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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?
Hilariously seems like Bluesky has the inverse of the Witches Problem.
They witch-hunted all the witches off Twitter, pushed them to Gab, Twitter, Parler, Truth, etc., then a new monarch came to power and let (most of) the witches return.
So the witch-hunters all filed off to form a new community that was in theory was against witch-hunts but also promised to prevent the witches from doing their witchy stuff too much.
Witch-Hunters started making some really questionable accusations and some of the accused just shrugged and returned to twitter, and a few leaned into it and antagonized the witch-hunters enough to garner the current reaction.
Like its crazy, Bluesky might have managed to gain real traction as a Twitter alternative if the users were allowed to have fun and the primary userbase wasn't exactly as censorious and bigoted (using the proper broad definition, look it up!) as their stereotype. Now its arguably a more petulant echo chamber/breeding ground for radicalism than ANY of the RW twitter alternatives.
Now they can't even easily return to twitter because the witches are pretty well entrenched. Also they've declared the owner of the site to be a particularly dangerous witch.
Lol, they can of course return to twatter. Twatter (as they loudly decry at every opportunity) has virtually no standards or "safety", it basically follows the bare minimum of US law (so no CP or active calls to violence) with a few extra advertiser-friendly bits thrown in (you need to click on "sensitive" videos instead of autplaying, porn is mostly banned except for the softcore "sub to my OF" type stuff). There's literally a million people talking shit about Elon and Trump all day every day, the only difference is these comments are not being artificially boosted and have no official seal of approval, so they have to stand on their own merits (which they seldom do).
I am greatly enjoying watching BlueSky descend into a ratfuck, because it reveals the true nature of the people who populate it.
Porn isn't banned. It's just hidden behind 'sensitive content' which, with the wrong setting, can be displayed automatically.
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