With social media fragmenting, I’m bringing back my old “You Tell Me” Wednesday discussions to try to get good old fashioned blog conversations going. If you’re reading in a feed reader or via email, please click through to the post to leave a public comment and join the discussion!
After the recent election, a massive shift took place where a lot of people who had held on over at X formerly known as Twitter quit more or less en masse and decamped to Bluesky, which has recreated a lot of older
Does it have the juice?
A ton of social media sites have risen and perished in the past fifteen years (remember app.net, Path, Vine, Post, et al), a tiny handful new entrants have thrived (TikTok mostly) and some recent entries (Mastodon, Threads) showed some early promise but have either stalled or fizzled out.
Is Bluesky here to stay or is it another flash in the pan? And if you want to join me on the blue sky network, you can find me here: https://bsky.app/profile/nathanbransford.com
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Art: Drifting Clouds by Caspar David Friedrich
It does seem like Bluesky finally went viral enough to be a Twitter replacement, at least until its owner(s) sell it or betray their users again in some way.
Both Bluesky and Threads claim to be decentralized, but all they really mean is “we can talk to Mastodon.” They’re both just as centralized as Twitter and FB always were.
Mastodon, meanwhile, is fully decentralized (which I think is the only way an actually democratized internet can actually work), but it absolutely sucks for onboarding. And though I have a deep distrust of algorithms that feed me posts from randos, they do serve a major benefit in discoverability.
Also, most people don’t care about decentralization. They just want to be on the platform where everybody else is. Bluesky is starting to look like that.
Until the red hats try to take it over. Until then, I’ll stay on Bluesky, though I never see myself using it or any social media platform the way I, and most of my friends, once did. The fact Jack left the board and deleted his Bluesky account doesn’t bode well for it.
I think it does, Nathan. Still finding the stride a little bit, but most of my faves are there now and hopefully it will continue to blossom. I would love anything close to the golden days of Twitter. When we all laughed at the variations of “This is my son” or that guy’s wife falling off a mini cliff.
And it’s so nice to have something not owned by someone hanging out too much at Mar-a-Lago.
It started well, but so far I have only found it to be somewhat dominated with American post-election conversations. although in a much kinder way. I have tried following other people from around the world that entertained me, but they aren’t posting enough as they are still stronger on X. So I worry it will fade.
I haven’t posted much, but I have hopes that it will be the writers’ meeting place that Twitter used to be. I’m so sick of politics that I’ve unfollowed or muted some accounts. I want to use Bluesky for my own purposes, to communicate with people in the writing/publishing universe.