In 2019 we didn’t believe in ourselves so much when we shared our stories against HIV stigma for the first time: no one will understand us, we will be overwhelmed by criticism and hate speech, we will have to close before we open. Instead, PlusBrothers are alive and kicking in the face of those who want to tear us down.
Where we started from
In August 2019 Facebook was our only place: a trusted list of contacts who knew our personal stories and needed no explanation of what the Positive World was; next we opened a public page and started posting there.
It was a careless and naive decision, because we noticed quite a lot of traffic but did not value enough the conditions that the social network gave us: full of advertisements, visibility influenced by an algorithm and to increase it you have to pay, the possibility of being reported and banned for unfounded reasons always due to the automatic systems based on numbers and not content.
The idea of having a site didn’t even occur to us at first: “why should we even consider this option when we are closing after a few months anyway!” Annoying, that’s how we judged the blog, and it took some suggestions from some of our friends to change our minds. So, by dint of trial and error, we arrived at 2021 with our first WordPress installation.
Technical issues
Undoubtedly, comparing it to Facebook, running a self-hosted WordPress blog forced us to come to terms with the lack, or obsolescence, of some of our technical skills.
Struggles with service providers, searching for themes, until the switch to WordPress site editor and meeting the person who has been following our work for some time came along: Gloria Liuni, a WordPress web designer and trainer who believed and believes in us.
Little time, many changes
Talking to other people and professionals has bring to reality all that remained only a dream for too many years: a blog in English, being able to customize the appearance of pages without too much code knowledge, more flexibility in choosing which elements to place and where, despite this slows activities a little down in content writing.
Home Page with all articles is no longer present, but we have several sections with their own posts and, most importantly, we are creating the characters each with its own background story.
The so-called “artificial intelligence” then give us a huge help in unlocking some technical circumstances where we don’t get to, minor annoyances but which can keep us stuck for months.
Let’s then talk about Elettrona, @talksina@mastodon.uno doing interviews around the world… One on HeroPress (English and Italian) and the other in English only on Women In WP – a podcast about women active in WordPress.
Our approach with social networks
Most relevant change is in the approach to social networks: after leaving Twitter, we interact less and less even on Facebook although it has (apparently) welcomed us.
No one will ever deny jokes we shared with the network of contacts created over the years and we will use Facebook page to exchange even more of them from now on, however, we want to invest in a free web environment.
Freedom does not mean “saying whatever we want” but having, as much as possible, control over our own data, be it articles or followers; we are exploring the #fediverse with its pros and cons, we must build our credibility from scratch but we are not giving up soon.
We don’t fear disability or HIV with all the stigma they carry. Could we be afraid of struggling a few months to gain more visibility on federated social networks?
Thank you to…
The biggest “thank you” is all for Gloria Liuni: without her we would not be able to enjoy a faster, newer site, and despite now we deal with a more difficult interface than before, we are soon going to fix this as well.
And then? All those who hate us and in general who say nonsense. We are not masochists but if they didn’t exist, there would be no Agony Ass.
Are there people close to us, in person and online? Yes, many of them and by reading this post we hope they feel included in our “thank you”. Indeed, we thought we would not arrive at Christmas 2019 with our project, but if we are here it is also (mostly) thanks to them.
Our followers? If we consider just humans, we don’t have that many but let’s look at the POSITIVE side: there are billions of HIV viruses following us and learning from us, but no one can see them because they are all undetectable untransmittable.
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