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Sick of the bots and echo chamber that X has become, I decided to visit Bluesky. Nothing serious- just a hope that the algorithm would be more curated toward centrism in a way that would prove refreshing compared to the assault on reality that X has become.
Agree with Hanania on the topic of not giving up on existing institutions, and that it is increasingly impossible to deny that X is deleterious to being anchored to earth, and wondering if perhaps Bluesky would be better?
Think again, motherfucker! For, immediately, on the front page (no account) you are assaulted with the culture war and the assumption that you've not just picked a side, but you've picked the woke side. Instead of re-anchoring and toning it down, the social media justice warriors are still out in force.
Within 10 posts, I counted 3 about trans issues, 2 about billionaires, one about gaetz, and another about hegseth. (Gabbard remains unimpeachable, it seems)
It took a bit of scrolling before actual breaks, like discussion of Disney soundtracks, or nasa space pictures, started to appear. If bluesky is to be the twitter alternative, then retreating entirely from internet social spaces is the likely path forward for those that don't wish to be swept up in the torrent.
In conclusion, for the moderates and centrists: Your signal is jammed, and only extremism will be boosted on either twitter or bluesky.
Hey I got the Disney soundtrack one too … 5th post!
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Uh, normie Twitter is very much a thing. Sports and pop culture and local news that isn’t about politics is pretty easy to come by.
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So why use it at all? Why use any social media aside from linkedin and a facebook/whatsapp account for messaging? There seems to be a broad agreement in the rat-diaspora that social media is a plague that wrecks attention spans, leads to skyrocketing teenage mental health issues and erodes any kind of political discourse, yet people still seem to use it.
Just read books and build community in meatspace instead of using Twitter/Bluesky. Whatever benefit you derive probably isn't worth the exposure to memes and toxic ragebait.
I use Twitter basically for Cremieux content exclusively.
I only know Cremieux as a private label fashion brand at Dillards … what is yours?
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Conversely, I've never understood people who ragequit Facebook completely and then try to demand others to use some niche service to contact them. Just stop reading the feed (install a browser extension if you have to) but keep the messenger.
Facebook messenger? That sounds like some niche service that you want me to get to contact you. Don't you have, like, SMS on your phone?
The advantage of Facebook messenger is that it allows you to send private messages to people you either don't know or don't know well enough to have their phone number, enhanced by the fact that the large user base makes it pretty easy to find people. This was at least the case ten years ago when practically everyone of a certain age was on Facebook and used it regularly, and when you'd get a friend request from practically everyone you met. Now it seems like most people, especially younger people, either don't have profiles or don't look at them. I seldom look at mine, and it seems like most of my friends who used to post frequently have slowed down over the past several years. So these days it doesn't work as well as it used to because there's less likelihood that you'll even be able to find someone on Facebook, and even if you can there's a decent chance they won't see the message.
SMS is horrible for group messaging. You can't take yourself out of a group, and you can't edit the recipients without starting a whole new message. You also can't type longer messages efficiently since you don't have a real keyboard. It's fine for certain things but ongoing group texts about nothing in particular should really be on another app. I was able to switch a couple of mine over to Discord and it's been a 100% improvement. I'd like to get my ski group on there but that's going to be a tough sell.
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Known better as just the messages tab om facebook. Which a lot of people my age use. Also works seamlessly on laptop & tablets unlike sms or whatsapp.
But really the #1 killer feature of FB messages is that they’re tied to your name, not to your arbitrary phone number. Want to send someone a message? Just send one. No need to try to hunt their phone number.
It does require a separate app install on mobile though, right?
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I have come to despise the proliferation of messaging apps with slightly different functionality, and each one tries to justify itself somewhat differently but end of the day the features anyone cares about are identical.
"Meta" missed a huge chance to live up to their name and build up interoperability with every major messaging app so that Facebook users could end up having a single account on one app that allows them to chat with everyone on every other app through one interface.
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I'm shocked that you thought even for a second that Bluesky would be better than Twitter - it's purpose is to be a new home for people who are upset that moderates and conservatives are being given a voice, any early adoption is going to be centered around that. Yes some of the media are trying to take mostly apolitical stuff over (like football) but its purpose is still "fuck Musk for platforming people we hate."
