Having not been through this before, I find the emotional temperature fascinating. People feel superior for moving to Bluesky, and other people feel superior for staying on Twitter. “The best people have moved with us” and “the annoying people have left” and so on. In the end one platform will stabilise as by far the most popular (for a few years), and everyone will end up there. It’s a bit early for them to be so sure which one it will be.
I'm sad that original building is gone -- I saw a lot of good movies there for only $1 admission -- but mainly because at the time, that building seemed to young me to be the pinnacle of progress in electronics. I remember my dad using stacks of data entry cards there in the early 70s, the first time I had seen those.
11 years later I got my own account on the timeshare system there. There was no Usenet access yet, or I didn't know about it. I didn't get access to Usenet and NNTP until 1984-85. (As a Mac guy, my favorite newsgroups were comp.sys.mac and alt.binaries.mac.)
I don't think I managed to get anyone interested in computers-all-linked-to-a-worldwide-network, until about 1991 when Archie and then Gopher, could ably demonstrate the vast amount of information that was available, on a huge variety of topics, spread around the globe.
If you're interested, I first became aware of you thanks to SciBlogs. That was a really good site for a few years.
I can't really disagree with your take on Bluesky-at-the-moment. I will say this: In the beginning (I got an invitation code to the beta), I would consciously choose to go there first, just to show support and boost engagement. Over time, and as the number of users increased, I found myself spending more and more time there, compared to Tw, because I just plain like it better.
Like you, I keep my Tw account active, for several reasons.
My biggest complaint about Bluesky right now is as you said: everyone is (close to being) on the same page. I do like to debate people with whom I can reasonably disagree. Doing that on Bluesky these days often feels like the People's Front of Judea vs the Judean People's Front.
Yeah, Scienceblogs in its heyday was pretty great. They never really figured out the financial side, though, and their fumbling attempts to monetize the site ended up screwing everything up.
That's the problem with some many late great sites, isn't it? It's just not that easy to make money when all you have to offer is great content and discussions. Very sad.
My social media experience is similar, but started sooner and used somewhat different platforms. I got onto Usenet in the late 80s, and stayed with it till at least the late 90s, maybe into the early 2000s. I then went to livejournal. Livejournal became somewhat of a hellscape, and I went to dreamwidth, a derivative site. I'm still there. I also used, ran, and moderated email lists during this period, both run-your-own-server and yahoo and google offerings.
Facebook didn't have a good value proposition for me when it came out - "all your friends are here" more correctly applied to live journal and dreamwidth. Twitter was even less attractive - what on earth is worth reading, that can be said within their character count limit? And by the time they were becoming seriously popular - friends and family *were* on FaceBook - serious criticisms of their feed algorithms were well enough known that I decided not to bother.
I did create an account on Bluesky, back when invite codes were still required. I found very little content worth the effort of regularly polling yet another site. I also signed up with other rudimentary new social media attempts, mostly to reserve my preferred ID in case they took off; I mosly never visited them again after account creation.
I also follow(ed) lots of wordpress blogs. Sadly many of them have moved to substack, with its worse interface for comments and its constant shilling for money. Plus many many irrelevant to me recommendations of other blogs to follow.
When LinkedIn tried to become social media, I responded to a post I was shown. My response was shown to all my LinkedIn contacts, *but not the person I was responding to*. That was maximally useless, not to mention potentially embarrassing; I never used the misfeature again, and attempted to disable all announcements, pop-ups, etc. related to it.
The only good things I've seen about bluesky are:
1) It's possible to have an old-fashioned feed algorithm: show me everything this set of posters have posted, sorted chronologically.
2) Elon Musk is not involved.
#1 is especially important, given the way Facebook, twitter and others prioritize "engagement" by giving you whatever will make you most angry and upset.
I presume it's just as prone to selling personal data to spammers as any of its competitors, and probably full of advertisements helpfully removed by my adblocking tools. (Dreamwidth doesn't have ads - you pay for your account with money, not interruptions and wasted time.)
Garbage Day talked recently about Bluesky and the promise and yearning for "the main artery of the Internet." But, in addition to the inevitable disillusionment about every new platform that you're reminding us about...it's not 2013 anymore, or even 2017. The good stuff (as well as the bad) is way too abundant to be contained in one place. I like Oliver Burkeman's advice: It's a river, not an inbox. Dip your cup in, use purifying tablets when necessary, keep moving.
