Sharing and sharing buttons

This is something that, quite frankly, I hadn’t looked at for a long time. I happened to be doing some reading on the weekend here “How Should Educators Use AI”?

It was an interesting read but I was also visually distracted by the sharing sidebar to the site.

A few things stood out.

• the top icon was a share to Facebook. That often isn’t an option here in Canada as Meta has stated that it won’t allow the sharing of news due to Canadian legislation. Right now, it’s applied to Facebook but there’s word that it will happen on Instagram in the near future. What’s next? Threads?
• the second thing was the second item. That’s the Twitter icon. That brings back online life before Twitter became X. Most online sites have sharing buttons on them and some of them have dropped our familiar blue Twitter icon in favour of the white X
• there was no sharing to Mastodon or to Threads although you could always copy the URL from the website and paste it yourself
• the icons were colourful. That’s an interesting point to me. While the colours do stand out, I prefer something that’s all of one colour

I wondered to myself. What’s the sharing that I have set up on this blog? It was probably the default from years gone by when I originally set up things and ignore it daily!

I had no Mastodon either. Or Threads. Actually, I understand that the Threads sharing isn’t available anywhere as that service develops.

I decided to poke around. There is a configuration for Sharing. I don’t normally look at it but I did this time around. Some things were in there that I didn’t know. I decided to fix that.

There indeed was an option to include Mastodon and X. So, I added them to make things complete. In case anyone knows/cares, I left Twitter there just for old times sake.

Quite honestly, I did it just for looks. I never actually use any of them.

On every browser that I use, I have installed the AddToAny Extension and use the Share Anywhere button to do the sharing that I do. Share Anywhere has an enormous collection of services that you can share to. You just have to narrow them down to the ones that you’ll use. If you want to get a sense of how big Social Media is, click through and see all the options that you have available.

I guess the bottom line in this case is that I was feeling a little guilty that I’d let this setting slide. So, I made the changes; whether it makes any difference to visitors I’ll never know.

At least, I can feel better about it.