My Experimentation with Bluesky is Over

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The extremely cool and awesome villain in Farcry 3 once said, “Do you know the definition of insanity?” Doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. And I feel like I’ve been doing that with Bluesky over the past few years that it’s been a platform. But there’s a certain point where you have to stop yourself and be like, “Maybe this app and/or the people on it are just as bad as the people on Twitter?”

From the day I registered and got my invite-code, when I asked someone to give warning before addressing her followers with a slur, and getting dogpiled for it, to sharing my personal experiences and issues with no one in-particular, and mostly trying to explain to people that my experiences aren’t exactly the same as everyone else’s, and getting dogpiled for it. To now, watching someone share donation requests with the network around Bluesky, by framing it around threats against their own life if strangers don’t donate, and me addressing that and saying, like, “Hey, this is bad. You should not do this. You absolutely shouldn’t pin the potential end of your life on other people just because they haven’t sent you money.” And getting dogpiled for it.

I’m done. I’ve had enough.

The ideological differences between extreme left purity police on Bluesky, and extreme right conservatives on Twitter (X) are different, but their behavioral patterns and the way they treat people are exactly the same. Like sociopaths: glib, lacking in concern or empathy for others, and a measure of self importance so great that it doesn’t matter who they harm, as long as it benefits themselves.

Is it the way algorithms have worked for the past decade and a half that has made people this way? Or have a lot of people just always been susceptible to being downright pieces of shit?

I don’t know at this point, and I don’t care. What I do know is that none of these people see themselves as evil, or bad, and there is no way to convince them that they are.

I once joined Bluesky because the Fediverse felt lacking in community, because all the people I’d regularly communicate with (if we got along) decided to join bsky, because choosing a server on the Fediverse is just too hard (apparently). But there’s no such thing as community. There is only every person out for themselves at the cost of everyone around them.

And I think I’ve finally decided that, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter where you go or where you post, because disgusting people are everywhere. It’s just that there’s a much higher concentration of them on certain apps, like Bluesky. And that’s not to say I haven’t had run-ins with extra extremely mega shitty people on the Fediverse as-of-late: I have. But at least on Mastodon or what-have-you, I have complete control to silence anyone who even so much as clicks on my profile wrong, through my entire server.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Why is social media even that important, anyway?”

I don’t know. I spent a lot of time on social media when I was out of work, when I didn’t really have an income, when I needed support from those who were digitally around me, and it became a thing that’s attached to me like an extra appendage, and ever since the “net split” and exodus from Twitter (X) it’s been a nonstop circulation of, “Where can I go to find what I used to have, community, support, friends, where I wont be cutting myself off from a large amount of people?”

But I just don’t care anymore.