The Bluesky Experience (so far)

LAST night (Monday where I am) I signed up for Bluesky. I've been hearing about for some time, but did not give it much thought; the experience with a couple of "Twitter substitutes" (such as Mastodon) after the Malignant Yarpie took over that platform was unsatisfactory, so I dropped social media completely for a couple of years. 

But a brief news item posted on YouTube by the BBC got me thinking about it again. The gist of that story was that Bluesky was experiencing explosive growth, and turning into a site for Twitter refugees; the thing that made an impression the description of the number of corporate, institutional, and otherwise "big" accounts that were abandoning Twitter entirely (I will never refer to it as "X", you go to hell, Leon, you piece of human garbage) entirely for the new platform. 

I mentioned this to my 19-year-old daughter, and she divulged that she and almost all of her artist friends had already ditched Twitter for Bluesky, or were about to; some were doing it because of Twitter's neo-fascist bigotry vibe (these kids, daughter included, are mostly hyper-left, gay, trans, or gender-fluid types), but mostly because they have had it up to here with not being able to stop Twitter from scraping their artwork to train large language models, and apparently that is something a user can control on Bluesky. 

I'm a writer, not an artist, but I can certainly relate to that -- I'll be damned if I'll let an AI program snatch so much as a punctuation mark from any of my work, if there's any way I can stop it. And, though I would sooner shave my ass and sit in a pan of gin than spend a single nanosecond supporting the existence of that simpering little shitbag Musk, whose face and voice enrages me to the point where I creatively visualize punching him in the jaw so hard it flies off, I actually did miss Twitter. Facebook is just...weird, and I dropped that years ago. TikTok is Chinese government spy software, and Instagram makes me want to barf. But Twitter was my speed, not only a good outlet to interact with people on the scale and in a context I find comfortable, but a great newsfeed, and a big help to my work. 

So, I decided to give Bluesky a try. And though I am only two days into it, I think I'm hooked. It's like Twitter used to be, only better, because it does have better tools to control what I see. And even when I do just let the algorithm do its thing, it seems friendly, and at least tries (successfully, for the most part) to show me things I may like, rather than what the people behind the curtain want me to see. 

I hope it grows, and I hope the team behind it can avoid ruining the experience. I am not naive; at some point, it is going to have to make some money, and there will be some changes, probably some I will not like. That's just business. But it doesn't have to be awful -- the people who are using Bluesky now seem to be doing their part to ensure that it is not, so I hope the company won't let them down. 

If you'd like to connect, you can find a link to do so over there in the right-hand column >>>