July 5th, 2024 Issue

Returning To Social Media

Good morning! I wanted to take a moment and share with you the direction I have decided to take with my teaching. Many of you know that I came to Substack so that I could share my knowledge with people that were not comfortable with the social media site I was on.

I spent three years posting almost daily on a free speech site called Gab. Gab is very controversial because it will not sensor free speech. Therefore anyone and everyone can share freely what they believe, including white supremesists and people that hate Jews. Even though I despise what they believe, under the constitution they do have the right to say publicly what they believe. I learned quickly how to navigate a site like this. I found the gardening, homesteading, fishing, mushroom foraging and other groups that I was interested in and joined them. Then I became exposed to other content creators that I really appreciated. My favorite content creators and the groups I joined I created shortcuts to. If you go to someone’s profile you will see a star towards the top. If you touch on that star it will create a shortcut that will notify you whenever they post new content. You can create shortcuts for your groups as well. I got to the point that I just had my favorite shortcuts all established, and I would just spend my time looking at that content. I didn’t spend a lot of time on the explore page. It just wasn’t worth it. There are too many offensive posts to get much benefit from it.

I have met some very special people on the site. Some of them have become good friends and have visited our homestead. I took a break from Gab though to create this Substack account so that people that would not be willing to go to Gab could be exposed to what I have been learning. I feel like I accomplished that goal. Anyone can go to my Index here and find in depth teaching on how I Quilt Garden. They can also simply print whatever articles are of most interest to them and they have a hard copy from then on.

Since last fall I have continued to get requests that I would return to social media. I have over 10,000 followers and they have missed my daily interaction with them. I was considering going to a homesteading site but was having difficulties with uploads. The other factor is that most of the people that I would be interacting with on the homesteading site are following me on Gab.

Some of you will be thinking, “why don’t you just go to multiple sites, like many people do?” I did that for a while a couple years ago and I felt spread thin. I don’t do this for a living. This has been a way that I can give and serve others. It has been a labor of love for me. With how busy homesteading can be, one site is enough for me to take on. Because I have so many followers on Gab the level of interaction can be big. Here is a link to the first post I did the other day after being gone for months, you can see the amount of interaction that took place. People were so glad I was posting again, you can see in the comments.

https://gab.com/Schaafcraig/posts/112719101966415883

For those that want to see the kinds of groups I post my content in, here are some links. The gardening group I established about two years ago and is very edifying.

Gardening: https://gab.com/groups/62718

Homesteading: https://gab.com/groups/5779

Mushrooms: https://gab.com/groups/36979

These are the main ones I post in. But there are thousands of group on about anything you can imagine. This is the link to my main profile.

https://gab.com/Schaafcraig

If some of you would prefer not to use Gab, you can still interact with me through email. Feel free to email me at schaafcraig@gmail.com I realize that whatever decision I make it will not please someone. I had many disappointed people on Gab when I left for these eight months. By far though I can reach and impact the most people through social media.

The photo above is part of my garlic harvest this season and the topic of the Gab post above. God bless you all, I hope your gardens are prospering this season.