Bluesky is Different (for now)

I started using Facebook before “open registration” when it was still mostly exclusive to colleges and universities, people with .edu email addresses. I was working at Mozilla and Facebook was testing the waters around bringing more people to the social network. The first new category of users they let in after .edus was non-profits, and Mozilla was a friendly non-profit so mozilla.org emails were allowed to sign up.

Those were the days when you had a “Wall,” an extended profile page where you’d post messages that would also show up in the “News Feed,” a relatively new page then, one that aggregated the messages from all of your friends. This was still years before Farmville and other games hit the platform, the beginning of the end for me.

With open registration’s massive growth in users and the proliferation of games and other spammy nonsense cluttering the News Feed, I could see the writing on the wall, as it were. Eventually the reverse chronological News Feed would be renamed to “Home” and your friends’ messages would be interrupted with Facebook “featured posts,” the beginning of recommended content. To put the last nail in the coffin for the News Feed, Facebook changed the sorting to some undecipherable order that made keeping up with friends even more difficult that even the spam of the games era had.

I was also fairly early on Twitter. I signed up around the time of the SXSW award that propelled them into the limelight. That was shortly before a friend and colleague, Chris Messina, proposed the hashtag which soon after made following topics, not just people, pretty easy for users. That was 2007.

By about 2010 or 2011 Twitter was gaining traction with a considerably larger, non-tech user audience and the site was regularly folding under the weight of those numbers. That was the era of the “fail whale,” a graphic that would show when the site was unavailable. It was also when fake followers, spam, and the slow decimation of third party clients began turning Twitter from an open playground to an manure filled “walled garden.”

Facebook and Twitter were the two places I could share and keep up with my friends and colleagues but by 2012 and 2013 both had dramatically degraded the users experiences, prioritizing ad revenue over usability. That meant an increasing volume of ads in the feeds and extreme user tracking. Oh, and the above mentioned algorithmic feed manipulation.

Eventually both grew into the sewers they are today, no longer social networks but advertising networks called “social media.”

Today, those companies are owned and operated by billionaire assholes whose only interests are power and wealth. They manipulate users for profit and are no longer recognizable to the people who boosted them into the mainstream a decade and a half ago.

I’ve abandoned both platforms, as a result of the decline in usability and the moral bankruptcy of their owners and I’ve settled on a new social app called Bluesky. Bluesky is superficially, in many ways, similar to those I’ve abandoned, But it has one feature that makes all the difference in the world to me, custom feeds.

At Bluesky, there’s no requirement that you eat what the company feeds you. You can build your own feed, one that follows the rules you create, or you can easily use one that someone else has created that serves your needs.

My primary feed at Bluesky is not the default “Following” feed that’s filled with shared links with clickbait and brand images leading to news sites covering the outrage of the moment and all the repeat re-posts that amplify that noise. Instead, I use a feed built by the Sky Feeds account called OnlyPosts. This feed does exactly what it says, showing only the posts from people you are following, nothing else. There’s no recommended content, no re-posts, no replies, just the content posted by the accounts you care about. And, if you want to see what’s happening with friends of friends, Sky Feeds has another one called Mutuals that you might find valuable. I keep that one around for when the OnlyPosts feed isn’t moving as fast as my desire for distraction :-)

Where Bluesky’s default “Following” feed hardly does, that OnlyPosts feed makes Bluesky tolerable and meaningfully differentiates it from Twitter. That’s because the default feeds for these sites, even Bluesky, prioritize engagement above all else. Engagement, the time spent interacting on the site, is best served not by a rich collection of messages from your friends, colleagues, or anyone else you follow, but by maximizing outrage and strife.

I don’t know about you, but I get enough of that already. Exiting Twitter and Facebook was about getting away from that noise and manipulation. Fortunately for me, Bluesky allows me to do just that with user-created feeds, including the amazing OnlyPosts feed.

If you’re looking for a place you can read what others are saying, not just a wall of clickbait that enriches some of the worst people on the planet, give Bluesky and custom feeds a chance. I’m loathe to integrate a new social app that’s quite likely to go downhill eventually, but for now custom feeds tip the balance in favor of that investment. Maybe I’ll see you there.