Like many others, I’ve given Bluesky another go recently.
Despite signing up on day one in early 2023, and being invited within a couple of months, it’s sat on my phone pretty much unused since then.
Twitter (I still refuse to call it by its new name), of course, died the day they blocked 3rd party apps like Tweetbot. Using the official app – a pathetic shadow of its former Tweetie days – was the first time I’d seen adverts on my feed, which were soon followed by various levels of enshittification.
While I still use the app for notifications on a couple of accounts, logging in for work the other day (because you can’t even view a thread these days without an account) I was greeted by a forced ‘For You’ view, and a feed literally containing various sexualised tweets, adverts, and various political posts. It’s certainly a great leap backwards from the innovative, casual, tech-leaning, conversational platform I joined in 2009.
Despite being over 18 months since Jack Dorsey went public with Bluesky, earlier this year saw a huge jump in users following the current Twitter owner’s stupidity and antics, and then millions more as a result of the US Presidential campaigns and election result.
I’d been meaning to jump back in for a while, but as with all these things it’s a bit ‘chicken and egg’ in terms of who’s on the platform. Last time I checked back in the summer, only a handful of my peers had made the switch – with some also knocking around Mastodon – with the federated approach and lack of simple usernames still putting off more casual users.
Since the Autumn though, there’s clearly been a change, and listening to Maggie Appleton speaking at a conference last month and promoting Bluesky as her only social media, I was finally convinced to give it another go.
She was also the first user I’d seen solve the awkward @bsyk.social (or other server) username issue by using her own platform, which is a much more elegant solution. And who knows, might even lead to a much-welcomed rise in personal websites again.
For now, at least we have our community feel back.