My apathetic arrival on Bluesky last spring did not suggest I had much interest or confidence in that decentralized social network: I opened my account on April 25, posted for the first time on April 27, and then waited more than two months to grace Bluesky with a second post.
And yet over the past two months, Bluesky has become my primary successor to Twitter as the platform that now goes by X continues its spiral into conspiracy-theory hell under Elon Musk’s militantly ignorant misrule. Bluesky now ranks as one of the first apps I check in the morning and among those I revisit most often during the day–even though my follower total of 608 is far smaller than the 1,404 following me on Mastodon or the 18,713 followers of my idle Twitter account.
The top reason is the quality of the conversations on Bluesky. I see more engagement with my posts here–see, for instance, the comparison I did in December when I shared the same PCMag story about Comcast rate hikes on Bluesky, Twitter, Mastodon and Meta’s Threads–and that feedback is more likely to leave me more enlightened or at least amused. I keep thinking this won’t last, especially after the platform dropped its invite system in February, but so far Bluesky’s banter remains mostly pleasant.
It also helps that so many of the voices I valued on Twitter have made their way over to Bluesky–and that I’ve had the pleasure of discovering new voices there. And since I’m not getting paid for any of this or deriving other obvious and direct professional benefit (as in, I know how few people clicked through to stories I shared on Twitter), those things matter to me.
Second, Bluesky has advanced faster than I might have expected. A small team of developers led by CEO Jay Graber has built out its foundational feature of account portability with impressive speed. That means not just the option to take my followers to a new account with a different handle, what I call settings portability as offered at Mastodon, but the ability to move my entire presence, including the handle that I’ve set to my robpegoraro.com domain name, to a different host.
That progress in building a legitimate breakthrough in social networking gives me confidence that Bluesky’s developers will check off such lesser to-do details as these items on a product-roadmap update posted May 7: direct messaging, inline video, in-app tools to create and manage custom feeds (for example, my D.C.-area airports feed), and login-security upgrades enabling a choice of multi-factor authentication options.
An edit button, however, is not among those roadmap items, and in that aspect Mastodon maintains a distinct advantage over Bluesky. But while I continue to have good conversations there, too many of the people I liked seeing on Twitter either haven’t set up shop on Mastodon or tried it and have since moved on.
A large fraction of the Twitter diaspora, meanwhile, has looked past both Mastodon and Bluesky to migrate to Threads instead. But while the default “For You” algorithmic feed isn’t as hopelessly vapid in my Threads account as it was six months ago, I still find the notion of handing over that much more of my online social presence to Meta to be profoundly distasteful. I do not need a single point of social-media failure that large, especially not one with Meta’s history of bad-faith behavior towards journalism.
Also distasteful: how I still have to read Twitter because of all the people who have not bailed on that platform and continue to share enlightening tidbits there. I mainly do that through lists I created that help me avoid the clout-chasing randos, conspiracy-lie merchants and fascism-curious creeps now polluting that platform, but because I cover social media I also have to keep up with Musk’s reputational self-immolation through his increasingly delusional tweets.
I don’t know that Bluesky will ever replace what Twitter was, or if anything can or even should. But while much about this project remains uncertain–most of all, if this public-benefit corporation can secure a reliable business model–at least I know my free writing online isn’t underwriting a shitposting billionaire’s vanity value-destruction project.
https://robpegoraro.com/2024/05/10/one-year-in-some-of-the-clouds-around-my-bluesky-experience-have-cleared/
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