Blue skies

I was a Twitter user for over a decade, not because I truly loved the site, but because as far as social media went, it kind of felt like the best of a bad bunch to me. It still allowed you to just see a chronological feed simply containing the posts of people you followed (if grudgingly), it focused on text (even if images and videos were available) and it had a clean layout that wasn't cluttered with ads, games or other "features" I didn't give a damn about.

Then Elon Musk came in and things degraded rapidly. An acquaintance gave me an invite code to Bluesky in July last year. It felt more like the Twitter of old again, but was very quiet. Still, I persisted and continued to post there, even if I was still checking Twitter as well.

About three months ago, my Twitter account got locked down for not having a birth date tied to it, and since I was already annoyed with the site, I didn't bother to unlock it and switched to posting on Bluesky exclusively. There were some people left on Twitter that I still missed, but things got more active week by week.

A couple of weeks ago, things suddenly picked up momentum and the site's user growth accelerated. Yesterday it supposedly gained a million new users in a single day, despite having some technical difficulties (that were apparently unrelated to the new sign-ups).

It was also the evening of a SWTOR dev stream, and I added to the Bluesky chatter about the subject myself. This morning I woke up to more than 30 notifications... I don't remember the last time Twitter was this active for me, if ever, and I had five times the amount of followers there.

In general it's just been... weirdly enjoyable? It's like old Twitter, but also based on an open source protocol, with lots of ways for users to contribute to making the experience better and an express intent not to sell out. I don't know if it will last, but it's nice to dream of a type of social media that could be nicer and focused on people actually enjoying themselves.

The next few months are definitely going to be interesting, because the site has finally hit the point of virality. Mainstream media are starting to mention it, and as more people join and are having a good time, it creates a feedback loop of everyone telling their friends and more people wanting to join. It's no longer just "join Bluesky because Twitter sucks now" but "join Bluesky because it's fun", which I think is an important difference. At the very least, I'll try to enjoy it while it lasts.