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They didn’t read what you said. I like BlueSky. I don’t see as much of what you describe.

(i don’t think either assumption is safe, but if i assumed the latter, i guess it would come off as a defense of X)

No, this seems pretty clearly like you're describing X as a problem in a post where your claim is that Bluesky is a problem.

What if Bluesky is not a public square for debate and persuasion, or a billionaire’s pet epistemic bubble, but a tool to organize and energize a political base?

So, what's your point?!? Doesn't make any sense stay there just because the others are. There's a plenty politicians here, maybe is not the kind of politicians that you wanna...

You guys are both wishing for it. Maybe you could do a column together. Call it...I dunno..."Is Bluesky dead yet" or something along those lines.

There isn’t real traffic on twitter now though. Just bots and Nazis.

Yes. It sort of proves your point, doesn't it?

Very telling that you think otherwise. Saying that Bluesky corralled everyone on the left into a fishbowl implies that you view their agency negatively. When the left uses any agency, the critics comes out in droves.

No. It is not and I am not. Claim 3 was that Bluesky is responsible for the degradation of X. It is not.

They're not. They're interpreting it as a stupid post that conflates the reason people left twitter with the reason people joined bluesky. They're right.

Telling that anyone is bothering to interpret it as anything at all.

I don’t interpret it as that. I like bluesky because it’s not a racist cesspool. Good enough for me. Those on X being dragged further right…that’s their problem, not ours.

Or when the owner of X makes the most grotesquely racist posts literally hundreds of times a day and has rigged it so everyone has to see it.

Well, we learned that people really want Bluesky to work and really hate Twitter now!

Hanging on to, "I was right!" long after discourse has proved you wrong is a choice, David.

So what’s the solution? Is there a solution? