The Broken Promise Of The Post-Twitter Era

Nick’s status reminded me of my dormant Bluesky account and all my reasons for why it has been dormant for a while. I’ve written about this site a lot on my blog, in fact more than about any social network. I was really excited for all the things it could’ve been which it ended up failing at so spectacularly. It had so much going for it and so much brave experimentation, but all that doesn’t even out what I’m going to be discussing in this post.

My issues with Bluesky

I was mostly excited for the stackable moderation approach that I was hoping would close the gaps between traditional moderation systems and my needs. There is a project that lets you filter out anything that triggers your phobias. I really loved that and used it all the time!

My two contention points with this approach are the following: (1) it outsources the moderation of essential areas (like hate speech against marginalized groups) on unpaid volunteers like Reddit and (2) it puts the burden of moderation on the individual. It’s not up for debate that Bluesky isn’t a safe space for trans people, at least not anymore. It’s one thing to be unsafe for a given community, but it’s a whole other league of piece of shit when that community was the one who made the platform what it was. The trans community beta tested Bluesky for free, gave feedback, and was among the first communities to congregate there.

I was so disappointed to find out that Kiwi Farm cunts like Jesse Singal and adjacent scum like Brianna Wu could literally do and say whatever without getting their accounts banned. I’ve never seen a more transphobic transgender person than Brianna Wu. She deserves to rot for eternity in the darkest pits of hell, and that’s not even accounting for her dehumanizing hot takes on Palestine.

While these foot fungi roam freely on the platform, a viral AI-generated video that was playing on TVs throughout a US department showing Trump kissing Elon’s feet was taken down quickly, albeit reinstated after public outcry. It seems the moderators are perfectly capable of taking decisive action as long as those being protected are not the ones in need of protection.

And just to test the default experience, the thing Bluesky supposedly does better than other microblogging sites, I removed the 20 or so blocklists with Nazis, MAGA, and other fascist groups and the couple of moderation services I was subbed to in order to stay as close to how a default Bluesky profile is.

In the end, I was subbed to no lists and just the default moderation service (which you can’t unsubscribe from and whose decisions you just have to swallow – so much for decentralization) and went about browsing my following and the discover feed (usually installed by default, too).

You can bet I wasn’t there for more than 10 minutes at most. It felt like the platform was trying to rage bait me into dog-fighting with others with the shit suggested to me on the discover feed. I’m not talking mildly politically incorrect stuff; I’m talking people calling for some trans people’s imprisonment (ie a death sentence) and people manufacturing consent for genocide.

This was insane. I couldn’t believe that this was supposed to be a platform better than Twitter. I was seeing Twitter all over again. I don’t have any screenshots because that was a while ago and I needed to protect my mental health so I just closed the tab.

All of this discusses the myriad of moderation issues that Bluesky has, but doesn’t even touch on the failed promises of decentralization. This has been discussed better than I ever could by none other than one of the co-creators of ActivityPub Christine Lemmer-Webber upon request from an ATProto developer. It’s a long although highly insightful (and mostly non-technical) read.

Edited to add

Bluesky got investments from a blockchain company (Blockchain Capital to be exact) and pinky promises it won’t enshittify like every other VC funded clusterfuck in existence.

And we shouldn’t forget that because all posts pass through the same firehose, only that firehose (central point of failure) has to be compromised to gain access to the entire network’s content. What Hugging Face did here wasn’t against the rules and only accessed Bluesky’s open APIs, but still, all they had to do was scrape one endpoint and that’s that.

Blocks are public, so you can’t even block dicks in private. Muting doesn’t hide them from view, at least not completely, so to get rid of them, you gotta block.

What I’m using instead

So yeah, I don’t exactly know why I’m still keeping that account or why I’m discussing that site’s issues here again/at all. I was mostly done with microblogging platforms so I created a microblog of my own here on Bearblog.

You might remember that I used to mirror my Mastodon profile on this blog in its own tab in the navigation bar. Mastodon has its fair share of issues as well and I realized that I didn’t want to decide up front of what I had to say was a blog post or just a short one. I’ve had a couple of instances where I would post a toot (Mastodon tweet) that grew into a thread, something better kept on the blog. So I would delete and move it over here.

My current setup keeps everything in one place, can be followed at once, and reduces friction for me as well. All it takes to change a status into a post and vice versa is changing the tags in the post metatags. I based my status page on what Sylvia’s and Robert’s code from a few months back and adapted it to fit my theme using Ava’s microblog experiment as my inspiration. You can find the final code on my theme page.

With a status timeline on Bearblog, I don’t have comment, like, and share counters and most importantly: replies happen per email. I end up getting a lot less bullshit in my mentions this way and I’m not invited to keep scrolling after hitting “post.”

I still use Mastodon, although only for keeping up with some mutuals. For the handful of people I followed (and read) on Bluesky, I think I’m just going to add them to Reeder.

Happy (micro)blogging to you, dear reader!