Social Media Navigation

Hi folks, it's 2021 and people are understandably more concerned than ever about privacy on and undue influence from social media. I (Beek) just wanted to run through a description of what we use to communicate with racers and how you might want to interact with us. I have certain opinions, but each race director may choose to use social media differently.

This website (https://endracing.com) is the canonical source of important information about our races unless superseded by an email from us. With multiple race directors it can be hard to keep everything up to date, but all the important stuff should be here. Comments are enabled on blog posts if you have questions. Drop a line on this post and tell me what you think.

Our Facebook page (https://facebook.com/endracing) is the main social media people use to interact with race directors and about races. We do not require anyone to have a Facebook account to get information about our races, but network effects understandably drive a lot of racer focus in this direction. Facebook events provide an area for people to discuss races, but are unfortunately not easy to access for those without accounts.

We also push a fair bit of information to our Twitter account (https://twitter.com/endracing) and will respond to questions or RTs. The more you interact with us there, the more stuff we'll tweet. Twitter also provides an easy way to provide event updates, and event discussion can happen through the use of hashtags like #wildermantri or #endwet.

Our Instagram account (https://instagram.com/endracing_gf/) is used intermittently. Some people love it, some people hate it.

We use YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/endracing) to host videos and that's about it. If you have a video from one of our races and want to share it, we can add it to our curated playlists. The same goes for Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/endracing/albums), which has tons of great Wes Peck photos.

If you're concerned about privacy, ads, or other nefarious use of your data, ENDracing also has an account (https://mspsocial.net/@endracing) on Mastodon. Give us a follow and a mention and we'll follow back. Brands aren't always welcomed for "brand activity" on Mastodon, but we're mainly interested in interacting with racers rather than advertising.

[Technobabble break: Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org/) is a Twitter-like microblogging platform that is part of the Fediverse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse). That's a lot of jargon, but the key point is that you can view all of our posts from the web without logging in (similar to Twitter) and also interact with our account from any Fediverse account (Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed, Friendica, Diaspora, etc.). Rather than Google/Facebook/Twitter owning the whole social network, it's controlled by individual server administrators. If this sounds intriguing but still have questions, let me (Beek) know and I can help.]

We tried a traditional message board for a short period; if there is interest we could bring that back. All it required was an email address to make an account and we have no plans to sell your data.

If you don't use social media (even public website comments), you can always email us (hello@endracing.com) and we'll try to help.

Hopefully this 1) clears some things up about what social media is required to get information about our races (none!) and 2) provides some alternatives to Facebook if you don't have an account but want to be social. See you out there!

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