Blue Skies from here?

I’ve moved the bulk of my posting (arguably, shitposting), from Twitter (X), over to BlueSky.

It feels very ‘trendy’ at the moment to say and do this - a form of protest against Elon and his right-wing alignments, but it’s more than that.

It feels like a return to social, for social’s sake.

Want to know my main bugbear with Twitter/X? These things:

The pay-for-more-engagement, and as a result, get paid for engagement, has resulted in a massive shift in the quality of content on Twitter/X.

People are just posting engagement bait, and while this exists against their profile, it’s tough to separate what are truly their authentic opinions vs. what will move the needle with regards to their monthly payout from the platform.

It’s harder to determine who is being themselves, and therefore, harder to find a solid community.

It’s a mild echo chamber.

Social media, before the “algorithms” and controversies caused by companies like Cambridge Analytica was a lovely place because you built your own little sphere, much as you do in real life.

Elon’s argument when taking over Twitter, renaming it X, and changing the Algorithms to expose more left wing people to more right wing content, and vice versa, was that these places should exude true "neutrality”, and that the echo chamber was ‘bad’ - “what use is having the opinions of every person in the world at your fingertips, if you’re only exposed to people who think like you?”

Well, your sanity, for one thing.

Social media used to be about (for me, at least), a few things:

• I could ‘shout into the void’ and people could, if they wanted, shout back, if they happened to identify or have an opinion on what I was saying.
• Those with more power or influence were subject to the same conditions for their posts appearing as I was, and you couldn’t “pay” for more influence, you had to grind for it, and it felt more organic.
• Extreme individuals, extreme viewpoints, and those who spread hate based on race, gender, or for any reason, were subject to being banned or removed.

A lot of those aren’t true any more, and with the third being the most important to me - extremist voices are allowed to persist, calling people slurs and spreading misinformation, without consequence.

Thank goodness the community notes feature was released before Twitter was bought out, otherwise I fear it would have been even worse, even more quickly.

On BlueSky - the Discover feed presents those risks, but it feels like because it’s a much more empty

I’ll take a mild echo chamber, that feels safe any day of the week.

Trust and safety seem to be at the forefront.

Following on from my point earlier about extremist voices, BlueSky seems to make it much easier to quiet this noise using block lists.

They also have a great post on the subject here: Bluesky’s Current Efforts on Trust and Safety - Bluesky.

Also, things like quote detachment are super easy ways to take power away from abusers.

It’s open source.

You can actually download, install, and run BlueSky locally on your machine, it’s just JS + React!

It’s early days.

It’s still early, can BlueSky scale to meet the demand? I think they can, and as they grow they’ll attract investment too which will help.

Will their position as an antithesis to X/Twitter stay true, or will it erode? Most likely it will as time goes on (and as they seek to become sustainable and profitable), but it’s great start, let’s see how it plays out.

The biggest question remains: will there be enough engagement there to keep people on BlueSky, before they run back to Twitter/X.