Bluesky an' clear: the social media app that will definitely last forever

The only social media app I like is the one where people talk endlessly about the other social media apps I don't like and am not on

Still to use my code.

lol, that's maybe the smartest way to bluesky

sell it on ebay

I'm @rooob.bsky.social btw, not that I post really

rhymes with brewski

another for the pro column

Anyone who pronounces it like that around me is going to get a restraining order.

ello

Bluesguy

not a bad idea, Eazy

Folks, you're all doing it wrong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-36ijwAQUs

So if someone were to try to extract user data from this new service, would that be

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7f/MidnightOil_BlueSkyMining.jpg

seems like the owners/employees have basically been bullied off their own platform. apart from one SWE they've completely stopped posting. truly outstanding effort from the userbase.

what a world

abolitionism starts here

Bluesky: It died in Beta

"seems like the owners/employees have basically been bullied off their own platform."

Just joined 😂

ha i thought that would catch your eye.

leadership here is as sus as threads or twitter. like jack, they seem to share a lot of intellectual heritage with thiel, although i'm sure they'd deny it (60s bay area libertarianism, girard, etc.) but with burning man and shitposting (as an alibi for race wierdness) and some weird fash-adjacent stuff about nature.

grasscist

seems like the owners/employees have basically been bullied off their own platform. apart from one SWE they've completely stopped posting. truly outstanding effort from the userbase.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, 14 July 2023 19:17 (one hour ago) link

tbh this is very funny

dril's second skeet was good: "im going on a posting strike from here until the.y make every one not racist or whatever"

first post from someone other than that one poor SWE who had to ship the n-word regex. replies are good. https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3k2izrg6k6o2j.

someone normal should make an app imo

first post from someone other than that one poor SWE who had to ship the n-word regex. replies are good. https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3k2izrg6k6o2j🕸.

lmao the mods are being called out and people are snitch tagging the investors on ... linkedin!

no

i mean someone else can, but i can't be bothered to be honest. no offence. it's very silly.

its all fun and games til you bring the beef to linkedin

ahh brilliant, hide it where no one will look

seems like the owners/employees have basically been bullied off their own platform. apart from one SWE they've completely stopped posting. truly outstanding effort from the userbase.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, July 14, 2023 3:17 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

'scuse me, while I diss bluesky.

Not a screenshot but: the post is from a bsky team technical advisor that says “Some of that Blue.” with a photo of a blue sky with which is just not remotely helpful.

To you, no. If you consider that some people reading might be colour-blind, though...

I almost went back to LiveJournal after seeing my posts from the 2000s and missing writing in paraphernalia, and then I found it was owned by Russians and…subject to Russian law.

(Also am in Bluesky and it feels like me and Albini and Parton Oswalt hanging out in a Delta Skylounge.)

Xp: ha well they did include an alt text so that’s good

TIL blueski was (probably) a pun

Holy SHIT you are not ready for this pic.twitter.com/1wMD4Jq9Kp

— Lauren McKenzie (@TheMcKenziest) July 14, 2023

Bluesguy

― underwater as a compliment (Eazy), Friday, July 14, 2023 11:11 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Lol

I joined ello but lord only knows when I was last on it or if the account still exists

i was @lebronjames on ello

in case anyone wants an invite code

bsky-social-ufxqd-dszmo
bsky-social-2biwx-cqxgy

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

both taken

I'm on there now as chants.bsky.social. Haven't found very many people to follow on there, idk.

"I joined ello but lord only knows when I was last on it or if the account still exists"

the app still exists, so I assume the network does (I think I wound up deleting it, but I would occasionaly open it up as recently as a year ago and see just random images). Confusingly Ello is also now the name of a more high profile reading app that has nothing to do with old Ello.

If anyone wants to follow me on there I’m matthewbalaam.bsky.social - I won’t post much except the odd link to a radioshow or gig probably.

bluesky cant hope to compete with twitter until they get video so you can watch the cop eat shit on the slide

Have atthem:

bsky-social-w77g6-ysjch
bsky-social-zsizl-emv5i
bsky-social-efm3v-h6eeh
bsky-social-7ch5w-6blgf

Thanks!

thanks!

it's pretty easy not to post death threats though is the thing

Megyn Kelly absolutely deserves to be put in a wood chipper tho

just while it's switched off, we can compromise on that maybe

then we turn it on

it's pretty easy not to post death threats though is the thing

― a (waterface), Friday, November 14, 2025 9:42 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

its easy not to but sometimes its nice to

― lag∞n, Friday, November 14, 2025 10:02 AM (fifty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Sure, and when you do, you should not be surprised in the least to face consequences for it. It does seem like this was poorly communicated to her, so I get why she would be frustrated and confused at first, but continuing to whine about it after the reasoning was explained is nagl.

wonder if "woodchipper feet first but im not going doing it" violates tos

i wish woodchipper feet first upon you

I hope Donald Trump gets tinnitus, severe chronic pain and complete incontinence and then lives to the age of 108 in a run-down nursing home where the staff hate him

my take basically

eter‬
✧@notalaw✧✧✧.b✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧‬
· 9m
everyone gets so mad at the mods here for doing basic mod shit. sometimes you gotta make a little murder joke and eat a three day ban for it. that’s life baby, there’s beauty in that.

xp - maybe don't wish that on the nursing home staff. he'd file nuisance lawsuits against them on a daily basis.

