Bluesky Out of Beta + Various Social Media Thoughts, February 2024

Bluesky, the microblogging service that I joined last April, is finally out of beta and is no longer invite-only, so anyone who has an interest in joining is now free to do so. Here’s a link to the site; just follow the directions from there. Once you join (if you join), I am pretty easy to find; feel free to follow me there if you like.

Do I suggest you join Bluesky? Well, sure. I left the former Twitter about four months ago now and while I’ve been using Threads and Mastodon quite a bit, Bluesky has been my primary social media hang for most of that time. It’s a generally friendly and fun place to hang out, and while no social media site is perfect, or perfect for everyone, the overall vibe of Bluesky is one I like a lot. It helps that the ethos there when trolls and bots show up is “Don’t Engage, Just Block”; no snarking, no dunking, no pointing out their errors in logic, etc, just immediately blocking them and robbing them of the engagement they crave. The block function on Bluesky eradicates them and their comments entirely from your timeline, which makes it extra powerful. It makes for a much more congenial experience, less prone to obnoxiousness. I like it.

(This will be the cue for some folks to have a handwringing moment about whether blocking is the right thing to do, discourse, echo chambers, blah blah blah, so I want to be very clear about this: I don’t give a shit. You can spend your time online with bots and/or shitty people if you think it’s important and you’re striking a blow for intellectual freedom by doing so. I wish you joy in that endeavor. I’ll be spending my time online with people I actually enjoy.)

Although I do at this point spend a lot of my social media time on Bluesky, I am on both Threads and Mastodon frequently as well, and I find that each scratches a slightly different social media itch. Bluesky is the hangout, Threads is where I talk about politics and social stuff, and Mastodon is where I engage in general nerdery. These divisions are not strict, and I do a little bit of everything on each site (and each get pet pictures and commentary on the writing life), but in general this is how it susses out. When I l first started ramping down my presence on the former Twitter and then stopped posting on it entirely, I assumed that I would end up choosing a single site to take over the role it played in my social media diet. Several months on, I don’t feel like that any more. I’m perfectly content to use three sites for slightly different things, and with slightly different audiences. Is this going to work for everyone? Maybe not, but I’m not everyone, I’m me, and for me, it’s working quite well.

Speaking of the former Twitter, a few months on it surprises me how little I miss it. One part of that is that most of the people I followed on Twitter are now on Bluesky/Mastodon/Threads, so I don’t feel their lack. I didn’t rely on Twitter for news and followed hardly any celebrities there, and those I did have Instagram accounts anyway, so done and done. The other part of it is that the amount of shitty people one has to wade through is much lower away from the former Twitter. I’ve spoken about Bluesky in this regard, but both Threads and Mastodon are better in this matter too. It may not stay this way forever, mind you — Threads had a substantial jump in bots when Europe came online (hello, Russian bot factories!), and I imagine now that Bluesky is opening up, we’ll see more there too. But they at least feel more manageable, not the least because the “Don’t Engage, Just Block” ethos exists on those sites as well.

As a creative person needing to tell people what I’m doing, I did have concerns about how (ugh) marketing my personal brand would be affected. Several months on, I needn’t have worried. I had more followers on the former Twitter than I have on Bluesky/Threads/Mastodon combined… for now, and by not as much as you might think: 194k on the former Twitter vs. about 130k on B/T/M combined. It seems to me that more of the accounts on the newer services actually have a real person behind them, who is signing in and using the service. Engagement feels good on all my post-Twitter services. Also, it took 15 years to peak at 200k followers on Twitter; all the followers on Bluesky and Threads, and about a third of them on Mastodon, have arrived since last April. There’s momentum there. The former Twitter feels eminently replaceable for career purposes.

I don’t ever plan to go back to the former Twitter; for my purposes the only thing it’s useful for now is as a honeypot for existing and aspiring fascists. Easier for the FBI, and the rest of us, if they all stay there. I don’t hold it against the non-fascists who stay on the former Twitter, because they still have their communities there and moving everything is a real pain in the ass. That said, now that Bluesky is out of beta, Threads has 130 million users, and Mastodon has been Mastodonning for eight years now, there really has never been a better time to leave the former Twitter. Make the leap if you want to. Wherever you land, people will be there.

And wherever else you go — see you there.

— JS