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

In the name of community I started following a bunch of people, but I've already had to start unfollowing annoying (over) posters. (None of you people, though.)

bsky-social-9uiqa-gwsw4

suspect a lot of the not having stuff like dm and video has to do with the protocol its built on, if they were just making a normal website it wouldnt be too hard to implement that stuff

― lag∞n, Friday, September 22, 2023 1:33 PM (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

dont mind videos but not having dms is annoying

also the feed is weird. it shows me every single reply from an account i follow, even if they're just replying to a random account i don't follow. but at the same time sometimes it doesn't show threaded replies by the account i do follow to themself

― flopson, Sunday, August 27, 2023 1:34 AM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

they fixed this in the new update btw. feed is pretty readable now

i've been enjoying bluesk tbh. there's a provincialism to it that's in some ways unappealing--lots of the discourse you see has this vibe of like, "this is the safe space away from scary mean twitter", to which i rmde--but it is nice how relatively small it feels. i missed out on early twitter (think i joined in 2013 or 14) but kinda reminds me of the first couple years

I joined twitter in November 2006 and I am one thousand years old

at the time I thought I’d missed the good wave when it was popular at sxsw (also rip) and maybe was right

I don’t think early twitter can quite be recaptured, but it’s interesting how each alternative (and I’ve tried… seven (7) of them) has its own vibe & culture, without necessarily promoting itself that way. Seems to happen somewhat organically, you know?

loving how you can configure your TL so you only see posts of folks you follow and nothing else.
there are lots of feeds to select from that tweak your feed, but for me 'OnlyPosts' is the one that sorts me out.

early twitter was so great

I joined in 2009 but it really started to devolve around 2014 or so

2015/16 was the real turning point (for obvious reasons); early 2010s Twitter was the peak I think – "weird Twitter" era, plus real-time engagement w/"events" but not in the oversaturated way that came later.

once tv news started showing twitter screenshots it was cooked

I dig the new website design, with your feeds listed in a sidebar that you can easily click around in.

once tv news started showing twitter screenshots it was cooked

― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Thursday, September 28, 2023 12:06 PM (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

...cop starts breakdancing

2015/16 was the real turning point (for obvious reasons); early 2010s Twitter was the peak I think – "weird Twitter" era, plus real-time engagement w/"events" but not in the oversaturated way that came later.

― Chavez video on MTV, July 1995 (morrisp), Thursday, September 28, 2023 11:52 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

some of the early 2010s weird twitter humor hasn't aged that well imho. the best tweets of that era are classics but on the whole there was still lots of residual "so random larfs"/"epic bacon" type of millenial humor in the mix

yeah a lot of it in retrospect was kinda lame but i think people liked it cause it was goofin off online not cause it was genius or whatever, then brands and the pundits et al came along and those are anti goofin off groups

it's weird how classic dril tweets just seem normal now, i remember them being so unlike anything at the time. also, i wish normal_now would come back.

the other day the discourse on bluesky was everyone dunking on a post by will stancil making the pt that if everyone on the left ceded twitter/X for the "walled garden" of bsky then no one would be left to bully the media and shift the discourse except nazis and centrist tech people. and everyone was dunking on it but like, the whole "posting is praxis" thing was definitely something that a significant share of ppl very earnestly believed from 2015-19. and imo it's now underrated how effective it was

Weird Twitter def. could feel forced or goofy, but there were also folks making such creative and cool uses of the medium (including the character limitations). Even close to "the end," I would occasionally run into accounts doing offbeat things that were so funny to me. I see a little of that elsewhere now too (like Bluesky), but it feels like the time for it has passed...

wait goofy is bad now

tough crowd

I like goofy... it's hard to do well tho, like many things I suppose.

I feel like even though twitter is obviously way past it's best, in any given month there are a fair few very funny tweets that can hold there own alongside the all-time funny tweets, are there equivalent very funny posts on bluesky, or are people still saving their best material for twitter?

weird twitter went downhill after horse ebooks stopped posting

everything happens so much less now

and imo it's now underrated how effective it was

― flopson, Friday, September 29, 2023 2:15 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

anyone whos seen some big name pundit driven insane by a bunch of nobodies knows that shit works

anyone whos seen some big name pundit driven insane by a bunch of nobodies knows that shit works

― lag∞n, Friday, September 29, 2023 2:41 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

ya exactly. not just pundits either tho, like the decade-long campaign by keynesians and MMT armies of twitter randos who'd bully anyone who said the word "deficit" pejoratively definitely made the biden fiscal stimulus bigger. possibly by like an order of magnitude

My favorite aspect of Twitter (besides all the official/gov't accounts) were these smart, funny, and/or interesting posters you would run into who weren't necessarily recognized experts in a particular field (or if so, they were posting anonymously), and weren't blue checks (in the traditional meaning) – but were clearly coming from a place of deep knowledge and/or analytical skill, and it's like... who are you? you're just a random account with a jokey username and cartoon pfp, but clearly you know what's up.

