Fedi and Bluesky are both desolated sunbleached deserts when it comes to fashion,
Reddit was never good but fell past the godawful event horizon when they banned r/FFACJ a year or so ago (and tbh 3rd-party API clients before that),
Tumblr fashion is mostly theoretical (i can see a layer of lolita fashion poster skeletons from 15 years ago and a few dedicated coelacanths still going but very few real OOTD posters),
and Instagram is so much of a shitshow ad factory that i deleted my throwaway account.
so i've resorted to using TikTok now, and good lord do i hate it. some of the most aggressively hostile UX i've ever seen. except for the core product of the FYP + recommender algorithm.
all the ads are sponsored posts or TikTok shops. you swipe past them just as fast as you swipe past everything else. if there's a mandatory unskippable video ad format on there, they hide it from newish accounts, but i don't believe such a thing exists. (Stories might be an exception, they keep interposing those between a video and its account if the account has any, but i can't figure out why since they're not actually ads?)
pretty sure they just rely on people breaking down and impulse-purchasing whatever shop shit they see 90 times. search… kinda works. lotta sponsored posts and LIVE GO RIGHT NOW EVENTS in there but mostly on the first page.
like most recommender systems, it feedback-poisons itself really easily — anyone who's ever listened to a video game soundtrack on Spotify knows that it will only recommend you video game music afterwards, forever, regardless of actual music genre — so now i'm stuck seeing plus size 30yo goth women's fashion, and it really doesn't want to show me other styles. (yeah yeah there are worse fates 🖤) maybe the way to go here is accept that a recommender is not good at recommending two things and to have a bunch of accounts for different styles.
the other trick (and i'm sure this isn't news to anyone who's used modern "social" media) is that in the fashion space you can tell if someone's worth following or not in about 20 seconds from the thumbnails on their first page. everyone is there to shill shit, guaranteed, but some people are really on that desperate for an exploitable generically parasocial relationship grindset, and those people rarely actually show any fucking outfits. mostly pictures of their face with some text so it's not always the same picture. for some reason they mention husbands a lot. is this a "lifestyle influencer"? whatever it is, i hate it.
anyway look for the ones that show clothes in their thumbnails. if you're lucky they'll eventually mention brands. if you're doubly lucky these will be real brands and not dropshipped TikTok shop "one size fits most" shit. i assume the burnout rate of these people is horrific but whatever this isn't really social media i'm not here to make friends.
god this sucks. but again, there is literally almost no fashion discussion on Fedi. about the only things you can discuss here that involve making decisions and spending money based on them are retrocomputing and video games. we have made our choices about what gets discussed here, and failed to build any kind of groups or discovery on top of them past, like, hashtags. which suck because of the usual Fedi distribution problems. (there's no secret fashion Threadiverse, nobody uses that shit.)
so… TikTok. ugh. we'll see if it turns out to be competitive with FPOG results in the end… dealing with the fact that Google ignores a steadily increasing fraction of your search query has been painful. but so is TikTok.
#PlusSizeFashion