![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So I've been using BlueSky for a few months now, and I am cautiously finding it very pleasant. The owner of Dreamwidth posts a lot on there (I skip a lot of her fanfic stuff but she also posts a lot about social media policy stuff), as does Techdirt's Mike Masnick. One fun thing that happened was that The Onion got put up for sale, and it was a Bluesky query from Ben Collins that got it done. Currently there are no ads, and very few corporate channels; you can find unofficial news feeds for all the mainstream newspapers (huh do we still call those that? seems outdated). You can set up pinned feeds, and currently my favorite is the Gift Articles/Links one, in which people share their gift news articles to the feed. Also you only see what you want to see. I only see stuff from people or feeds I follow. For the most part I'm following various journalists, especially if they've been pretty good on Palestine/Gaza.
I don't post myself a whole lot so there's not much use to following me on there. I'm still debating with myself a lot about what I want to do with an online screen presence. I certainly sometimes have things to say, but as someone said there's also the "dread of being perceived".
John Scalzi posted about his one year of Bluesky experience here:
The other aspect of Bluesky being algorithm-free (and still being relatively small; its user base currently sits at 5.5 million) is that it’s not great for being famous or being an influencer, or being a troll. I think the Bluesky technical and cultural schema confuses the famous and/or influencer and/or shitty people who come onto the service to be famous, or to influence, or to be shitty for clicks. You can’t game an algorithm to go viral, and the sort of marketing that works on other social media works less well on Bluesky, and even if it did work that way, there aren’t hundreds of millions of people to broadcast at. You can try to do all these things on Bluesky, obviously. But Instagram and TikTok and Threads and the former Twitter are all still there, and much easier to game and influence and troll. People who come to Bluesky to do those things don’t seem to stay very long.
I don't post myself a whole lot so there's not much use to following me on there. I'm still debating with myself a lot about what I want to do with an online screen presence. I certainly sometimes have things to say, but as someone said there's also the "dread of being perceived".
John Scalzi posted about his one year of Bluesky experience here:
The other aspect of Bluesky being algorithm-free (and still being relatively small; its user base currently sits at 5.5 million) is that it’s not great for being famous or being an influencer, or being a troll. I think the Bluesky technical and cultural schema confuses the famous and/or influencer and/or shitty people who come onto the service to be famous, or to influence, or to be shitty for clicks. You can’t game an algorithm to go viral, and the sort of marketing that works on other social media works less well on Bluesky, and even if it did work that way, there aren’t hundreds of millions of people to broadcast at. You can try to do all these things on Bluesky, obviously. But Instagram and TikTok and Threads and the former Twitter are all still there, and much easier to game and influence and troll. People who come to Bluesky to do those things don’t seem to stay very long.
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