BlueSky Isn’t Boring, You Are

For about the last decade, The Algorithm ™ has had control of our social media. Each app took our personal information, turned it all into demographics and showed us posts, ads and potential follows based on what other people like us would like. Did you post on Twitter about an episode of Star Trek? Well, here’s an ad for the streaming service with all the episodes of TOS. Oh, you like romance novels? Here’s the new novel everyone is talking about the most, for better or worse. Whether this targeted content was effective to you depended on the app. Pinterest worked great for me in the mid-2010s and Twitter during the Scandal/HTGAWM era kept me both entertained and informed. The Algorithm ™ for each of these was effective and gave me what I wanted from the internet, until they didn’t.

COVID is what made me notice a change. I was seeing less and less of what I was looking for on the internet and what I was being shown felt targeted in a way that was less showing me the things I would like and more showing me things that someone wanted me to like. Did you look up something about gardening? Here’s a bunch of cottagecore aesthetic videos. Looking up recipes? Have some tradwife content. Oh, you’re working out? Welcome to the manosphere. Slowly the internet became less and less useful and fun and instead became more trouble than it was worth.

Then I left Twitter.

Just before it’s full conversion to X, I realized that the site was more of a stressor than anything else for me, but I still wanted a place where I could find memes, jokes, and where the Black people of the internet were hanging out. I tried all of them, but end the end found myself mostly hanging out on BlueSky. It was refreshing, there weren’t a million posts flying down my timeline from people I wasn’t following because The Algorithm ™ decided that I needed to see it. Instead, it was a strange barrage of art, nerd shit, politics and food, and while I wasn’t having content spoon fed to me, I started curating what I wanted to see on my own. It was like Twitter pre-Elon, where if I wanted to know about a topic, I followed a bunch of people who talked about it and learned. It wasn’t perfect by a long shot, as per usual there was a racism problem for many of the early Black users, but there was no algorithm, it was just me making the space interesting for myself.

In the mass exodus from Twitter/X to BlueSky things have changed. The timeline moves faster unfortunately, but the influx of former Black Twitter users means the place is even funnier than it was before (for me personally). There’s a lot more drama, a lot more arguments, but because I’m creating space for myself when the drama I don’t want comes across my feed I can stop it easily by blocking or muting people. And the BlueSky block is nuclear, so once you hit that button you can’t see any of their content and they can’t see any of yours, and any quote posts or responses you’ve had with one another show up as broken threads. If someone doesn’t want you to communicate with them on BlueSky, you won’t be able to.

So, when I see so many articles talking about how BlueSky is dead, or it’s an echo chamber, it reminds me of the early days of The Algorithm ™. Oh, you don’t really see a whole lot of people posting? Maybe that’s because a lot of people have blocked you. You’re only seeing the same political ideas over and over and over again? Why don’t you try following other people? BlueSky doesn’t have an algorithm like Twitter/X or Insta or Pinterest, which means that your demographic information isn’t being used to push things into your feed. Instead, what you see is directly related to who you choose to follow, and what they choose to share. It’s the people on the site that spread interesting things around. The reason you aren’t seeing them is because you chose not to follow interesting people.

The transition from Twitter/X and it’s frenetic energy to BlueSky can be jarring, but it doesn’t mean that BlueSky is dead. As the exodus from Twitter/X was happening most knew there would be a change in how we were social on social media, and BlueSky is an interesting return to the basics that I think is needed so that we can figure out what we want in the future. Hopefully, once people stop expecting it to be a different site, we’ll be able to make a place that is as fun and informative as Twitter used to be, but it something all it’s own.