Ditto for Mastodon. It is an absolute cesspool because it's primarily used by people who couldn't stand the idea that Elon might not let them bully people with politics they didn't like (and this was before he bought Twitter no less). It is exactly as bad as you might expect based on that.
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You can try Threads, which rarely shows me political content but is entirely full of engagement bait about various other things. I do follow some adorable baby animal accounts and some interesting economics people, but otherwise it’s basically the instagram algorithm transplanted into.a text space.
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I have never used Twitter. Mostly, because I have read Amusing Ourselves to Death. I knew that absolutely no good could come of engaging in 140 characters.
As the platform evolved (threads! 280 characters!), I was occasionally tempted, but never tempted enough. It sometimes seemed like a place where interesting people were having interesting conversations--but with the caveat that, in terms of depth, insight, and "popularity contest" dynamics, Twitter is like attending a very large, very angry high school. Sure, you have some wild conversations at your lunch table, but is it really worth the cacophony? The kibbitzing? The sophomores?
The amount of coordinated astroturfing and, admittedly, occasional not-just-astroturfing I've seen for Bluesky in the last week is quite sufficient to ensure that I will not even dip a toe into it. I think their current marketing is clearly intended to capitalize on the current perception that it is Truth Social for Leftists.
Further strengthening everyone's filter bubble will surely have no negative knock-on effects whatsoever.
I think it is also rage against Elon because Trump won and Elon obviously played a role in it. I think democrats hate Elon more than Trump.
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Musk is pretty much the platonic idea of a centrist, no ?
The Indians are annoying, but to me the bots are just noise. I tune it out. Big accounts are pointless, but .. echo chamber? Go somewhere outside of your immediate circle and you find entirely different people.
Uh, no. He’s jumped pretty hard on whatever populist-right memes are floating around Twitter.
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Musk is by no means a centrist, he has actively campaigned as a partisan this election in order to secure a position for himself in the Trump ecosystem. He may have some kooky ideas that do not align with the rest of the Republican base but he has entirely abandoned the 'centre' position one could have argued he held years ago in favour of one side of the political spectrum.
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After carefully curating my feed and lists I pretty much never see any content I find completely distasteful and I also get a smattering of opposing views that aren't stark raving mad.
I kind of hate the site as a general rule, but it's less bad than virtually all the competing options. Facebook is boomers and slop, LinkedIn is strivers, grifters, and awkward corporate copy, Instagram is distilled narcissism. Reddit is... reddit. Twitter is, I think, the closest to the ideal of the public square where large scale discourse actually happens.
Pick your poison.
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You asserted that X is an echo chamber. What is your evidence for that?
Also why would you assume blue sky wouldn’t be an echo chamber given that the media types specifically left X in reaction to losing an election.
It won't be echo chamber, it will be the singularity in a black hole. The circular firing squads already started.
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How does that actually compare to Twitter at this point in time? There's no "front page (no account)" on Twitter anymore, you have to log in to do just about anything and once you're logged in, it's your personalized feed.
And I think this question goes a bit deeper than it might look. Bluesky does try to show you a representative slice of the overall community there. Sure it's probably tuned or curated or whatever, but it's clearly designed to look like it's representative. Twitter, on the other hand, takes effort to not let you know what the userbase in general is like. And it was one of the first things implemented after Elon took over.
It sure can be different. My feed is something like 90% German right now /s
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Now that Twitter is 50/50 left and right, and the left isn't allowed free hand to censor, it's an "echo chamber".
Seems like there's something being missed.
Source for Twitter being 50/50? I assume it’d lean one way or the other.
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Twitter really isn’t 50/50 left/right if you’re a random new user who creates an account today. Of course there are both liberal/centrist and progressive (and hardcore leftist) spaces, but you have to find them whereas you get conservative messaging pretty much immediately and universally, often even if you don’t follow any politics or CW-related accounts.
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Best case outcome = Bluesky becomes a Tumblr replacement rather a twitter replacement.
Erstwhile twitter was louder, but boring. Tumblr was where the real stuff was cooked. Autistic wokes have been homeless since Tumblr collapsed, Twitter got taken over, Reels are brain-rotten (it's great) and tiktok has normiefied.
Worst case outcome = It's turns into a threads style bot-o-calypse.
