Yuck (or, why Bluesky still isn't for me)
One of the awesome people I follow on Mastodon reposted this note from another user1:
People keep learning the wrong lessons from all this social media stuff. "Clearly just move to fedi" "Bluesky is going to be totally different". The lesson you needed to learn, which was how we used to do things in the good old internet we all pine for, is diversify your internet presence. Be on a lot of websites. Be on tons of platforms. Use several messaging apps. I'm not going to tell you which ones, that's up to you, but have redundancy in your social networks online. Federated decentralized platforms are great, but you can still put all your eggs into one basket with them. Don't! Have fifteen different places you can reach out to the same fuckin friend. Spread yourself out. We used to visit tons of websites and post on dozens of forums AND run our own personal site. Continuing to use exactly one platform and cling to it for dear life doesn't help as much as you think.
I've been pretty firm on not joining Bluesky despite its explosive growth over the last week. This made me reconsider enough that I headed over to bsky.app2 to register for an account.
Here's what I saw:
- An interface that looks exactly the same as Twitter did ten years ago
- A colour palette that looks exactly the same as Twitter did ten years ago
- An immediate ragebait post about US politics on the front page
Nostalgia, plus an appeal to the disillusioned left, plus it still being very obviously US-biased, plus a lack of anything new or interesting, plus private venture capital that seems very morally dubious:
The Series A round is led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Darkmode’s Amir Shevat, and Kubernetes co-creator Joe Beda. The presence of a crypto-focused firm might alarm skeptics, especially since CEO Jay Graber used to be a software engineer for a crypto company, Zcash, but Bluesky has proactively assured users that the company is not pivoting to web3.
The whole enterprise seems so cynical. Has everyone forgotten the mess that 2015-era Twitter got itself in? That it never found a sustainable business model? Bluesky's suggested they'll eventually pivot to some sort of subscription-based model as if that ever worked for any large-scale social network.
I don't get it. The whole thing just seems gross.
I closed the page and got on with my day.
Since publishing this blog, the post I've referred to here has since been updated to make clear that "this is NOT about how you need to join Bluesky" specifically. Click through to check that edit.↩
Apropos of nothing, what a lousy domain that is.↩