There were a few posters who I was really hoping would migrate over to another platform (and were the main reason I stayed on Twitter as long as I did), but they set up accounts and still haven't started posting regularly elsewhere, so I guess they don't plan on it. It's a bummer

buckle up babies cause charles_72sss is about to take yall on a wild climate ride

and imo it's now underrated how effective it was

― flopson, Friday, September 29, 2023 2:15 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

seriously think this is why a lot of elon's SV friends are cheering him on.

totally

The paranoid part of my brain sometimes thinks that was the entire point of the acquisition.

posted this a couple months ago:

This is correct afaict https://www.garbageday.email/p/paying-to-use-a-site-you-cant-use

The reason for its success, if you can argue that it was ever really successful, wasn’t that it was cooler than Facebook. It was because of its proximity to power. The reason it was so popular with activists, extremists, journalists, and shitposters was because what you posted there could actually affect culture. The thing that ties together pretty much everything that’s happened on Twitter since it launched in 2006 was the possibility that those who were not in power (or wanted more) could influence those who were. And I don’t think it’s an accident that a deranged billionaire broke that, nor do I think it’s accident that we’re suddenly being offered smaller, insular platforms or an offshoot of a Meta app as replacements. The folks in charge clearly don’t want that to happen again.

I don’t know about “since it launched in 2006”… for a long time it was mainly comedians and bands and your IRL friends.

(I also don’t agree that it was a good thing for all those journalists etc. to gather in one place, in fact I think it really wasn’t, but views obviously differ.)

I don’t understand Dril. I’ve read articles about him, followed him, and I simply don’t get it. My brain doesn’t work that way. It’s like those magic eye optical illusions. Never could see ‘em.

The Bluesky iOS app has a bug where if you type a reply that's more than a few lines, the screen doesn't "scroll"; and so you can't see what you're typing, or whether you successfully attached an image (it's all "buried" beneath the bottom of the screen).

I submitted it as a bug report awhile back... I know they're a small team and have a lot to work on, but I assume their devs use iOS as well, and you'd think they'd iron out this pretty fundamental irritant.

Yeah I've experienced that on Android as well.

tag that guy Paul on bsky and complain and he will probably look into it

also, may want to try Greysky, I am hearing it is now further along in some features and has fewer bugs.

this guy is currently working on the apps https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov

it’s probably been a few weeks now, but a handful of people were run off of bsky for being weird, and one of the weird bits was that they were using a discord to just sit around and workshop their posts, which they would then throw out there and repost and strategic hours

I get the entire 1. get a social media following 2. ?? 3. profit scheme but it’s weird to see it start from zero and ramp up

I should note this wasn’t “weird twitter” kind of weird, but “your interactions seem to imply you’ve got a sidebar of interactions going we can’t see and there are no direct messages here”

lol board detectives got em

Were they good posts at least? (A lot of posts I see on there could use more “workshopping”…)

that is fairly inoffensive. some people got run off last month because it was revealed they were colluding on discord and then piling up on people with unfounded accusations.

this weekend's drama that I witnessed involved a woman who publicly declared she had begun to kill herself, and then when people reacted and called for help, apparently the cops showed up and now everyone who tried to help her is evil because ACAB.

the accusation stuff is just weird and just created on the fly. there was a group on twitter that seems to be attempting to migrate whose entire m.o. was to find someone actually popular, find something they said that could be misconstrued, and then blast that as a talking point to pull in anyone who might be susceptible

what are you even doing online if this is what you’re up to? at least muting and blocking is being more normalized

you can absolutely ignore, block, mute anyone who thinks the fact emergency services showed up for someone in trouble means people who tried to help are pro-cop!

before musk took over i blocked and muted basically no one on twitter. i block and mute tons of people on bluesky. it's a good system. should have done it sooner.

the other day the discourse on bluesky was everyone dunking on a post by will stancil making the pt that if everyone on the left ceded twitter/X for the "walled garden" of bsky then no one would be left to bully the media and shift the discourse except nazis and centrist tech people. and everyone was dunking on it but like, the whole "posting is praxis" thing was definitely something that a significant share of ppl very earnestly believed from 2015-19. and imo it's now underrated how effective it was

― flopson, Friday, 29 September 2023 bookmarkflaglink

"Posting is praxis" ppl haven't decreased to a significant degree?

From a ukpol perspective there was a five minute window to make some changes. That has been firmly shut way before Musk took over.

This post on bsky...

"i've noticed since this most recent wave of invites went out, a lot of new people are here posting like shit, being super aggressive and scolding people in their replies and i just want to say we don't do that here, go back to twitter if you can't act right"

Is funnily enough the first time I've encountered something like twitter behaviour on there lol. Though I am still only looking now and then. Timeline is growing.