This blog now has a feed on Bluesky in addition to the RSS feed.
If I’m being honest I lost interest in social media when it started filling up with fascist hate groups, but Bluesky promises to be different — or at least more open source — so I’m crossing my fingers and hoping this works out.
Much has been written about the process of “enshittification,” where existing products actively become worse in the name of making a quick dollar. The most cited examples are Facebook, which used to be a way for college students to connect but is now filled with conspiracies from your drunk uncle, or Google Search which used to be a simple and powerful search engine but is now a scrambled nest of ads and AI gibberish.
I think a good example of enshittification is a bicycle. Let’s say you bought a decent bike. Then one day you wake up and before you can ride it to work, you have to install something called Bicycle+ on your phone that costs $18 a month or the tires won’t stay inflated. Well now you have a bicycle that not only sucks but you can’t even give it away. Worse, you can’t sue the company that made it because the app’s terms and conditions (that you didn’t read) included an arbitration agreement.
Personally I’m not overly optimistic that Bluesky will be any different than Facebook and Twitter, but it is new, and in the world where capitalism slowly strangles the life out of everything, perhaps “new” is all we have left.