i wish basically any social media site would generalize the "Lists" idea that twitter had into a more central "follow sets" concept. i want to have my friends and good posters in two separate feeds by default so i don't miss my friends' posts.
like, give me one column that's good posters i choose to follow in that column, and another column that's people i actually talk to with shares/retweets/whatever turned off
cohost's multiple pages come kinda close but i don't wanna have to switch back and forth. on twitter i can just pin a list of friends and swipe left and right. bluesky doesn't have anything unless you blow an invite on a second account. mastodon doesn't let you add people you don't follow to lists, and if you don't check it for a while your lists stop working
a thing we've been thinking about is how much more satelites there are visible in the night sky than when we were a kid, and how bright they are now.
and like this feels like a thing that would be liable to be just my imagination except, no i'm not imagining it, there is a very objective sharp increase in the number of satellites orbiting earth in the last few years, which corresponds directly to increased presence of visible satellites in the night sky
when laying out stargazing on a summer night, we are at the point where satellites are basically a continual presence in the sky. i feel like there's rarely not a satellite visible somewhere in the sky
i have mixed feelings about this. on the one hoof, there's something kind of interesting about it ii guess, the way that a moving starlike object gives a depth cue to how far away the actual stars are, and it gives me more things to look at in the light polluted urban sky
but on the other hoof all these satellites are themselves just, more light pollution. more capitalist trash littering the world. we have seen satellites that are ridiculously bright. in fact, we have seen satellites (not airplanes) in the daytime sky. we used to chase down iridium flares when they still existed, but we hardly miss them anymore with how not-giving-a-shit satellite companies are with reducing reflectivity.
idk. this just feels like a particularly surreal and weird thing to witness over the course of my life, seeing the increasing commercialization of space in my lifetime in an extremely visible way
and imagine all of the satellites i can't see in the city. imagine just how worse the problem must be in a place with no light pollution otherwise, how cluttered the sky must be getting