I don't agree that Oswalt or Kendzior's comments are equivalent to right-wing folks threatening journalists with death for... reporting facts. Context matters if you're going to parse if something is a actual threat or not, it's why content moderation is incredibly hard to do. Oswalt and the chud threatening to hang journalists are not the same because the chud is wrong. Asserting that all threats are equally bad is a convenience of capitalism that makes moral judgements cheap enough to be profitable (and also cheapens them) but it is not something that is objectively true. Some threats are good and necessary.

(I also get banned on Reddit all the time and it doesn't really faze me anymore, same as getting copyright violation letters from your ISP for torrenting stuff stops being worrisome after you get two or three of them)

mods have the tools to ensure jokes are funnier

im kinda fine w/kendzior, she's been like two steps too close to ultra-panic mode since at least ferguson but given where we are im not sure she was entirely wrong

no opinion on her specifically, but these politics influencers / famous for posting non-pundits are the worst form of mental pollution

well she is a writer who is published by reputable publishers with several non fiction books that have sold very well and were well reviewed, not some NPC who only posts insane conspiratorial ravings. I realize people may not like her social media presence, but she's also been right about a lot of things.

ah ok my bad, there are so many annoying people in the other category I tend to assume people whose work I haven't personally encountered are among them

yeah her books are p good, tho the better bits tend to be about her travelling w/her kids round america (before it vanishes!) than her detailed geopolitical analysis, which can be somewhat hair-on-fire

she very evidently loves missouri, which (as someone living far away in devon) is a readable trait IMO

she's been like two steps too close to ultra-panic mode since at least ferguson but given where we are im not sure she was entirely wrong

It's easy to hit panic mode when events consistently push the trend line further in the direction of fascism. One gets tired of looking for evidence of an effective counter trend emerging. If there is one, it is still mostly subterranean and just starting to bubble into view in the No Kings rallies and the off-year election numbers. Clearly, the structural advantages now heavily favor the fascist-oligarchic-reactionary coalition. No single election will sweep these away unless the economy crashes so badly we're back to quasi-1932 conditions.

iow, she's not entirely wrong.

Oswalt and the chud threatening to hang journalists are not the same because the chud is wrong. Asserting that all threats are equally bad is a convenience of capitalism that makes moral judgements cheap enough to be profitable (and also cheapens them) but it is not something that is objectively true. Some threats are good and necessary.

feel like there's not enough consensus on who deserves to get death threats for 'no death threats unless someone really has it coming' to be a viable moderation strategy, even if there was no profit motive involved

I feel like when it comes to moderating online communities, it is 100% tied to profit motive. good moderation is expensive because it boils down to paying smart people to do what is an exhausting job. there is a powerful incentive to tack to an ethical stance that is compatible with automated moderation tools.

Moderation, as the name states, is not designed to make informed judgments about the relative moral and ethical merits of the multitudes of different statements made on social media. It is simply designed to recognize statements that significantly diverge from a generalized 'center line' of accepted social behavior into generally unacceptable extremity.

It's true that making death threats has become much more accepted in social media than such threats ever were before social media existed, but at whom it is acceptable to direct them is still a matter of violent dispute among the habitués of social media. This disagreement about the acceptability of violent rhetoric is also one reason why women have been driven out of a lot of social media venues.

Moderation, as the name states, is not designed to make informed judgments about the relative moral and ethical merits of the multitudes of different statements made on social media.

That's exactly what good moderation does. And has to do. There's no shortcut past considered judgement because any generalized rule you come up with for moderating will immediately be gamed by bad actors. That feedback loop of publishing rules and people creatively breaking them cannot be closed if you're dealing with humans, especially rich ones. Judgement calls have to be made constantly if you want a community instead of the cesspools of Facebook, Twitter/X, Reddit, or any other low-moderation comment site.

That's exactly what good moderation does.

When it involves selective moral judgments it is more correctly called censorship, which can be either good censorship or bad censorship, according to what one thinks about it, but censorship is what is based on moral judgement. Moderation is based on moderating the tone of discourse.

