🦋 Zarf on Bluesky
Andrew Plotkin (Zarf) has some worthwhile thoughts on Bluesky: Four weeks in the blue sky.
In retrospect, Twitter had a lot of stuff that I was not into. And I'm not talking about the toxicity and harassment (which, I am relieved to say, never landed directly on me). I'm talking about the good social interactions. Forwarding the news of the day. Finding a new twist on the meme everybody is repeating. Retweet with your last book/teacup/Simpson's quote. "You may not like it but this is what peak
<whatever>looks like." Shitposts, in the most enthusiastic sense.
People manifestly love this stuff. Bluesky is getting a huge wave of people who feel like they can finally leave Twitter without giving that stuff up. But it's not what I was on Twitter for. It's what I rolled my eyes and scrolled past so I could get to people talking.
To be clear: I'm not complaining and I don't think Bluesky needs to change. (I don't think you need to use Bluesky differently.) But scrolling past all that stuff is a bit of drag, a bit of daily energy cost. When I bailed for Mastodon, this little muscle in my neck relaxed. I didn't realize how good that was until I got onto Bluesky and felt it tense up again.
I appreciate most of Zarf's observations and can relate to a lot of them- in particular the energy suck danger. It's clear to me that there are already a few people I'm following who simply post too much for my taste and I need to unfollow them. Most of my posts on Bluesky will be replies to other people or related to live events. I'm decidedly not interested in driving more traffic and attention from social media randos to my blog and microblog. Like Zarf I am interested in conversations with people with similar interests to my own, and completely agree that you don't need to follow a lot of people to get that (or everyone that follows you). His thoughts on clients and interface functionality and niceties are on point as well, but I expect those to improve with time.