Bluesky an' clear: the social media app that will definitely last forever

seems like the owners/employees have basically been bullied off their own platform. apart from one SWE they've completely stopped posting. truly outstanding effort from the userbase.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, July 14, 2023 3:17 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

'scuse me, while I diss bluesky.

Not a screenshot but: the post is from a bsky team technical advisor that says “Some of that Blue.” with a photo of a blue sky with which is just not remotely helpful.

To you, no. If you consider that some people reading might be colour-blind, though...

I almost went back to LiveJournal after seeing my posts from the 2000s and missing writing in paraphernalia, and then I found it was owned by Russians and…subject to Russian law.

(Also am in Bluesky and it feels like me and Albini and Parton Oswalt hanging out in a Delta Skylounge.)

Xp: ha well they did include an alt text so that’s good

TIL blueski was (probably) a pun

Holy SHIT you are not ready for this pic.twitter.com/1wMD4Jq9Kp

— Lauren McKenzie (@TheMcKenziest) July 14, 2023

Bluesguy

― underwater as a compliment (Eazy), Friday, July 14, 2023 11:11 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Lol

I joined ello but lord only knows when I was last on it or if the account still exists

i was @lebronjames on ello

in case anyone wants an invite code

bsky-social-ufxqd-dszmo
bsky-social-2biwx-cqxgy

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

both taken

I'm on there now as chants.bsky.social. Haven't found very many people to follow on there, idk.

"I joined ello but lord only knows when I was last on it or if the account still exists"

the app still exists, so I assume the network does (I think I wound up deleting it, but I would occasionaly open it up as recently as a year ago and see just random images). Confusingly Ello is also now the name of a more high profile reading app that has nothing to do with old Ello.

If anyone wants to follow me on there I’m matthewbalaam.bsky.social - I won’t post much except the odd link to a radioshow or gig probably.

bluesky cant hope to compete with twitter until they get video so you can watch the cop eat shit on the slide

Have atthem:

bsky-social-w77g6-ysjch
bsky-social-zsizl-emv5i
bsky-social-efm3v-h6eeh
bsky-social-7ch5w-6blgf

Thanks!

thanks!

all taken (not by me, alas)

I’m on there, easy enough to find.

I've got to keep an eye out for the next invite dump!

Voilà

bsky-social-jl33a-obpxg
bsky-social-q5c6l-q6owc

Thanks!

welcome :)

if anybody needs one just DM me on slack or twitter, I've got 5

will do ASAP, I'm stuck somewhere else right now. are you easy to find on Twitter?

yeah I'm @smashedmcdouble

or I can just ilxmail you if yours works josh

that would be great, thanks! I am pretty sure my Gmail address is in my profile.

So jklein04 AT gmail.com. Thanks again! (Looks like I couldn't DM you on twitter if I wanted to without twitter blue)

I just used the ilxmail interface

Got it, thanks! Will start porting over twitter peeps and whatnot later today. Now I need to figure out how to change my ilxmail, lol.

yeah i don't want to post mine here because you're nominally repsonsible for who you invite and people get banned if their invites misbehave but i have a few. ilxmail me if you need one.

I'm not even sure how my ilxmail works. Is that just the address I used to originally sign up/register? My login ID? How do I change that without re-registering?

https://ilxor.com/ILX/Pages/editprofile.jsp ?

No, that didn't do it. When I send an email (to myself) through that portal, by clicking on my screen name, it just sends to my original login ID, which is an old email address. But when I try to change that old login address to a new login address, my current email, it logs me out, because it no longer matches the one associated with the password. Hmm.

who do we follow on bluesky?

everybody cool follows tracerhand iirc

thats right

I'm not nominally responsible enough to give a fuck about this platform or any of the people on it, anything online where you need invites to access it is for wankers, apart from private torrent sites - I don't make the rules.

I'd never lower myself to ask for a fucking invite code and then get precious about who you are going to give them to. Ohh can't have any riff raff here. It's a site for snobby supercilious wankers - lol, even worse than this one!

aww

Haha, funny posts. To be fair to them though, it costs a lot of money and takes a lot of infrastructure for a site like Twitter/Bluesky to run – as it is whenever there is a flood of new people the site starts to stop loading posts etc.

