THE SHORT PITCH Twitter is a cesspool and I’m only posting there now to tell people to find me elsewhere. That elsewhere? Bluesky, a new social media site that’s become the best place on the internet for me… and maybe you too? If you’re not already on social media, congratulations — you should probably stay … Continue reading Why I ditched Twitter for Bluesky – and hope you will, too! →
  • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.eeEnglish
    196·
    1 month ago

    My experience with BlueSky has been that it is better than Twitter because it is smaller and doesn’t cater to the far-right.

    BUT…

    It can become extremely toxic very fast because they implemented the same poorly executed features Twitter did that fucked things up. In fact, it’s way worse than that…

    The two features they copied from Twitter that hurt them the most are site-wide search and quote posts. Site-wide search enables people to “namesearch” or to monitor keywords for issues they want to fight about. Quote posts are a well understood “dunk mechanism”, that largely encourages dogpiling.

    As for being free of a central algorithm, that seems good, until you see that there are tons of community algorithms you can subscribe to instead. Now there are algorithms for things like “anti-Zionist posts” and “pro-Israel posts”, which not only let people find their preferred echo-chamber, but also provide trolls access to exactly the groups of people they want to argue with or harass.

    These algorithms can be built to detect certain hashtags and phrases, or they can just be big lists of accounts like a Twitter group. There’s no telling when you might show up in one of these algorithms or why.

    As a result, if you say anything less than agreeable about any issue, there’s a chance you’re going to hear from a bunch of accounts you’ve never met before, regardless of what side of an issue you are on, or how extreme your view actually is.

    I don’t recommend it. It’s a pro-profit company that seeks to be a wholesale replacement for Twitter. AT Proto federation is a complete joke, it’ll never expand if it doesn’t have a flagship open source server. They’ll give up on it just like Twitter did and just be another centralized, toxic, microblogging community.