My take on Bluesky

Well, here we go again. This is supposed to be a technical blog, but I enjoy giving my opinion more and more. This is a direct reply/reaction to the discussion Ian and Aaron had on Mostly Technical. An alternative title is "Twitter vs. Bluesky." You've been warned.

• Mainstream
• Discover VS Following feed
• Sharing a link
• → TLDR

# Mainstream

What I consider mainstream is that my IRL friends are on it.

Bluesky is not mainstream yet.

And I hope it will never be.

When I registered on Twitter in 2009 (that long 😲), there were only tech people on it. A few years later, I remember my IRL friends saying, "Did you see this new thing called Twitter?" and my reply was always, "Yeah man, I've been on it from the beginning, years ago, and it's great. "

Some years later, everyone is telling me that the content is shit and they don't go anymore. But I'm still happy there because of one thing: I handpicked every people I follow.

I hear Aaron complaining about politics and sports stuff on Twitter/Bluesky, and Ian about some gory things that pop up. I never had those. I mean here and there, but not as much as you seem to have in the American feed algorithm.

Maybe the problem comes from who you are following. I remember following a friend who tweeted about the NBA and football (⚽️ the real one with a ball at your foot) all day long, and it was poisoning my beautiful tech Twitter. I unfollowed him immediately and added football as a muted word ^^

Muted words are awesome.

Mainstream people are noisy.

# Discover VS Following feed

I always preferred the Following feed.

I want my feed to be chronological so I can see the content from accounts I chose to follow. The same goes for YouTube btw.

I discover new people through retweets. Much like real life, you meet someone new through a common party or recommendation. It the retweeted tweet is cool: you go to their profile, and if their content seems to be of interest to you, you click on that "Follow" button. Easy.

And you know what the cool part is? You can "Unfollow" when it's no longer in your interest.

I do click on the "Discover" and "For You" tabs from time to time when I finish reading my Following tab, but only when I'm bored.

We're not meant to read every f*cking thing that happens in the internet.

Just focus on what you enjoy reading and learning.

# Sharing a link

I mentioned how great the early Twitter era was, but there’s something I didn’t tell you: it replaced my RSS feed. Every major blog had a bot account that posted new articles, and I loved scrolling to the top to read my news.

However, someone at Twitter decided that this was no longer a good thing..

I think that lowering the visibility of tweets with links was a terrible mistake. I know why they did that, still a mistake. I hated every moment I had to click on a tweet to see the link attached to it.

Also, I believe that displaying views and monetising them significantly contributed to making Twitter a worse place. Tweeting should not be a job or a daily goal.

Seeing liked posts on my feed made it worse too. If the person wanted me to know, he would have clicked on the retweet button.

I don't know what could make Twitter great again.

And it's too early to say if Bluesky is that shiny.

# → TLDR

• In 2009, Twitter replaced IRC and RSS for me.
• Bluesky is great because of the lack of algorithms.
• Stay in the Following tab, read it as your newspaper, and stop doom scrolling.
• Muted words are important on every social network.
• You can control what you see on social networks.
• Stats are what make people chase vanity.

Still don't know who you are and why you read such articles. Hope you enjoyed!

Bonus, thanks to Bluesky comment Statamic addon, you can comment on my blog now.