I created an account to verify what you said. Damn it's bad. I avoided politics as a point of interest. I followed we mens wear guy. Still, it was all vacuous nonsense. /r/politics tier. As of now, it's surely headed towards bot-o-calypse.
Where did all the funny liberals go? There were plenty of them on pre-Trump Reddit. Say what you want, but 4chan autistic trans degenerates were funny as fuck too. Tumblr was good shit. Surely all these furries, twinks, trans girls etc. must be around somewhere. Hell, just the wierd porn artists (very left-tumblr coded) created enough engagement for 1 social platform just on their own.
Wonder if they all just grew up, and the woke-censorship era destroyed the pipeline for new degenerates to replace them. Maybe they're deep on Tiktok somewhere.
We should have a different word than collapsed for "lost 90% of its users" or whatever happened to Tumblr. It still works fine and is the only social media that I read. I just read people's archives, but I understand even the feeds mostly just follow in chronological order. It would be my first recommendation for what you're looking for, but you would have to, at first, find your own blogs to follow there - perhaps shieldfoss and morlock-holmes and who they interact with would be a good place to start, perhaps not. YMMV. The whole point is that you can decide there
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They're on discord, if my hobby servers are anything to go by.
Do you have any recommendations for finding good hobby discords for, I dunno, underwater basket weaving? I see a decent number of active Facebook groups for such things, but Discord seems to have poor discoverability.
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This. Discord is their domain.
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Turns out more than one side has the "7 zillion witches" problem.
Back when SocMeds were only taking off, and some blue-tribers of the FOSS variety were getting creeped out by the potential power megacorps could wield with control of recommendation algorithms, someone came up with the idea of letting each user customize their algorithm on each platform. Technically speaking it wouldn't be that much of a problem to implement it, but the SocMeds have no incentive to do so, so it would require government regulation. Sadly it turned out that stopping Trump / the anti-woke backlash became a higher priority than controlling corporate power. Such a shame. The "it's a private company, they can do whatever they want" crowd can now enjoy the world they created.
This is me, unironically. And yes I am enjoying the world. Though I don't take credit for creating it.
The secrets to enjoyment:
Everyone went on a weird social media bender for a few years, but I think a lot of people are waking up from the haze. The companies got to do what they wanted with their product, and they gave us the drugs so good and hard that now a bunch of us get sick at just seeing the drugs again. This is personally how I prefer to deal with additctions. I like to burn them out of my system hard and fast.
To be honest I think it’s the way most social media is set up. Unless you set up pretty hard limits on minimal content quality, you’ll quickly find that everyone is going pretty low hanging fruit of one liners and hard core factionalism. Nuance just doesn’t work in an environment where the currency is engagements. Long from content is not viral in the same way that a one line dig at outside enemies can be. Memes, gross images, crass wording, and anger are the things that nature has somehow engineered our brains to notice and spread. A long form nuanced article that steel mans the other side and treats the issue fairly is only plausible in environments where such content is a minimal expectation.
I do go on Twitter for the lols, but not much else. It’s kinda funny to snark and mock the pious Palestine-free stuff simply because I find it naive and uncritical of its own side. People who under other circumstances would oppose rape, murder, and terrorism are taking the side of people who do exactly that and celebrate it happening. The Israelis, particularly the settlers, are not completely innocent here, but after months of hearing about how this is one sided and anyone who isn’t actively opposed is evil, some part of my brain gets excited about posting a guy eating a hamburger under a tweet about McDonald’s supporting Israel. Downside being that Twitter thinks I’m Jewish or something.
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...Bluesky has exactly that: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds
Sweet! Shame they ban / remove content they don't like. It's even harder to justify all the censorship if you can make your own feed algorithm.
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When was this, specifically? Do you have any links or something to evidence this?
The idea for letting individual users customize their algorithms? It was ages ago. Early 2010's, or even late aughties. I read it on some blog. I can try to look for traces of it, but the blog might be long gone, and search engines have gotten terrible so I hope you understand this is a tall order.
On the flip side, are you actually saying this is something strange for blue-tribers of that era to recommend? What are you basing your opinion on? This was standard politics of the Stallman-Torvalds techie faction.
I guess I'm mostly just surprised that people had the "customizable algorithms" idea that far back.
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