentioned, it's getting a bit more useful to me. And if I put camera, lens, film and dev details in keywords in C1Pro, they do turn up on flickr, which is nice.
It's certainly really good to be able to see images on flickr in Large (even if that's a 16" screen for me!). Better than anything else that way, AFAIK.
Glass and Vero, I don't know much about.
So, back to Grainery. I do wish it well. I'm unclear about the social aspects, and it needs a lot more traction before the network effects really begin to show. Image display size is limited. And I can't see any way it would support a question like "what really IS the best dev time for Tri-X in HC-110B?". So, it's probably one destination too many for me.
So TPFC remains one of my favourite social venues. Mainly because you lot are such fun to chat with, such a fount of knowledge, and we can (or could) occasionally meet up In Real Life. So, thank you all.
