Bluesky Is Growing On Me

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I’ve had some criticisms of Bluesky, ever since it opened. Albeit, I had some bad experiences with some users who seem to have also been chased off of the platform for the way they treat others. But, I also have been skeptical about its mode of decentralization (where is it?), and them being VC backed, and recently funded by a crypto company. But, things are changing …

They’re changing, because the social media landscape is changing. And I don’t mean, “Musk took over Twitter, so we probably have to go somewhere else” in a means of changing, but more like, “All corporate social media with lax moderation methods run by billionaires is probably a good idea to flee from.”

And, for me, personally, looking at potentially everything becoming more expensive, and my bad experiences with being on Mastodon instances that aren’t owned by me personally, I’m looking at what I may need to do in the future.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the fediverse. But I have had to leave at least five different instances due to unjust banning, or extremely overzealous moderators who seek power in a digital space in order to a fill a void where they have none.

And for me, that’s a problem.

I’m a creator, I run a website, and now I also run a server with numerous scripts that showcase what I have, and can do. I run a digital “business” in Second Life, and I’m working simultaneously on an album and a novel. I’m a developer, a webmaster, a writer, and a sound designer, and I can’t put my future, and potential future career in the hands of people who could silence me at a moment’s notice, just because I, for example, said “fuck off” to a troll.

Yeah, I’m still talking about the hackers.town incident.

Call me jaded, but I just don’t know if I can trust admins of a fediverse instance to not screw me over, since this is something that has happened to me, over and over.

Now, that’s not to say Bluesky doesn’t have methods of silencing people for no reason. They have public blocklists. But! What these blocklists can’t do, is erase your entire online presence in a matter of minutes.

And that’s where I find myself at a theoretical future crossroads where, suddenly, maybe I can’t pay 40 some dollars a month upkeep on my personal Mastodon instance, and I have to look at the alternatives.

Albeit, Wafrn, and Kitsunes.club are decent enough fediverse servers, and their admins haven’t clobbered me out of existence (which would suck, because I’m also a partial admin/moderator on Wafrn), for one reason or another, they just feel like an extension of my online identity, rather than one that’s central. This isn’t a criticism of either of these places, but more probably just me being … weird. I don’t know. Owning my own Mastodon instance has given me a feeling of real control over how people interact with, and also perceive me online. And on something like Bluesky, I can sort of also achieve that, by forwarding my domain to my username, and redirecting my little bots to separate accounts (which I’ve already done).

The thing is, I’m probably way overthinking all of this, but in this bout of turmoil I’m experiencing, Bluesky has grown on me a bit. I’ve figured out how to use “feeds” to create my own “algorithm” and I’ve setup some placeholder moderation lists, and it feels … okay. It could feel alright, if, for some reason, I suddenly have to move there.

But … maybe I just haven’t given Wafrn or Kitsunes enough of a chance to be central to my online identity.

What I do know, is that it’s important to have control over your identity online, and to own your voice. To give the wrong people power over you in any regard, or facet, would be a mistake.