willingly using social media in a public-facing manner in 2024

When I was making the about page for this blog, I ran into an issue that, hindsight being 20:20, was entirely my fault for missing the whole point of an about page. See, the reason most people had them is a means of telling people both who you are, and where else on their little computer you might exist. I can kind of tell people who I am, that’s perfectly fine.

Problem: you need to exist in places other than one, niche website host and an MMO to accomplish the latter. I’ve been publically isolated off most social media sites for a long, long time, and in my defense, I do think that’s perfectly reasonable.

This is, shockingly, not that related to what’s, uh, been happening with Twitter, I left that years before one guy was forced by a literal court of law to purchase it–and honestly, I’m sure even in its current state, it probably isn’t even close to the worst I’ve used, even accounting for the people within it.^{[1]Link to footnote 1} For the most part, it’s just a matter of it being a massive social media that’s the problem. Fact of the matter is, social media was terrible even during the years everyone loves to swear up and down that it was the golden years.

Social media, as a whole, comes off as something where you have to actively be on the defensive, not as result of what you say, but as a result of what a random stranger on the internet, spending their hours actively looking for a reason to explain why they feel so miserable, has decided you actually said. I’m sure I don’t need to explain this phenomena, as by existing on any of these sites for long enough, you’ll always meet at least one or two people who have arbitrarily decided that you are a kind of -phobic, and if you make the mistake of engaging with them to ask why they think that, you inadvertently learn that they’re a different kind of -phobic towards you, specifically, and so they instinctively assumed you hate them.

The number of times I’ve had to deal with some random accusation of biphobia, despite having never even mentioned the word bisexual, merely because I mentioned I personally did not like men and chose to emphasize that I do not like men, is obscene.

It was made worse by the fact that, for a long time, “alternatives” were generally real bad, too. There’s some small problems here and there; on some level, many people yearn for a forum, a bulletin board service of some sort, but because we’re about a decade and a half removed from the last time forums were relevant, we’re at the point where people don’t remember what forums are, and so don’t recognize they just want the small community with specific topics that a normal-ass forum provides. Mastodon’s big sell is, for all intents and purposes, that because you can self-host your own instance, and then moderate that instance, and maybe even close off that instance from everyone else, you can just… make a forum, but worse.

Did you know modern forum technology just has twitter-like functionality built in? You could, instead of making a forum but worse, have both a twitter-like and also an actual forum for discussion.

However, that’s kind of minor compared to the actual issue: the people. Nobody hates Tumblr because of some niche quirk about blog editing or whatever, they hate it because you’ll get a random anonymous ask saying you’re “following someone problematic”, without even mentioning by name who it was, and then subsequently getting a second anonymous ask getting mad you aren’t unfollowing the unnamed someone, and then eventually in 3-5 months you stumble upon the post that makes someone you follow “problematic” and it’s like said peridot from steven universe is “inherently puntable” or some other shit that doesn’t matter in the real world.

Those people are going to move to those alternatives. Those same people, mysteriously, make those same alternatives just as awful as what came before, because none of them bother with having mechanisms to let you ignore or block those people that don’t just flat-out involve blocking off entire communities around them. You can’t really fix that, because their psychological poisoning comes from dedicating too much time to the very sites you’re interacting with them on.

It’s perhaps not too shocking, then, that the one time I decided I’m willing to commit to an alternative, it’s because Bluesky builds blocklists directly into the system.

Yes, you have blocklists. You can nuke large swaths of pro-AI people, people who are likely to annoy you, racists and transphobes, whatever. No third party tool that might stop working years from now, that shit’s already socketed into the core. Not only this, but blocks don’t work like they do anywhere else, they’re absolute fucking nukes. Every interaction they have with you, from quotes to replies, ceases to exist next to your posts, meaning a lot of the mechanisms that enable being annoying online just stops working with this protocol.

Oh, right, it’s also a protocol? Like, not a platform, not a website or app, a protocol in the same way that email is a protocol. That’s something I imagine a lot of people don’t recognize, because even big techie dudes on social media seem confused as to the “profit motive”, not realizing that it’s not trying to be a website. Who knows if it sticks that landing in the long run, but the core idea here is that Bluesky doesn’t want to replace Twitter, it also wants to have all the framework needed for it to be, in itself, replaceable as needed.

It is, quite possibly, the first self-aware social media network, the only one I’ve ever witnessed that is purpose-built to resist the exact kinds of dumb, stupid bullshit social media networks will enable if left unchecked. I can use it, and I can talk to my friends, and repost^{[2]Link to footnote 2} random shit I think is cool, and it’s just nice. It feels like what social media kind of once looked like, back when I wasn’t fully aware of accounts named @wholesomekawaii manually replying to every single person to explain why all pansexuals were going to hell or whatever.

I have no idea if it stays this way. Really, there’s a good shot that there’s still one major flaw, one I just don’t see quite yet, that renders it just as unusable, for my purposes of having a large public venue on the internet to spout shit on, but for now, it’s fantastic.