
Josh Tolentino | weeaboomer, Gamist
| work: RPG Site, Game Rant, Gamecritics | ex: Siliconera, Destructoid
Contacts in Carrd
even Mastodon, as different and more scattered-fiefdoms-y as it is, had a roughly comparable arc during its "unfamiliar new world" period in late 2016 through some vague point in 2017 (and maybe shift that to any of the later large migrations for other newer folks).
i think the main thing is that as a platform goes from being "everyone's first day at a new school" to being a normal familiar place people go to hang out, social connections become more and more known, explicit, and expressed in increasingly complex ways. the rage and bad faith people bring to a really nasty twitter shitstorm is probably (i'm not on it) already there on bluesky the way cosmic radiation is here on earth, and it'll be social signals that gradually make it just as or maybe even more toxic than twitter - "found a new type of guy", etc. i guess a lot changes if the place fully enters a "federated" paradigm where large groups of people can ignore/block one another... but mastodon has already given us plenty of looks at what that feels like (ie still pretty bad, but in different ways).
yes! i think what's driving bluesky atm is the sense that it's a single place a la twitter but in truth it IS basically a big masto instance cosplaying twitter, for people who want to cosplay twitter. there's a clock somewhere counting down to when the outfit has to fundamentally change, so to speak, and who knows what the hell that looks like, what the outcome is, and what sort of culture the place has built up in the meantime
yeah bsky feels a lot like the nicotine gum analogue to twitter. it produces some of the same effects but ultimately makes the original conceit more unappealing the longer you engage with it (at least for me). trying to make a website “the same thing, but different!!” doesn’t really seem to work
came here to say everyone talking about how good bluesky (or "old bluesky", now) is (was) feels to me like someone on methadone acting like they're enjoying the high, so thank you for this more palatable analogy to use going forward.