Minor update to the blog: I eliminated the Twitter link from the sidebar. We’re done with that.
I joined Bluesky in August of last year and, since then, it’s been a revelation in my social media experience. I was a long, long time user of Twitter, from the days of the early failwhales and the open wonder of the platform up until the current bad times. Twitter was my connection to a wider world, unfettered by the vagaries of distribution and scale.
It wasn’t the personal twee of Facebook nor the judgmental essays of Tumblr, nor the empty pictorial promotion of Instagram. It was people, in concentrate, saying things. It required brevity, encouraged wit, and acted as a filler to the empty hours between.
And then some asshole who won’t hear No decided to do what assholes with too much money do. He bought the thing, and because Twitter wasn’t a collective in the end, but a company beholden to the values of a corporation, it sold at the obscene price he offered. Ever since, he went on to make everything worse for the worst reasons.
Bluesky, though similar in tenor, has been just that. A clear blue sky compared to the torrential rains of bullshit Twitter became. It isn’t gamed, isn’t bought, and isn’t for sale. It doesn’t push what users don’t want to benefit those who want their eyes and not their voices. And it has an ethos of telling people they are free to speak, but that we are free not to listen if they so offend our ears.
I lived a long time on Twitter, but in the words of Ella, I’m through living in the storm. Come join me.
Blue days
All of them gone
Nothing but blue skies
From now onBlue Skies – Song by Ella Fitzgerald and Paul Weston & His Orchestra