Skies were gray but they’re not gray anymore

Not a paid endorsement!

Though there’s a lot about the internet I still like, I can’t say that it’s been offering me a lot of fresh new experiences. Really, what’s it done for us lately? Last time I was charmed by a New Thing was Vines, probably; since then, what? AI, the devil’s own shit? Please.

When one of the previous pleasures of the internet, Twitter, started to putrefy, I explored new alternatives. My curiosity and attention were not at first much rewarded. Mastodon was an enormous hassle to set up and the fediverse was hell to navigate. After weeks of struggle, I realized that I was only struggling because I thought I had to. I was no longer a young ‘net-surfer who picked up New Things by instinct and sympathetic vibration, so I thought my liberation from Twitter required struggle, they way middle-aged men have to work out if they want to keep playing street hoops. But in reality the labor-intensive Mastodon was like knitting or building a ship in a bottle: You either enjoyed the effort or it wasn’t worth it. And for me it wasn’t.

Threads was Facebook and out of the question, and what even was Hive? That left Bluesky which, on first contact, seemed like Twitter but smaller — and, as someone who’d moved from a very big city to a couple of smaller ones that I’d been assured were reasonable substitutes but which turned out not to be, I was not, as they say, keen.

Everything’s relative, isn’t it? Weeks, then months passed, and Twitter reeked more and more of grift and fascism and the unpleasant chaos of any enterprise run by drug-addled, blustering nepo cunt. It became a thing not to trade up from, but to actively escape.

I don’t know whether I was slow to notice or just in tune with the times, but when I revisited Bluesky I found a lot of other people who felt the same way. And this go-round I didn’t experience the platform as an underdeveloped substitute, but as a genuine upgrade — big enough to offer variety and the promise of more beyond the horizon, but cozy and welcoming enough that it felt like a place you could stretch out rather than somewhere you could only hold as much ground as you fought for.

I hear it’s a bubble and an echo chamber. I don’t care.  I’m following a lot of people I either knew and liked from Twitter, or who followed me on Bluesky, so naturally within my little sector there’s a lot of agreement and correct opinions. And I’m not getting a lot of blow-in from sealions, debate-club contrarians, scammers, bots, humans with the characteristics of bots, and assholes. In fact I’m not getting any of that because I’ve adopted a practice that is much availed and endorsed by my fellow users: speedy and preemptive blocking of people that you don’t want to hear from or talk to.

You know me — I’m a big arguer and teller-offer, and I did a lot of that on Twitter. But it struck me upon my reentry to Bluesky that there’s something to be said for not fighting all the time or even any of it. I don’t think I’ve changed much, and I’m still bitching out creeps and feebs, but I no longer instinctually engage them directly or even via quotetweet. I say my say and sit down, like at a Quaker meeting.

Because my feeling is: Who needs it? I admit I was for a while reluctant to leave Twitter because I thought it meant — as I’ve heard other people say —surrendering the field to the creeps and feebs. But Musk has already gifted them that stinking, shrinking field. They can have it.

As I suggested, this is a vibe widespread on the platform, and it has stung a lot of doucebags who are not on Bluesky -- or who are on Bluesky, but have been so mercilessly blockaded there that they can’t harass liberals the way they can on Twitter:

So we’re getting stories at rightwing strokebooks like this:

Here’s my fave quote from that:

Bluesky gained one million new users in the week after Trump won the election, but some liberals who have remained on X warn that moving to the app will only exacerbate the perception of the Left as being alienated from working-class Americans. 

There has been no end of object lessons lately on how “elitism” simply means anything rightwingers don’t like, but claiming “working-class” bonafides for a fucking social media platform is about the limit.

But their incoherent seething is just the icing on the cake. I’m held onto my Twitter handle so someone else can’t use it, but I’ve downloaded my archive, deleted the app, protected my tweets, and fucked off. @edroso.bsky.social — come up and see me sometime.