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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17151 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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So I've done my best recently to avoid being subjected to personalized social media feed. So my lurking on mastodon without account saw that something happened over at Bluesky and people were leaving to go to the fediverse instead. It turns out it is classical Culture War stuff. Bluesky is apparently imploding because of "Waffles".

So this is not a "boo outgroup" post, my observation is that bluesky is resisting its best of becoming an "ideological monoculture", failing at that though. It is as uninteresting because of the monoculture for me as getting an actual account mastodon instance or truth.social and gab due to the ideological alignment of majority of their users.

It seems that it is hard to make large scale "microblogging" platform that caters to heterodox political culture and I'm a little curious if there is any insight for why it is hard to make one?

my observation is that bluesky is resisting its best of becoming an "ideological monoculture", failing at that though.

I guess my question is, why are they resisting this? The hardest part of making a successful social media site is building the userbase. The current Bluesky userbase consists almost entirely of people who left Twitter because it wasn’t an ideological monoculture. Owning a site with an annoying userbase is better than owning a site with no userbase.

It's mostly left-wingers who left Twitter after Musk enshittified it my ramming his preferred content down everyone's throats. They don't want a monoculture so much as they don't want to be forced to look at posts by Ted Cruz. The fact that they were getting a reputation as you described is probably a big part of the reason they are so flippant currently. If the woke scolds who are the face of the company but a small percentage of total users want to leave, let them leave. I went on Bluesky today without an account and I didn't see anything relating to politics, mostly sports and scenic photos. I can't say the same about my Twitter account, which shows me a bunch of right-wing political posts even though I'm almost exclusively following sports journalists.

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