Our gal in Oslo came through for me this morning, and I entered and successfully created a Bluesky account. It’s been months since I first added my name to the wait list, and I suspect there’s a real chance a code got eaten by the spam trap, but we’re going to overlook how long it took me to get onboard and celebrate that I arrived.
It feels like a throwback – not least because I immediately connected with the various denizens of the EDSBS Cinematic Universe, most of whom I have had very little contact with since 2016 and the dissolution of my main public Twitter account in the aftermath of the election. It’s not lost on me that I may be letting myself in for a rough year next year, but we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. Not only did I see a bunch of those folks again, I found a surprising number of people have already made the jump.
On paper, this is a step in the right direction, because it is being what Mastodon cannot and Threads won’t: a drop-in replacement for Twitter. No algorithmic timeline, no ads, no auto populated firehose of influencer and celeb accounts. It has some interesting features: self-verification via a domain name as account handle, customizable algorithmic feeds to make sure you surface material relevant to you without forcing it into your chrono timeline, and the prospect of federation and account migration in future.
Unfortunately, it also seems to have failed to go to school on some of the simplest practices of moderation and safety. The fact that they hadn’t established deny-listing of racial slurs in user names suggests a fairly privileged group of developers who failed to ask the first question for any new product in 2023: “how will Nazis abuse this?” I got the impression they may be speed-running the steps to get to a better solution, but they don’t have Instagram’s existing moderation apparatus. Of course, neither does Mastodon, and until this morning everything I heard suggested Bluesky has been a superior experience for nonwhite users. So who knows. It may be that you just have to pick the level of unpleasantness you can live with.
And right now, Bluesky has some obvious advantages. Unlike Threads, it is not “what if Twitter but Instagram” and I am not being force-fed a diet of influencer bullshit and journalistic self-importance. Unlike Mastodon, it has people I know on it and they are willing to use it. And unlike Twitter, it’s not owned by a ham-faced racist yarpie who should be ground into meatloaf for the homeless and his assets liquidated as a down payment on reparations. These are all nontrivial advantages.
Not to mention…Twitter is kind of dying. There are maybe half a dozen people there for whom I have no other way of following them. Brands and teams can be had via Threads, and hopefully followed from my private Mastodon account before long, which would complete the realignment. Threads accounts for reading, Bluesky for socializing, Signal for private chat and personal contact, with special use cases for Slack and iMessage.
Of such things is our new social world built. But tonight, I have a functional social media outlet that isn’t in hock to Phony Stark or the Zuckbot 3000, and that is a blessing I have long looked forward to.