Yeah, it is notably sluggish at the best of times.

Lotta placeholder accounts there right now with virtually no activity (including Tracer's, lol). I often can't tell if they are squatters trying to steal/scam the handle or legit mirrors of their twitter accounts.

I don't know anything about this app other than I agree it is pronounced like brewski

i'm still trying to "find my voice" josh

also need to settle on my bio, something like "Flâneur. Appreciator of gin. #fuck2017."

ok, so a few months back i added my email to the waiting list.
i got my code today so signed up.
how is it within a few hours i have several followers that i have no connection with !?
i mean, i have done no promo.
is there something about this place that i have yet to understand, or is it cos the first thing i did was follow ned ?!

A response: https://www.garbageday.email/p/safe-and-cozy-in-your-doomsday-bunker

I don’t think the media and political elites on X are necessarily being “dragged” to the right. And don’t our comrades from the British Isles always tell us there are plenty of leftists on X?

if only we had stayed on twitter and kept yelling at dem think tank workers trump would be dead by now

ugggh that makes my media studies brain twitch

"I need people on the busiest site to placate my ego" is exactly what got us into this situation to begin with. Positive or negative, against your views or for them, you can find very vocal groups online that has no sense of practicality or publish sphere compromise because their entire bit is yelling their demands constantly. If you can't triangulate a stance or stable approach that's not "the least people yell at me, the most people praise me" based purely on social media comments, you're already unhinged.

some columnist getting yelled at for two days online isn't the same as civilians getting bombed but you'd really be hard pressed to find a difference in some people's coverage

I don’t think the media and political elites on X are necessarily being “dragged” to the right.

I suspect that David Roberts, a former Vox writer who has a newsletter and a podcast that focus largely on energy and environmental policy, may have felt like his ideas were more influential when he was on a platform populated by a lot of media and political insiders. And he likely feels that those insiders who have stayed on Twitter are now paying more attention to right-wingers (because that's who Twitter promotes) and less attention to left-wingers (because many have left Twitter entirely). Once upon a time, Beltway reporters and congressional staffers were retweeting David Roberts; now they're retweeting Richard Hanania.

A lot of people have made the point that text-based social media is niche and not the most efficient way to have broad, popular influence in 2026, which is true. However, because a lot of those media and political insiders *are* on Twitter, it still probably does have an outsized influence on elite thought, which has various trickle-down effects.

https://i.postimg.cc/sgR4DSJ4/image.png

Bluesky is kinda lame for sure, but I don't know what anyone thinks is a good alternative. "Come back to X," no fuck off. I do have an anonymous X account so I can see what people I write about post, but I have zero interest in actually engaging on there. Any time I'm on it for more than 10 minutes it depresses me.

Even boring old Facebook is feeding me white supremacist content now. I've never found Instagram very useful for anything. And OK if all of these are just short-form video sites now, then that's not good or useful to me either because I don't make or care about short-form video.

It's all broken afaict.

yeah the social media era is pretty much over theres either niche platforms like twitter or bluesky or algo video sites instagram tiktok youtube, posting is dead rip posting

doesn't help when bluesky's down every other day, as it seems to be right now

I hate how irritable it is making me, which is probably a sign that I'm addicted.

"it" = the outage (although bad posts often make me irritable, too)

its weird how many websites have become unreliable since llm code gen became industry standard, prob just a coincidence

wish I’d invested in big cloudflare/cloudfront a few years ago. all those CDN/bot blockers are in front of everything now

yeah its crazy how much of the internet runs through cloudflare

Been bored enough to scrape bottom on the app lately. It has a real focus group feel, like they imagine this is what appeals to the lowest common denominator but in truth it mostly appeals to no one.

No idea if this is guided from the top down or if they’re just neoliberal grifters opening themselves up to the usual targeted manipulation.

Plenty of toxic concern trolling and far right dog whistles down here though.

you hate Reddit, now bluesky

MUTE

MUTE

Thought my account was suspended for a second, heh.

I’m sorry. I’ve been remiss in my duties and I offer my heartfelt apologies.