Having not been through this before, I find the emotional temperature fascinating. People feel superior for moving to Bluesky, and other people feel superior for staying on Twitter. “The best people have moved with us” and “the annoying people have left” and so on. In the end one platform will stabilise as by far the most popular (for a few years), and everyone will end up there. It’s a bit early for them to be so sure which one it will be.
I first rode onto the Internet via a Bitnet at Bronfman Hall on Hoxsey. 1983.
Sound familiar?
Indeed, that's the late, not-particularly-lamented building in which I first used Gopher...
I'm sad that original building is gone -- I saw a lot of good movies there for only $1 admission -- but mainly because at the time, that building seemed to young me to be the pinnacle of progress in electronics. I remember my dad using stacks of data entry cards there in the early 70s, the first time I had seen those.
11 years later I got my own account on the timeshare system there. There was no Usenet access yet, or I didn't know about it. I didn't get access to Usenet and NNTP until 1984-85. (As a Mac guy, my favorite newsgroups were comp.sys.mac and alt.binaries.mac.)
I don't think I managed to get anyone interested in computers-all-linked-to-a-worldwide-network, until about 1991 when Archie and then Gopher, could ably demonstrate the vast amount of information that was available, on a huge variety of topics, spread around the globe.
If you're interested, I first became aware of you thanks to SciBlogs. That was a really good site for a few years.
I can't really disagree with your take on Bluesky-at-the-moment. I will say this: In the beginning (I got an invitation code to the beta), I would consciously choose to go there first, just to show support and boost engagement. Over time, and as the number of users increased, I found myself spending more and more time there, compared to Tw, because I just plain like it better.
Like you, I keep my Tw account active, for several reasons.
My biggest complaint about Bluesky right now is as you said: everyone is (close to being) on the same page. I do like to debate people with whom I can reasonably disagree. Doing that on Bluesky these days often feels like the People's Front of Judea vs the Judean People's Front.
Yeah, Scienceblogs in its heyday was pretty great. They never really figured out the financial side, though, and their fumbling attempts to monetize the site ended up screwing everything up.
That's the problem with some many late great sites, isn't it? It's just not that easy to make money when all you have to offer is great content and discussions. Very sad.
My social media experience is similar, but started sooner and used somewhat different platforms. I got onto Usenet in the late 80s, and stayed with it till at least the late 90s, maybe into the early 2000s. I then went to livejournal. Livejournal became somewhat of a hellscape, and I went to dreamwidth, a derivative site. I'm still there. I also used, ran, and moderated email lists during this period, both run-your-own-server and yahoo and google offerings.
Facebook didn't have a good value proposition for me when it came out - "all your friends are here" more correctly applied to live journal and dreamwidth. Twitter was even less attractive - what on earth is worth reading, that can be said within their character count limit? And by the time they were becoming seriously popular - friends and family *were* on FaceBook - serious criticisms of their feed algorithms were well enough known that I decided not to bother.
I did create an account on Bluesky, back when invite codes were still required. I found very little content worth the effort of regularly polling yet another site. I also signed up with other rudimentary new social media attempts, mostly to reserve my preferred ID in case they took off; I mosly never visited them again after account creation.
I also follow(ed) lots of wordpress blogs. Sadly many of them have moved to substack, with its worse interface for comments and its constant shilling for money. Plus many many irrelevant to me recommendations of other blogs to follow.
When LinkedIn tried to become social media, I responded to a post I was shown. My response was shown to all my LinkedIn contacts, *but not the person I was responding to*. That was maximally useless, not to mention potentially embarrassing; I never used the misfeature again, and attempted to disable all announcements, pop-ups, etc. related to it.
The only good things I've seen about bluesky are:
1) It's possible to have an old-fashioned feed algorithm: show me everything this set of posters have posted, sorted chronologically.
2) Elon Musk is not involved.
#1 is especially important, given the way Facebook, twitter and others prioritize "engagement" by giving you whatever will make you most angry and upset.
I presume it's just as prone to selling personal data to spammers as any of its competitors, and probably full of advertisements helpfully removed by my adblocking tools. (Dreamwidth doesn't have ads - you pay for your account with money, not interruptions and wasted time.)
Garbage Day talked recently about Bluesky and the promise and yearning for "the main artery of the Internet." But, in addition to the inevitable disillusionment about every new platform that you're reminding us about...it's not 2013 anymore, or even 2017. The good stuff (as well as the bad) is way too abundant to be contained in one place. I like Oliver Burkeman's advice: It's a river, not an inbox. Dip your cup in, use purifying tablets when necessary, keep moving.