I want it to be possible for everyone to switch to Bluesky. I still find it harder to use than twitter. On my iPhone it's ok. On the iPad, it is a small rectangle inside a sea of black
I'm enjoying Bluesky, and was a bit surprised that my rate of commentary and replies put me into the top 5% of most loquacious users. Still a very limited number of followers, which is fine. Sifu Tweety is there, and reliably writes things that I want to respond to.
I basically only ever look at my "Following" feed, though one of the selling points of Bluesky is supposed to be greater flexibility of feeds giving you more interesting things to read. Mostly I follow history/politics, books/authors, a smaller number into space/astronomy and then a collection of interesting weirdos. I follow just a few horny posters, but then I'm there under my real name, and there are only so many of my vices that I want to be out there in the social media world.
Without the kind of public profile that Scalzi has, and presenting as a middle-aged white guy, I don't feel the need to block many people. But I've always curated ruthlessly, and it is nice that Bluesky's approach to blocking erases pretty much all trace of what led to it, so that lowers the level of drama noticeably.
I like Bluesky fine. I've never had to block people for trolling me but I have blocked people who were trolling people I follow.
Something that's come up on Bluesky very recently is that sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom deactivated her account. When I search for her name, I see 1) reports that recent trolling and condescending comments were to blame, and that this was the straw that broke the camels back and 2) Black women share her frustration.
Something that's come up on Bluesky very recently is that sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom deactivated her account. When I search for her name, I see 1) reports that recent trolling and condescending comments were to blame, and that this was the straw that broke the camels back and 2) Black women share her frustration.
Something that's come up on Bluesky very recently is that sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom deactivated her account. When I search for her name, I see 1) reports that recent trolling and condescending comments were to blame, and that this was the straw that broke the camels back and 2) Black women share her frustration.
I think one of the concerns about the "Don't Engage, Just Block" model is that it, when their are trolls, it becomes an individual responsibility rather than a group responsibility -- which solves some problems since "group" is often poorly defined, but not without its own issues.
No worries about the duplicate posts, but I will repeat my longstanding position that no one should call themselves "Lurker". Once you've said something, you're plausibly going to say something else, and then calling you a Lurker starts sounding silly.
I am curious above exactly what happened with Prof. McMillan Cottom. I was following the larger kerfuffle that occasioned it (Black professor at Stanford tweeted something politely critical about a journalist's work, journalist's kid, himself a Stanford undergraduate and student journalist, wrote the professor a brusque email telling him he should take the tweet down, professor called the kid rude and tweeted the email exchange), but I didn't see either what she said about it or what kind of response she got.
That's too bad. I like her stuff plus she followed me there so now I'm a follower down.
She's Wikipedia Brown, right? (Truly an all-time great pseudonym.)
I haven't been able to get the hang of Twitter or Bluesky.
I've said here before that the study of modern US culture ought to be called "trollology." So I've never shied away from the work of internet trolls. But, speaking from experience, there is absolutely nothing useful to be gained from following Don Jr. on Twitter. Or Sean Spicer.
So I didn't make that mistake on BlueSky, and the result is ... boring. Even in these latter, diminished days, blogs are superior to social media. Holbo is really good on Twitter -- he actually makes me understand that as a medium, it's not hopeless. But otherwise, it seems to me that everybody's IQ goes down 40 points on Twitter. I don't expect to ever tweet. I haven't got the IQ points to spare.
I think I've said this before, but Twitter and Bluesky make me nervous. Blogging, I liked the idea of getting attention if I wrote something. Twitter and now Bluesky, I strongly prefer staying inconspicuous. I'll reply to people if something occurs to me, and I'll occasionally retweet/skeet something, but mostly I'm not saying anything.
15: Oh! RIP is the same as NMM. I had no idea.
15 this one hurts
I was at this show. Fucking killer band. RIP
https://youtu.be/nIsMU6hw5W0
It was kind of fun that one time I made a stupid joke in a reply to Jel / ani C / obb and it got over a 100 likes.
17: I had that concern when starting out on Twitter, but I've found that if you're at the very low end most of what you post doesn't get any reaction at all. Which is depressing in its own way, of course.
Welcome Lurker. Thanks for all the times you supported me in e.
One interesting aspect of how comprehensive the blocking is: if you, person A, see person B replying to person C, but C then blocked B, then the two posts get so disassociated that C's post shows as "Blocked" even though C is not blocking A. (I was in A and worried I had been blocked for some unknowable reason but was able to go to their account and confirm I was not.)
As Bluesky rounds out it is getting more annoying people - it started out with a culture colored by power users who took it with the right amount of unseriousness (see sexy Alf).
I left Mastodon partly because it was more of a tech culture that likes to lecture about people who don't "get" it and ask for extra features. Bluesky is developing to lecture people from more political POVs and for being on exTwitter at all, though not without justification.
