What are your thoughts on Bluesky?

[yungwake0]

I dislike the Twitter format in general, I feel like it's too prone to circlejerking (for lack of a better word) and doesn't lend itself very well to any real discussion. These days, I also feel obligated to believe anything I see on "social media" is either AI, a troll, or both, which sours me on using any of it. I do think it's nice to have an alternative that isn't owned by Elon Musk (🤢🤢🤢) and doesn't scare non-techies like Mastodon/Fediverse

[small_cypress]

It's become another no-nuance outrage machine. I am so tired of piling onto people I'd rather really just ignore. Bluesky has great block lists, but its design (as so many of you have pointed out) is always going to be lowest-common-denominator outrage bait.

I also hate that I started to see widely distorted and straight up false information distributed by my fellow leftists that rivals the right-wing misinformation that made Facebook unusable. Reality is alarming enough, we don't need to make stuff up. And because of the format, you're unlikely to see a correction in the firehose of new outrage and made up dramas.

I do have an account for sharing my art as I am moving away from Instagram but I'm not really a consumer of content - except from Joey Politano any time I want spicy economics memes and Joshua Friedman for courtroom play-by-plays (althought I just follow his bridged account on Mastodon).

[Semper]

My thoughts on Bluesky (which I have ranted about a but on my website but I'm bring it here because why not haha) is that it's Twitter 2, and anyone saying otherwise is fooling themselves. When a lot of artists started migrating to bsky I had already deleted my twitter account and I had no intention of joining yet another microblogging site (I already have a mastodon that I barely touch).

I don't think it's a bad decision to make a bsky account as a working artist if you're looking to get eyes on your stuff and treat it as work and work only. Some of my close friends have done that, but they are not gripped by illusions that the platform is anything other than another devil they have to dance with. Unfortunately there are some people within our circles (but not close) that act like bsky is what will save social media, and talk about how it's so good for building community.

Cut to now my friends giving me the tea on each new silly round of drama that these same people are getting themselves into because they haven't learned. They've brought twitter's culture with them, pancake waffles and all.

ALSO in a material sense, bsky WILL turn into twitter if it hopes to pull a "profit" (vc money they will inevitably never be able to pay back). They're already talking about letting in advertisers and people are getting up in arms about it. Like, what did you expect the literal offshoot of a corporate platform to do? Run a bake sale to pay for all the bandwidth users are eating up by uploading videos and high resolution images?? Get real. And yes this transformation will include letting the most hateful people post freely, because moderating hate costs extra money, and the people running the platform don't give a flip about misogyny/racism/transphobia/etc.

Anyways, bsky is a source of schadenfreude for me, because I'm not on it and I get updates on the ways people who were singing its praises are now crashing out on their profiles for everyone to see.

[Bakartridge]

I REALLY don't like Bluesky tbh, everyone sings it's praises but it's basically just another version of Twitter, still pretty echo-chambery and prone to a lot of circlejerking and toxicity, only unlike Twitter people act like it's the greatest website ever made and if you don't like it you're clearly using it wrong. Yet it's still one of the ""better"" social media sites, I'd still rather be there than on the other site but that doesn't mean I like being there. :P
It's alright-ish in short bursts though, like just scrolling for 5 or so minutes every few hours then going to do something else, doomscrolling on there for hours will just rot your brain, though honestly I think that's just every social media site at this point.

[sirenkidu]

I never really used Twitter to begin with, so there's really not a need for me to go to bluesky.
Bluesky is probably less bad than Twitter but to be honest I'm still not sure about using it and skeptical in general. I just feel like it could be one of those spaces where its just non stop drama :/ even if its not twitter level, but im happy to be wrong. I did however make an account because I do know that if you want your art to be seen, you need to put yourself out there. I don't want to be a professional that gets commissions but I still do want people to see my works at least. I never really posted anything on there though, or at least yet.

[batgal]

I was quite happy with BlueSky when it first caught on and people were migrating from Twitter/X. It genuinely felt like with Twitter used to feel like when I was younger--no political/hot takes, no QRT slam dunks, nothing forced into my feed I didn't want to see. People were sharing their art, talking and joking casually, getting to know each other.

