The guys over at Black Sheep Warrior reported on this the other day and I've been asking around about it. It's called “Gun District.” It's described as a pro-gun social community, and from an initial look it appears to be about as intuitive as Facebook (though this estimation may be premature – I've only been on it a grand total of about half an hour).
Will it work? It's probably too early too tell. There are eleventy gozillion people already on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr ad nauseum ever day. It's will take a lot to pry people away from a platform on which they're already well established (or that's comfortable). That said, if Facebook continues its shenanigans (throttling down page reach, arbitrarily deciding what is in appropriate content or not, etc.) then Gun District could certainly become a go-to place for pro-gun people and firearms related businesses.
I created a page a couple minutes before writing this. I figured hey, Julie Golob is on there so I'll be in good company, right?
Here's what my page looks like from the front end:
It doesn't look like there are too many people on there yet. You can see how many members are online at a given time and in the time I've been browsing that's never gotten above 100 – but this is a new platform, too. There already a number of groups started, including one called Everything AK and “The Reloading Room.” In addition to groups there are a growing number of pages. I joined Patriot Cabinets LLC, which appears to be the same as ‘liking' a page on Facebook.
That was simple enough. So then I created a page. Figuring it's easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission, I made one for RECOIL Magazine. It was simple enough, though some of the steps were a little different than other social media platforms. You pick a category, of course, but you can also list tags and keywords. You can make it so new members to the page have to be approved or you can allow anyone to join at any time. You can also restrict those who want to comment. Other settings (privacy, photo and video permissions, etc.) are all under “Advanced Settings.” Once you create the page you can share it to your Facebook wall – very clever, that. Here's what the new officially unofficial RECOIL Magazine “Gun District” page looks like:
http://www.gundistrict.com/recoil-magazine
That's as far as I've gotten I haven't played around with privacy settings or checked to see how any of the other features work, but so far so good. Promisingly, I received a private message from an administrator within a few minutes of creating the RECOIL page to establish bonafides so they could see if I legitimately represent RECOIL Magazine. Now, will I use my page, or post to RECOIL's new page? I dunno. I can barely keep up with all the InstaFaceSpace stuff I'm supposed to be doing now. However, Gun District does have potential – I hope it does well. Check it out, let us know what you think.
Oh, and here's what Black Sheep Warrior's page looks like – need to give them a hat tip for letting me know about this site.
http://www.gundistrict.com/blacksheepwarrior
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