More on exTwitter, but I've been noticing the worst edgelords from the left like to use hammer-and-sickle emoji (not technically emoji, dates back to 1993) as declarations the USSR was good, actually. There's now a blocklist for people so delineated, which has improved the experience.
The Scalzi post is interesting and may inspire me to finally sign up for Bluesky after hemming and hawing about it for a long time.
I'm not going to check Twitter to find out, but this NYT headline is just the sort of thing that can be usefully discussed in that forum:
R.F.K. Jr. Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain
I like the way the NYT phrased the diagnosis:
Mr. Kennedy, he believed, had a dead parasite in his head.
Turns out he has had mercury poisoning, too. Explains a lot.
The WaPo article on the brain worm describes him as a "healthier alternative" to the other candidates.
27: Isn't it doing that so it's undercut by the actual news? "Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate who has marketed himself to voters as a younger, healthier alternative to the two major contenders, contracted a parasitic worm that got into his brain years ago and ate a portion of it before dying, his campaign said Wednesday."
The Biden family has a higher rate of finishing a presidential campaign than the Kennedy family.
27: Probably, but at least one version of the blurb that went out on social media didn't include the "marketed himself" part and seemed to be endorsing the "healthier" framing. They may have fixed it by now though.
I like Bluesky. I don't post, or repost, and haven't even made any effort at a profile. I'm a lurker. Following a few accounts (assorted, as Doug describes in 2) gives me some entertaining reading. One of the things I find tiresome on social media is "dunking culture" where gotchas rise to the top, even if the underlying arguments are obviously bogus. Or maybe that's Edgelordism. To the extent that the block-early-and-often ethos at Bluesky tamps that down, it's a good thing. I try to follow those of you I can find over there, though for some reason I never could find PF, who promised never to post anyway, so that probably doesn't matter.
re: rfk and as i posted on bsky, the only useful news i derived from the nyt article is that all these self-reported ailments (brain worms, mercury poisoning, heart issues, etc.) were disclosed in a depo as part of an attempt to establish in divorce proceedings that he has a diminished earning potential. now, in my view this is evidence of a shitty character that pales to almost nothing in comparison with the deaths of children in samoa, but it certainly isn't inconsistent with concluding that rfk is a spectacularly shitty human.
Electing a Kennedy who already has a big hole in his brain might be seen as a time-saving alternative to the procedure followed in previous cases, which had things happen the other way round
Also, 32, has something awful happened in Samoa?
34: https://apnews.com/article/rfk-kennedy-election-vaccines-8b7b8506aec638b26c30a42819d96036
31: I have never tweeted, skeeted, xeeted, tooted, truthed, bleated, greeted or mistreated on any microblogging site. And I have no plans to do so.
As Milton might have said, "They serve who also stand and lurk."
I cast my pearls of internet wisdom before unfogged commenters. The swine on Twitter can read Yglesias.
31: I have never tweeted, skeeted, xeeted, tooted, truthed, bleated, greeted or mistreated on any microblogging site. And I have no plans to do so.
As Milton might have said, "They serve who also stand and lurk."
Well said.
I think I've mentioned before, that I haven't used twitter, facebook, or most of the other social networks, but I have recently been finding substack to be a good place to find interesting writers. I think concerns about Substack are well warranted, but I was pleased to see that Nick Hornby recently set up a substack, and has had a good experience: https://nickhornby.substack.com/p/one-week-on-substack
I left Mastodon partly because it was more of a tech culture that likes to lecture about people who don't "get" it and ask for extra features.
My experience with Mstdn has been precisely 0% this. Like everything else, it's about curation.
I signed up for Mastodon, never was able to remember which server I was on, and stopped logging in because it took too much effort each time.
35: thanks. And the thing about all this coming out in court is that either he is a perjurer or he is, literally in its original sense, as mad as a hatter.
Thinking about it, not only is "putting on your pants/trousers one leg at a time" not the norm, it is extremely difficult. You put your feet into your trousers one foot at a time, yes, but you do not have your trousers on after doing so. You need to pull them up. And obviously if you have both feet in, when you pull them up you will pull them up both legs at once. If you put only one foot in and then pull them up, you will need to be pretty flexible to get your other foot in without lowering your trousers again. I suggest changing it to "puts his boots on one foot at a time".
Maybe the saying is from back when men wore breeches instead of trousers?
If anything it would be even harder to put breeches on one leg at a time, I would think - breeches were pretty high-waisted and quite neatly cut?
Chaps you could put on one leg at a time, I think. And I think that some sorts of hose were essentially stockings rather than tights, so you put them on one at a time.
Wikipedia Brown
I'm not on Bluesky but on twitter that was/is the handle of Eve Ewing, also a sociologist but not the same sociologist.
Thanks for the correction!