Twitter clone BlueSky is beginning to come into its own. At the moment it seems to be a mishmash of The Well, Resistance Twitter and 2012 Twitter. But gradually it’s beginning to be its own thing.
I continue to feel a bit self-conscious about using it because I’m not a smug wealthy liberal, but otherwise I’m at least trying to use it instead of Twitter. I fucking hate Twitter with a passion and it’s nice to have a new place to microblog.
It will be interesting to see what BlueSky’s ultimate fate will be.
The WELL was an early high end online service. You had to pay for it and I was in college at the time, I use the free Usenet instead — a lot. But I think of The WELL these days because of Bluesky, the Twitter clone.
Bluesky is good to great, but it seems — at least to me — to have a bit of WELL problem. It is so busy smelling its own farts that it can be something of a turn off to a member of the unwashed hoards like me.
But given how shitty Twitter has become these days, there’s not much choice, I guess. I also like Threads, but the quality of discussion is a tick better on The WELL, I mean Bluesky.
One of the most annoying aspects of the Trump Era is how radicalized both the Far Right and Far Left have become. What’s worse, all of this is happening in the context of the center simply not existing — you have to pick a side, one way or another.
Anyone who claims to be a “centrist” is a fool. They are, by default, tacitly siding with MAGA because MAGA exploits any time someone refuses to pick a side.
But wait, it gets worse.
Because of the nature of modern politics in America, once you do pick a side, you are forced to defend the dumbest, most radical positions of your side. With all that in mind, let’s address what I’ve experienced on the Twitter clone Bluesky.
Up until recently, the service just seemed like an updated version of the very inward looking WELL service of the 1990s. It was at first invite only and once I got access to it, it seemed very much a place for exiled smug Twitter liberals to sit around and smell their own farts.
But all of that has changed since the start of the war in Gaza. Now, the service is dominated by Far Left radicals who freak the fuck out if you, in any way, quibble with their orthodoxy. They get really mad!
They get so mad that it’s kind of a surreal caricature of what conservatives think anyone who disagrees with them are like. I sometimes feel like I have a better understanding of why MAGA people double and triple down on their fascism whenever anyone calls them out on it.
I recently got into an argument about a comment I made about how part of democracy is the marketplace of ideas where everyone yells at each other until we collectively come to some consensus about what direction the country will take.
When I refused to say what views I might have that don’t fit the Leftist orthodoxy might be, THAT caused heated debate. The more I thought about this particular issue, the more I realized it would be wise to just refuse to be pinned down.
The point is — once you get into that type of argument, the whole thing becomes a no-win situation. It’s a trap. It’s like when a wife asks her husband if her new outfit makes her “look fat.” If you’ve gotten to that point, you’re screwed. There just is no way to admit to something that doesn’t fit the Leftist orthodoxy without THAT being the thing you get yelled at, not the issue that first introduced the subject in the first place.
So. I don’t know. I will continue to use BlueSky, but I’m on a hair trigger when it comes to anything I might believe that might upset the Far Left.
I really like Twitter successor Bluesky, but for one thing — it seems like its populated with a bunch of very normal, very stable, very well educated people who all know each other and look down on kooks like me.
In short, it’s a modern version of The WELL from the 90s.
While all the cool kids used The WELL back in the day, I was running with scissors with riff-raff of Usenet. I always wanted to join The WELL and, yet, as an adult….I’m glad I didn’t.
And Bluesky is exactly like the WELL. It’s inward looking and no one ever does anything weird no no reasons. And, as best I can tell, there’s no “black Bluesky” which sucks. Most of the best memes online come from Black Twitter.
I saw a stray tweet tonight that suggests that Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey are going to transition Twitter to Dorsey’s “Bluesky” distributed infrastructure protocol.
This makes a lot of sense.
I mean, obviously “Bluesky” is a placeholder name and it would make a lot of sense if, in the end, Musk simply plopped Twitter onto the chassis of Bluesky and they changed the name…to Twitter.
This is all very, very speculative, but given Musk’s track record, I’m reluctant to bet against him.
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