This lasted for maybe 1-2 weeks before the Twitter-fication of the site began.

I left Twitter for Bluesky because I was tired of seeing nonstop political discourse without research or nuance, I was tired of untagged images getting through my muted tags/topics, and I was tired of not being able to say a single thing on my account without some random account who has no connection to me whatsoever popping into my mentions and "so you hate waffles?"-ing me.

At this point, this is also what my BlueSky experience has become, even with mass blocklists and filters enabled.

I'll keep my account there and check it out once in a while, maybe post art and videos when I have them, but I'm trying to shift my life away from social media and internet reliance in general and focus more on small net communities and offline activities/communities. I just don't see any modern social media platforms being productive or healthy places to be anymore, personally.

[Malice]

I had it for a bit and I deactivated because everyone is so obsessed with how everything is horrible and they think the only way to fix it is to be as miserable as possible. I have seen genuine posts of people shaming others for something as simple as posting a good thing that happened to them or literally just a photo of their cat because "there's nothing to smile about when Trump's in office or this thing is happening or that thing is happening". Misery and shame are NOT tools of activism and they should never be treated as such. Also, everyone is so focused on "owning the conservatives" to the point where they are devoid of any real personality, it's literally just Twitter but blue flavored. I left Twitter and Tumblr ages ago because they were moral OCD hell machines, and with Bsky's crabs in a bucket mentality, they're sadly no different. At least I saw some good artists on there and when I left I found where most of them are on other platforms and just saved their accounts to my RSS feed (there's no Bsky support on my reader ).

[Furbisms]

Basically completely agree with everyone else's gripes on this thread so far haha. I will say around the time I joined the site was actually pretty cool, but after they went fully public and didn't require a code to get in, I think the site has definitely fallen into the trap of basically repeating everything I don't like about twitter. It genuinely sucks, in my opinion. I can't say I have gotten no good out of it but I feel like in the past few months it has been more bad than good, especially now that the site is being swarmed by spam bots and just fake accounts in general. I'd say 90% of the follows I've gotten recently have been either bots/fake accounts or people mass following to bait follow backs. Either way, I think most of my followers on that site are illegitimate, which irks me. Of course people who only care about numbers would probably wonder why I complain more about having 1k follows than celebrate it 

I feel like I'd be slightly less uptight about this if the site didn't have tons of people (Like, most of the userbase honestly... In my experience) acting like nothing is wrong and refuse to see these issues. Like genuinely I've seen people celebrate bluesky for not having a bot problem and I'm like... Are we using the same site?! I'm following multiple blocklists that should automatically block bots and I still have these issues. I dunno, I'm just feeling lately like I want to ditch social media more and more. If the "good ones" are still giving me this much issue I think they might just not be for me. Whatever 

I don't like complaining a lot but phew I just had to get this off my chest, haha.

[killerscreen]

Bluesky is Twitter with less engagement.

I feel absolutely strung out trying to find a good platform in which my art would reasonably reach the audiences that should see it, but I don't want to go back to Twitter. That place is hellish, so much drama, so much misery. Can agree that it (and most social media in general) feel like moral OCD hell machines. Bluesky has pretty much just become a second version of that from what I can see.

I still want to use it as an art gallery--that's it. I don't want to say anything or engage with anything. My life is better without any of it, every time I used Twitter in the past it gave me some kind of brain worms. I think it just does that to people in general.

[MrsMoe]

I have a Blusky account but holy jesus, is struggle to commit to it. Every once and a while I remember it exists, but after only a week of posting, I just end up forgetting about it again.

I think my biggest issue with it is how much it it's a Twitter alternative, in the most literal and basic way possible. It's got the same layout, same boring UI, same features and functionalities, and worst of all, a focus on constant up to date news. I don't know why we keep making all these indie social medias, only to make them exactly as boring and stressful as the megacorp ones.

Also, I know that part of the whole site's appeal is that it barely has an algorithm, but the search engine kinda sucks. Even when your searching for things in the top tab, you'll still get stuff that way posted from today or yesterday mainly. That probably helps out small artists a bit, but I hate having to scroll through random replies with two likes just because they contained a word I searched for.