Monday, November 18, 2024

This'll be a short one folks

I was going to do a post on the new social media app Bluesky but man...As far as I can tell it is not interesting at all. Granted, that's basically on the basis of a few screenshots, but who has time? The main story is that where there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth eight years ago, now it's basically just an extended public sulk. 

Anyway, the best reason to leave a social media platform isn't to find another one that flatters your biases more. It's to stop staring at your phone so damn much.

2 comments:

susan said...

It's odd you chose to write about Bluesky the same day Jer told me he'd been interested in it a few years ago. Me? I never even heard of it before today.

Jer asked me to send you this piece by Cory Doctorow called 'Bluesky and enshitification'. It's pretty good and ensured I was just as happy never having known about it previously.

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-11-02-ulysses-pact-tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast-b2f89bb5b4d8

Ben said...

The reason I wrote about Bluesky is that there's been a well-publicized wave of people announcing their departure from Twitter (or X, as I've never gotten used to calling it) in protest of Elon supporting Trump. Bluesky seems to be their preferred destination. Musk certainly has a bias toward Trump, but it's hard to see how he did much to put his thumb on the scales. And like I said before, if you're going to quit a social media platform, the best thing to replace it with is life.

Doctorow makes some good points. A provider who thinks you need his service is likely to abuse the power it gives him. But these are his concerns more than they are mine.