On #RPGaDAY2026 So far: Days 1-16

[bird cawing] You know, let's start with the overview of the twenty twenty-six event so far, as that turned into a pretty interesting discussion on Blue Sky toward the end of last week.

Essentially, as we reported a few years ago and again last year, while the overall number of participants in the event does not seem to be significantly in decline, the number of posts which are served to an individual by their social media platform of choice definitely is, even if you sign up for notifications.

Forums and Discord servers do not interfere with their members seeing posts, but those posts have generally always been out of the public eye.

So with more people posting in private places, the number of posts which you can find through search has decreased, although the actual number hasn't.

And with service providers actually suppressing search results in favor of things that don't match or things which are ads, again, it seems like there are fewer posts when there are not.

So as a result of all of this nonsense, it can seem to observers that the event is getting smaller, and it can seem to participants like no one is interested in their posts.

And as I said, the root of this is the increase in serving ads at the expense of the material of the people using that particular platform, at the expense of the material you, another user of that platform, want to see.

And this preference given to items among those you appreciate which draw ad traffic or which are similar enough to a bot to make it a reasonable inclusion, but it's only really being included because it includes ads.

And so what you're actually looking for keeps getting pushed farther and farther away from you.

It's frustrating.

So what do we do? What do we do? Well, for a few years now, David and I have been asking people to share the posts that other people make and interact with those posts with likes or whatever, so the creator knows you were there.

That helps the creator.

A great way to make that easier still has always been the hashtag.

This year it's RPGADay2026.

But other functions available on your platform of choice, such as lists.

Now, I've been using Blue Sky a lot this year, and a lot of you know a character named Peter, also known as Spades Baby.

He made a list on Blue Sky that captures all the RPG a day posts.

It's been invaluable to me.

And the last couple of years it's made finding people I know nothing about who are posting RPG a day stuff.

It's made it really easy for me.

So it's awesome and it can work for you.

So this has actually become a bigger help than just the hashtag by itself.

Because of this list, and maybe because of the culture of interaction on Blue Sky, the interaction on Blue Sky this year has been spectacular.

Lots of people sharing lots of people's posts, commenting on them, giving support, that kind of thing.

It's been fun.