Bluesky: Still Not Very Good

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I didn’t post about this when it happened, because, honestly, I’m unsure how much attention I want to give toxic people, and, after so many years of this being routine from people with Main Character Syndrome (see: narcissism) on social media, it’s tiring. But, Bluesky was an unwelcoming hellscape when it required invite codes to join, and it’s still exactly that, except now it has millions of people on it. Of course, there’s the drama surrounding Jesse Singal’s presence on the network, and some trans woman who made a bot that made a trust and safety team member’s porn likes full-public-facing, but this isn’t really about that. At least not right now.

I’m going to be fully transparent, again, like I always am: I came out as trans in 2012, and I began transition in that same year. Things were rough, because I was at this pivotal position in life where I didn’t know who I wanted to be, and I didn’t know who I was, and I was suffering from anxiety already, before I jumped in. I made mistakes with my family, and things got dark for a while (they aren’t anymore). I lost my job because of harassment I had been enduring, and HR’s inability to take any action whatsoever. It transformed me into someone with crippling anxiety, and that of a person who could not function in public.

My first interactions with the trans community were on Reddit, where people posted photos of their faces and asked how well they “pass,” and people would routinely tear others down and talk about things that are either very hard to change, or can’t change at all. I had people telling me they liked my face before transition more than in the midst of it, and all of these experiences kind of setup my mindset for the following five years that went by (including the stalker I gained from the aforementioned subreddits).

I didn’t, and never had any community offline. Every trans woman I came into contact with in offline spaces ended up causing me some kind of pain, or heartbreak, for whatever reason. A girl in Philadelphia who used me for a day as a ride around town while she spouted off racist remarks about random people passing us by. A girl in West Virginia who is, coincidentally, also currently posting on Bluesky, who used me to make her ex girlfriend jealous, and then viciously abused me by pretending to attempt to take her own life over the phone, to me. Another who was a locksmith at the time, who I saw on and off for over a year, who ended our time together by telling me that I wasn’t “dating material.” After, again, well over a year.

I met someone I knew from Twitter for coffee, and she proceeded to never speak to me again, afterward, only because, I’m assuming, I didn’t ask to see her again.

And then there was the detransed person I knew from my job at the time, who was one of the most horrible people I’ve ever known, and had the displeasure of interacting with.

It’s safe to say, there’s no such thing as community offline. Or, at least, there never was.

Online, it wasn’t much better.

I came into contact with Laurelai Bailey, and in my extremely vulnerable state, I was manipulated, and then held emotionally and psychologically hostage for years, and I think this was a major contributor to my inability to ever belong to a community of any sort (Bailey has an extremely long paper-trail of being a social parasite online, among other things. Such as a rapist, and an FBI snitch).

I tried to find community on Tumblr, which didn’t happen, because Tumblr is very bad at actually connecting people together who have the same interests, and there were more bigots on Tumblr, than anything. I tried to find community on Twitter, and found endless toxic popularity contests and mean-girling. I tried to find community on Mastodon, and in my constant turmoil, I was banned, and then banned again (kitty.town), and then banned again (deadinsi.de), and then banned again (cybre.space)–Every single time someone decided to troll me, or attack me for my views, or how I looked, or what-have-you. I do not have good experiences with third-party fedi admins. Which is why I now run my own instance (tech bros who run instances routinely villianize those who are being attacked, rather than villainize the people doing the attacking).

I became part of the Twitter synthwave scene, and found some kind of community, albeit, it wasn’t a trans community. It was mostly men, who, years after, I realize were only tolerating my presence. Suffice to say, despite having a bestselling dark-synth album, I was ejected from that community after exactly one complaint against a transphobic comment, to the response of hundreds of people within Twitter-synthwave dogpiling and harassing me. I was muted and blocked by streaming radio stations, and my label (at the time), seemingly vanished from the internet completely. Then I was, again, on my own.

This kind of coincides, or leads up to me being banned from hackers.town on Mastodon, but that was more of the same in regards to what I’ve already mentioned: Tech bros and their sycophants, with backwards ideologies in regards to harassers and victims.

And you might be asking yourself at this point, “What’s this got to do with Bluesky?”

You see, I have to give some backstory here (and there is so much more to it than this), because it won’t make sense if I don’t.

I joined Bluesky over a year ago (as of posting this), because I finally got an invite code, and despite putting my transition on pause (which I could probably argue is more to do with severe anxiety and fear than anything else), I still wanted to find community. Which, at this point, I’m almost certain does not exist, anywhere. But, the problem with Bluesky, is that it has attracted all of the people who made Twitter shitty back in 2014: Harassers, narcissists, and self-described “mean girls.”

I recall a block list operator on Bluesky (who eventually got pushed off of the platform) who posted along with someone at the bsky domain “benni.gay” or something? And this Bennie, was, or still is, one of those strange people who not only identify with violent slurs, but regularly post them. We’re talking about “tranny” here. And me, with all of this disgusting backstory of nonstop bullshit, comes into contact with this person, and of course my reaction was, “Hey can you not do that.”

And, you know, since, apparently new-gen trans people have decided that slurs aren’t slurs, and I still get much, much younger trans women on Bluesky questioning me like, “What do you mean tranny is a slur?” I can only assume that there is an extreme lack of education in these faux online communities. But!

I questioned this person, and before tossing her a mute, I felt it was courtesy to at least ask or say, “Can we not post these kinds of words without a warning of some sort?”

You know what happened next. You already know.

Dogpiling, harassment, vicious narcissism, and violent denial of lived experience.

Needless to say, I originally deleted my account because of this, and joined Threads for a while, to begin normal-posting. And then, after a while, I launched my own Mastodon instance, and herein began where we are today, a year later.

But, you see, Bluesky has been gaining popularity, so … why not try again?

Oh, well, okay. So that was a bad idea.

And you can probably already guess, this lead to … harassment! Dogpiling! And eventual block-listing!

Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Maybe I’m too chill, or I give people too much benefit of the doubt. Maybe I’m emotionally non-existent, because of my history, and therefore can’t really see this coming anymore. Or, maybe online communities, especially and specifically those revolving around trans communities, aren’t good and are very bad, actually.

To be part of one of these communities, you have to subject yourself to bad jokes, labeling yourself with slurs that violent attackers have actually used against you, right before attempting to snatch you out of the driver side seat of your car (this happened, to me), and all-around act like a petulant, vapid psychopath, with no morals, or qualms with anything unless it affects you directly.

Well.

Merry Christmas, mother-freakers.

I stay on Mastodon, despite the numerous failures of admins across different instances, because it’s an online experience that I can completely control, while running my own instance, and own community. And even if nobody ever joins mkultra.monster, at least I can’t be ejected from my own platform for having the audacity to have feelings about things, and morals.

But I do think, at this point, Bluesky is beyond a failed experiment, because all it does is emulate the worst parts of Twitter, before Twitter became only the worst parts.