Why I Adore My Loyal Tribe

Big or small, your tribe is a precious joy. Nurture it.

Let’s face it, I don’t have the most enormous tribe on Medium. After six weeks in the game, I have accumulated 244 followers.

I’ll make a confession: I go to bed dreaming of the day I have 30,000 followers like some people, and then I will know I have truly made it.

But with a tribe like that comes a sadness: how can you possibly know all your followers by name, let alone read bits and pieces of their writing?

One of the joys of having a small tribe is that it truly feels like a family — as if you can really get to know people. There are about twenty people in my tribe whom I already feel are friends.

Long may that continue.

Another joy about having a small tribe is that you can experiment on them and the follower-unfollower tolerances are that much starker.

For instance, I made a choice about a month ago that I was going to write about what interested me to find my voice rather than artificially bedding down into some tiny niche.

I reflected on that choice in the following article:

The net result of all this is that I have been writing about all sorts of varied topics, including:

Mental health

Writing and writing tips

Self-improvement

Bagpipes

Cats

Tropical freshwater fish

Film reviews.

Most recently I posted a story called Why I Hate the Summer:

I pressed “publish” on this piece with trepidation because I knew the article would express a minority view — most people love the Summer — and I didn’t want to piss off my tribe.

To my delight, the article received nothing but positive comments and even got picked up by Medium for further distribution (the first time that has happened to me).

Equally, surprisingly, my bagpiping articles seem to have been fairly well-received. The only time I noticed a few people un-following me was a couple of weeks ago when I started posting film reviews on Coffee Times.

I was a little sad about this for a day, but I soon realized that if -as they are — film and writing film reviews are an integral part of my psyche, what would I want followers who at the end of the day didn’t appreciate that?

Which leads me to a fundamental truth:

Your followers are a reflection of your writing. If they don’t enjoy your psyche, what’s the point in them hanging around? The followers who do enjoy your labours will reward you with their loyalty and their comments and observations, and you will reward them back with yours. If you work at it and are consistent, slowly, slowly, over time your correct tribe will come.

I love my little tribe, which at the moment is inherently manageable. If, as I hope, over the years my tribe grows into the thousands, I shall be delighted.

But I’ll also be a little sad because my tribe will have developed into something much less intimate.

And now, as if to confirm my eccentricity, I’m giving you a bonus track of my Scottish small piping which went up on Spotify last year. It’s a set of two seventeenth-century dance tunes from the Dixon repertoire of 1733. The first is called Jack Lattin, and the second has an unspeakable title that I daren’t repeat here:

Enjoy, and remember, if you like being in my tribe, there’s more where that came from (but, you may be glad to hear, not every day).

Thanks for reading and listening, it’s a joy to know you.

Robert