Then, as another category, there is enforcement of the Terms of Service, which also gets lumped under the catch-all of moderation.

elizabeth spiers has spent the last two days posting *hard* about how there's no 'conspiracy' at the NYT to undersell the epstein stuff

she may or may not be technically correct, but having seen they way the paper goes after harvard presidents/trans ppl/her emails/inflation at very specific times vs. the biggest political scandal in this country's history, absolutely no one wants to hear it

she unwittingly provides the perfect example of how you dont need a formal conspiracy when people will voluntarily fall in line with organizational norms even going so far as to publicly defend them to the point of looking like fools, which is all very interesting since most of the people shes arguing with arent even alleging a formal conspiracy theyre just making an observation about the times coverage

tho there is no doubt a formal conspiracy aspect to it too its just way above spiers pay grade

i usually like Spiers but her falling all over herself to defend the NYT on this is lousy.

lol (from today in tabs)

Regrettably, Gawker founder and occasional Times freelance contributor Liz Spiers attempted to drag some of the wilder conspiracy theories on Bluesky back toward reality, which went about the way you’d imagine. She was correct to say that Landon Thomas having newsworthy information in his emails from Epstein is not at all the same as the New York Times having that information, in anything but the most technical sense that it existed somewhere on their email servers. Newsrooms are not in the habit of surveilling their reporters’ email accounts, for both editorial and legal reasons, although perhaps when Times editors found themselves firing a reporter for being too cozy with a source they should have bent that guideline a bit. In any case Spiers may have “infinite stamina for arguing with strangers on the internet” but for everyone else, I made a simple flowchart to guide you if you’re ever tempted to defend the New York Times as an institution from online criticism:

https://i.imgur.com/lMQVW82.png

I think Spiers was mostly right but she got at why a giant news org wouldn’t be able to act on that type of thing without digging into why that is the case. I’ve jokingly criticized the same: there were periods where very informed reporters in their public health beat were doing great work while the NYT style section were doing “influencers in the goop sphere are drinking some bleach” articles. There are some editorial coordination issues that are glaring

Kendzior does have some reasonable writing but her online presence is basically midwestern mom who wants you to know how badass she is. I have encountered her type in the wild and “here I am flipping off the camera” is a swipe left type of situation because ARE YOU TWELVE

i appreciated spiers's posts yesterday because a lot of people on bluesky are incredibly dumb about how the new york times, and journalism in general, works.

just a smol bean giant news org

spiers defenses from what i saw at least were laughable liberal version of if you dont know how to clean ar15 you arent qualified to be in favor of gun control

the idea that new orgs cant just go poking around in reporters emails, this is a guy who was fired for misconduct with a source, did they really not review his emails, if so that seems like pretty major negligence

people are so dumb, tho. someone today suggested that the nuzzi profile was published to distract us from the landon thomas stuff. as though a.g. sulzberger is pounding on his desk and saying "style section, drop everything! i need a puff piece on olivia nuzzi in the paper tomorrow!"

its easy to single out the dumbest arguments and pretend everyones dumb, its not worth much but its easy to do

as though a.g. sulzberger is pounding on his desk and saying "style section, drop everything! i need a puff piece on olivia nuzzi in the paper tomorrow!"

sure . . . but regardless of the timing why is the NYT publishing a puff piece on olivia nuzzi at all?

sulzberger doesnt have to pound on anything he does the hiring and firing

perhaps this impossibly leathery man . . . who is destroying public health in this country . . . could have been redeemed by committing adultery with a completely compromised journalist half his age (and vice versa)

let's not even get into 'wearing jeans at the gym'

amazing to indulge the outlandish idea that nuzzi fell in love with kennedy

or found him attractive or even just not repulsive

she retreated into isolation in LOS ANGELES, often typing passages for HER NEW BOOK into her phone whilst HIKING

a true hero's journey, no wonder the NYT wants to highlight her

admittedly getting away from the bluesky topic at hand but ffs NYT

a failed social climber goes hiking dont you see

Lagoon are you suggesting she is not head over heels in love with the walking ham hock

who wouldnt fall for a roided out bag of leather who keeps roadkill in his car and has the most fucked up voice youve ever heard

The funniest thing about that story to me was that the reporter went to Kara Swisher for damning quotes. Kara Swisher, the proto-Nuzzi! She's done so many 180s on interview subjects (You're a genius, and I was the first person to say so! Wait, your stock price is dropping... you're an idiot, and I was the first person to say so!) that she must have ball bearings in her spine. I guarantee that with a half hour's research I could find Swisher saying something insanely flattering about Nuzzi, probably calling her a "badass" or something similarly stupid.

I forgot to put the last line in my Spiers opinion: she posted about 60% too much about it. Could have stopped a lot earlier

I had exactly one Nuzzi interaction on facebook over a decade ago where I said she shouldn’t have written a dumb article and it turns out we were friends-of-friends and she popped in to scold me. Good times. I think her entire vision of access-style journalism is shmoozing and writing really gloopy articles about what it’s like to be hanging off of the interviewee’s arm. Her prose is very purple and dumb, if fun, for people thinking it’s more useful to be salacious than to have a positive impact on society

someone had a social media post (bsky?) about living near kennedys that was something like “you smile and nod in public but you don’t hang out with them, you don’t babysit for them, you don’t party with them, and you definitely don’t have sex with them. ted was probably the best one and he killed a woman in a car” and that has stuck with me. just a chaotic, starfucker, insane family line

chotiner follow-up: "say more. he looks like a pile of tanned nutsacks"