I’ve been on BlueSky since about January, after becoming fed up with Facebook’s new AI direction and its new commitment towards forcing users to doom scroll and get into arguments with AI bots. I still can’t afford to just up and leave but I’ve been on it a lot less. I felt like just voicing some of my opinions on BlueSky for anyone else thinking of jumping over there. I had never been on Twitter so it was like a foreign country to me for a while but I think I’m finally getting the hang of it.
The Good Aspects
One thing I like is how customizable the feed is. While it’s perfectly possible to doom scroll on BlueSky too, you aren’t forced to. There’s a general feed where very sad democrats and leftists bemoan the state of American politics, but there are other feeds dedicated to whatever interests you are into. So the doom-scrolling isn’t inevitable on BlueSky like it is on pretty much every other social media site. When I don’t feel like seeing the Orange Ogre or the Elongated Muskrat’s punchable faces I can go to the art feeds or the astronomy feeds, where you can (usually) avoid the news. In fact you can mute certain words in your feed so that they’re censored. I have “Trump”, “Musk”, “Republicans”, and other words muted; it doesn’t stop me from seeing them in shared screenshots but I see them maybe 75% less (you can’t even bury your head in the sand if you want to these days it seems). You also don’t have advertisements stabbing your eyes every other post either. I haven’t seen a single ad on BlueSky and I hope I never do. You also use hashtags on this site, which you can click on and see who else made posts on a particular topic. Facebook had that too I think but no one really used them much.
The rules are more lax than on Facebook so you might see nudity in the art feed unless you specifically tailor your preferences not to see it, just to forewarn. I don’t usually care, but if you’re scrolling in public it can potentially be embarrassing, and you might see things you don’t want to see as well. You’re as likely to see a tasteful nude as you are a morbidly obese furry.
The crowd on BlueSky are more my type of people really. A lot of artists, leftists, scientists, pagans, goths, and my good friends in the LGBT+ community (I may be straight but I get along well with them, maybe because most of us have autism in common). Conservatives tend to get blocked and shamed on BlueSky. Politicians and corporations have begun to weasel their way onto the site but I just block them. I’m probably on the older side of the user base, but I don’t feel too old for it.
The Negative Aspects
BlueSky isn’t a complete utopia, unfortunately. Most of my problems come from just how it’s built as a Twitter clone, and most of the things I disliked about Twitter are present here too, just without the toxic community. For instance, the character limit on posts. I like to post essays on Facebook, you see, but here I am limited. I have to link to this blog if I have something I want to say that’s more than three sentences or so. Why does it have to be this way? Do they not have the technology? I don’t know. Another thing is that it doesn’t let you edit a post once you post it. If you notice a typo afterwards, or if you forgot to add hashtags because you never used Twitter, you either have to just tolerate it or delete the post and rewrite it.
On Facebook, and on MySpace before it, when someone adds you (or follows you as is the case on BlueSky), it’s normal to drop them a message and say hello. But if you do that in BlueSky it seems like people treat you like some creepy online predator, a scammer, or an AI bot or something. At least that’s been my experience thus far; might have to do with the fact that my profile picture is me standing in front of a Neighborhood Watch sign wearing the same kind of coat and hat depicted on the sign, and my name is written in Armenian letters, but I digress. It might also be because there are a lot of people who follow you only in hopes of getting something out of you, either just for you to follow them back, or worse, to rope you into some kind of scam or pyramid scheme. These profiles will usually disappear after a couple days, probably for being bots or violating some kind of terms of service. I had someone offer me money to make artwork out of my aforementioned profile picture only for them to vanish, and had someone choose me at “random” to receive an exclusive free tarot card reading, again only to disappear later. Facebook is full of AI bots and scammers too but at least they stay on the feed and don’t usually try to message you. A lot of people on the site will write on their profile not to message them unless you know them in real life. So even though the crowd might seem friendly, you still can’t let your guard down.
Another thing I miss from Facebook is groups. You can comment on people’s posts and they have feeds for different interests but they aren’t really as interactive, so it is more difficult to make actual friends on the site, especially when people treat you like a weirdo for private messaging them. I can’t really meet and share thoughts with other goths, Armenians, pagans, fans of the Oz books, etc. That’s one thing I don’t see another social media site having a viable alternative to. The closest is Reddit but even then that’s more anonymous so it’s harder to build an actual community.
A lot of the issues BlueSky has were inherent to Twitter too, which is why I was never on that website, but if they’re going to be a Twitter clone they could at least fix some of the issues Twitter had. It’s at least less of a toxic cesspool than Twitter, and their CEO doesn’t seem to be a Nazi billionaire piece of shit, so there’s that at least.
