I feel like my twitter feed has gotten worse lately and a lot of accounts I follow have made the move over there.
I am so set in my doom scrolling ways tho.
I think the days of being able to gather all of our news on one mega-platform like Twitter or Reddit are over. There are important accounts which are only on telegram, only on bluesky, only on twitter, and (to a lesser degree) only on the Fediverse. It is a pain, because with the exception of Mastodon (which virtually no noteworthy politicians, state officials, or journalists use), none of these platforms address any of the fundamental problems Twitter has. They simply are less far along in their decline.
Good in that it has reached a critical mass of good people to follow? Probably.
But its enshittification has already began. It's let crypto firms on to its board and taken their money. They're looking at introducing personalized ads and having a subscription service to begin the slow process of stopping the VC cash bleeding.
Because it's not truly decentralized, everything still runs through the main Bluesky servers, this type of enshittification will affect the whole user base.
Someone reached out to libsky support about that. It’s because many of them share their gofundme links because they have to resort to begging for their lives to strangers on the internet. But rampant link sharing like that triggered their spam filters.
So, I can understand why the libsky algorithm flagged their accounts, but I don’t know if they actually did anything to address that problem.
it’s pretty terrible. i made an account because most of the handful of people i followed on twitter moved there, and i like being able to see their posts without the worst ads imaginable constantly shoved between them (for now). aside from that, it’s an endless sea of the most awful blue maga creeps imaginable. i’ve been on the site about 2 weeks now and have apparently blocked 450 people so far.
i feel like it can come across as a bit of a crank take but i kinda think all capitalist social media is brain poison and the goal should be to strive to avoid them as an act of self-care. at least the doomscrolling ones, maybe something like discord i could give a bit more leeway to. i would never judge anyone for using them but this is my general honest advice. when i was on twitter/bsky/tiktok it always felt like i was justifying an addiction with very few upsides, at best it would be a neutral way of passing time but more often would leave me feeling bad or empty. this is how i view them now. i'm addicted to this website too but it does feel like harm reduction. like in the months after getting banned from twitter on purpose i personally noticed genuine positive psychological changes.
Personally I feel much better about myself after leaving every Discord I was a part of, including one with some very longtime friends, because I no longer stay up until 3 am scrolling through or talking about whatever bullshit and hopping between voice calls before going to bed feeling empty. It's all part of the same feedback loop that was taking time away from literally anything else more productive. Even playing a video game for 5 hours felt better than that.
yeah, the reason i give discord leeway is i think it's a place where you're more likely to build like, a lasting connection with someone or whatever, like make real internet friends, than scrolling-based social media. which i think is a fair mark in its favour, as that's a good option to have for those struggling to build irl connections. but it definitely can end up causing the same patterns like you say. i just have a small, not super active friendcord now, i left any public ones i was addicted to.
They banned LibsOfTikTok but there's currently a huge thing going on about Jesse Singal, an anti-trans academic and pedophile/MAPS supporter, joining the platform and not being banned because he hasn't 'technically' broken the rules. He's currently the most blocked person on the website, but the bigots are definitely still there.
There's definitely good people to follow, but the platform itself is doing its best to be twitter 2 and fail in the same ways. Though - that's pretty fun to watch in itself, maybe worthwhile to lurk on there anyway lmao
The trick is to set up an RSS feed of all the relevant social media accounts that you follow. Using the actual site is just a recipe in frustration since the algo of every site purposely make you mad for the sake of engagement. Even for the case of Hexbear, I just have RSS feeds of comms that I like. For now, Bluesky is good because you don't have jump through hoops to get RSS feeds going, but who knows how long that will last.