Bearcat Connect is a nice aggregator platform for Baruch's clubs, but, unfortunately, it's abandoned.

Club members tend to send events and notifications on much more closed platforms, such as Instagram, which is sad!

Not everyone wants to download Instagram.

By the way it's a horrible app, created by a horrible company, and led by a horrible dude.

https://blog.cytrogen.icu/posts/83ff.html

Well not everyone wants to hear me mumbling about how bad the mainstream social platforms are today. I can go on all days, three days and three nights without stopping! So anyway I will stick with the not-everyone-wants-to-download-and-create-an-account part.

You create a club, you want to send your events out and let everyone see them.

Then shouldn't you publish on an open platform instead of the closed ones?

Not everyone wants to download Instagram, create an account on Instagram, and check Instagram every second just for school clubs and their events.

Yes, you inherited your followers from the previous board. Yes, there are a lot of them and the number looks fantastic and amazing.

And then what? Less than one in ten of them ever sees a post you publish, and that ratio keeps shrinking.

They aren't your audience.

Instead, they are a number the platform rents out to you, one that keeps deflating.

You post an event announcement, and the people who actually see it may be fewer than the people who show up to your club meetings.

Better yet, clubs love posting events as stories, and stories are precisely the lowest-reach format on the platform. They are so stupid that they self-destruct after 24 hours. I guess you are just betting on the format the fewest people will ever see, with a built-in delete button?

Oh I almost forgot about the school departments themselves. Some departments also post things only on Instagram -- shame on you! All of you!

So we have to -- no, actually -- need to use Instagram irrationally.

Seriously, why don't clubs host a free website, instead of that terrible desktop-unfriendly Linktree?

I mean, don't tell me that finding a technical person is hard. There's a bunch of starving students from the full-stack club. Hosting a website now does not cost you anything anyway -- aside from domain costs if you want a custom domain -- hmm actually actually, blogs.baruch.cuny.edu allows you to create free sites with whatever names you want. There is also the Baruch Domain project.

The ISACA Baruch Student Chapter has its own website. The United Chinese Language Association has its own website. The Collegiate Association of Women in Business has its own website. Even the Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Organization uses the school's free blogs.baruch.cuny.edu.

If a cybersecurity club, a Chinese culture club, a women-in-business club, and an entrepreneurship club can all do it, then words like we can't find anyone technical don't hold up.

Oh by the way, the school's own Student Life uses Linktree -- haiya!

Back to Bearcat Connect? It's also free. Browsing it does not require students to log in. Well, the school already registered accounts for us anyway.

So why? Why are we not doing this?