What kind of content are you looking for? Reading every random thought of people you like, or reading every random person on a subject you are interested in?

Frankly, I’d like to be able to follow a combination of people and subjects, but that’s hard because if I’m a techbro promoting my business by showing off some code, is that marketing or technical content?

One way or the other, you have to mentally filter out posts that don’t interest you.

I like subject-based content like Lemmy and Reddit, but it’s also nice to feel like part of a community where people (kinda) care about you as a person. In order to achieve that here, you need to be in a small community or a prolific enough poster that people get to know you. I also don’t like that microblogging tends to push real names and selfies and stuff—I value my anonymity. I don’t have to worry about someone from work feeling a certain way because I play Dungeons and Dragons or have trans friends or have the occasionally cathartic apoplectic political rant.

One nice thing about Mastodon is you can follow a hashtag and sort of get the best and worst of both worlds. I wish Bluesky offered that. Maybe they will in the future. They do offer custom feeds, but it’s not as simple as just pinning a hashtag in Mastodon, but otherwise I think Bluesky is a lot easier to use. Creating lists of people is easy. I haven’t yet looking into how to create a feed like “Star Wars posts”. Other people have but I don’t know exactly how they function.