Moving to Bluesky, My Initial Thoughts

Around 2019-2020, I made a Xitter (which is how I will refer to the site from now on, pronounced “shitter”) account, mostly to talk with some friends and catch up on game news. Over time, I built my online persona, made a few friends, and, admittedly, had fun making shitposts and stick figure drawings. However, towards the end of 2021, I realized that a few of my behaviors on that site were very mentally draining. I would doom-post whenever I had a bad day, I would spam random garbage replies to unsavory people, and I generally found the site less and less fun to use. So, I deleted all of my tweets and deactivated my account. (I would later reactivate and private my account just to keep my username and view replies to tweets, but otherwise I deleted the app on my phone and the bookmark on my browser)

I actually “left” Xitter even before He Who Shall Not Be Named took over, and when I checked to see how the site was doing, it was an absolute fiasco. Gone were the days of cool art, informative news, and the Ace Attorney Court Bot (which was unironically the biggest loss in my book). They’ve been replaced with engagement bait, content scrapers, ads for gambling sites, and blatant misinformation, all of which had replies consisting of even more engagement bait, unrelated memes, crypto shills, and people flashing their private parts. And now you had to pay for certain features? Hell no.

I’m not sure exactly when I discovered Bluesky, but a lot of people were touting it as the big Xitter alternative. I joined the waitlist, eventually got my invite, and lurked around the site. I’ll be honest, it was very quiet. I liked the atmosphere and the premise of not having an algorithm, but there weren’t nearly enough content and features to keep me reeled in. So my account became inactive for a while.

My second time checking out the site was when Xitter was (temporarily) banned in Brazil. As a result of this ban, a lot of users from Brazil (and many other countries) switched to Bluesky. This was when I decided to seriously give Bluesky a try. I promoted myself a bit, gained a few mutual followers, and all was peaceful. But alas, like the first time, the site wasn’t enticing enough for me to give it more than a quick glance.

I think the last straw for me were the results of the recent election and the changes to the block function, or more accurately, the removal of the block function, because it does fuck-all to actually block people anymore. There were a lot of people on Xitter whose tweets I didn’t want to see, and this change was simply a dealbreaker. Plus, some big names that I often watch on YouTube / used to follow on Xitter were beginning to make their move. Finally, I’m now able to commit to Bluesky full-time. And even though it’s not feature-complete, there’s so many things I like better about it:

• Content feeds and the “Discover” tab. I’m no longer under the whims of a single algorithm and I get to decide what I see. For example, I have a feed for seeing only posts from my mutuals, and feeds for subjects I’m interested in like gaming and astronomy. The “Discover” tab also does a much better job at displaying posts and people that might interest me in my opinion.

• It’s open-source. People with a hundred times more coding experience than me can contribute and make the site better to use. Bluesky’s feature set will only continue to grow from here.

• No ads. I can scroll through my feed without seeing an ad for a game I will never install. I’m aware that this probably isn’t sustainable for the site, and I’ll be expecting a subscription model where you can pay for cosmetic features, greater character length, and longer / higher-quality video uploads or something. But at least that would be a slightly tempting purchase.

• No bots and engagement farmers. I can open up the replies to a post and see actual humans having actual conversations with each other. And these conversations are all civil. Not a single rage bait in sight.

• Blocking a user actually blocks them! Wow!

• On the topic of blocking, moderation lists. This is the huge one for me. I can block massive groups of transphobes, zoophiles, AI “artists”, meme stealers, and other scum of the earth with just a few clicks. I will admit, it is a very nuclear approach, and there are a few flaws in user-curated lists (such as those users going rogue and just adding people they don’t like), but if it means I no longer have to worry about interacting with the types of people I mentioned, I can live with these flaws.

It’s sort of weird to say, but these recent events have been both a blessing and a curse for me. If it wasn’t for what happened, I wouldn’t have committed to my Bluesky account and made a bunch of new online friends (a lot more than on Xitter, by the way). I can only hope that more YouTubers and news accounts make the switch, so I can say goodbye to that other hellhole for good.