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Sick of the bots and echo chamber that X has become, I decided to visit Bluesky. Nothing serious- just a hope that the algorithm would be more curated toward centrism in a way that would prove refreshing compared to the assault on reality that X has become.
Agree with Hanania on the topic of not giving up on existing institutions, and that it is increasingly impossible to deny that X is deleterious to being anchored to earth, and wondering if perhaps Bluesky would be better?
Think again, motherfucker! For, immediately, on the front page (no account) you are assaulted with the culture war and the assumption that you've not just picked a side, but you've picked the woke side. Instead of re-anchoring and toning it down, the social media justice warriors are still out in force.
Within 10 posts, I counted 3 about trans issues, 2 about billionaires, one about gaetz, and another about hegseth. (Gabbard remains unimpeachable, it seems)
It took a bit of scrolling before actual breaks, like discussion of Disney soundtracks, or nasa space pictures, started to appear. If bluesky is to be the twitter alternative, then retreating entirely from internet social spaces is the likely path forward for those that don't wish to be swept up in the torrent.
In conclusion, for the moderates and centrists: Your signal is jammed, and only extremism will be boosted on either twitter or bluesky.
So why use it at all? Why use any social media aside from linkedin and a facebook/whatsapp account for messaging? There seems to be a broad agreement in the rat-diaspora that social media is a plague that wrecks attention spans, leads to skyrocketing teenage mental health issues and erodes any kind of political discourse, yet people still seem to use it.
Just read books and build community in meatspace instead of using Twitter/Bluesky. Whatever benefit you derive probably isn't worth the exposure to memes and toxic ragebait.
Conversely, I've never understood people who ragequit Facebook completely and then try to demand others to use some niche service to contact them. Just stop reading the feed (install a browser extension if you have to) but keep the messenger.
Facebook messenger? That sounds like some niche service that you want me to get to contact you. Don't you have, like, SMS on your phone?
I have come to despise the proliferation of messaging apps with slightly different functionality, and each one tries to justify itself somewhat differently but end of the day the features anyone cares about are identical.
"Meta" missed a huge chance to live up to their name and build up interoperability with every major messaging app so that Facebook users could end up having a single account on one app that allows them to chat with everyone on every other app through one interface.
I think its more that they erred horribly by trying to make Messenger standalone instead of keeping Facebook messages effortless and having messages by a draw to keep young people on facebook.
Indeed: I've been trying to discourage people from sending me messages on Facebook ever since they broke the seamless email <-> messages gateway. I even looked in to trying to build a bit that would reply to any FB message with a request that the correspondent email me instead. Alas it was not feasible given my expertise and motivation (both relatively high).
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