How to build a following for short stories?

[Spritelady]

A friend of mine, Agaming, has been doing some writing lately and was wondering if there was somewhere he could post his stories online to start building a following.

I have of course recommended he share his stories here with us (I personally really enjoy his writing, he's great at eldritch horror style creations!), but I wondered if anyone might have any other suggestions for sharing one's writing with the world?

[Jubal]

We're certainly happy to have more stories here Beyond that, I think a lot of it depends on what sort of following you want! If it's a particular genre thing, then there'll be certain genre communities, but also, how much effort, time, and money you want to put in changes the game a lot. Building a social media following is a lot of hard work and is for some authors more of the job than the actual writing - which is partly why I don't do that sort of thing for myself much. I think if you want a small body of dedicated readers, just finding every niche genre community and tumblr/mastodon/etc hashtag is probably not a bad start, but that won't necessarily ever get you the kind of reach that you can actually, say, properly leverage to make a sensible amount of money off writing.

I'd also say that in my view in the medium term it's a mistake to go too into a locked down platform, so better to be keeping writing either on a forum like this that's publicly readable or on a blog is a good basis to then share elsewhere: however, some people do just go all eggs in one basket and that approach does work for some cases.

[dubsartur]

What about archive of our own?  Magazines and web magazines too obviously.

There are definitely online communities for sharing specific genres eg. fantasy, erotica, political writing.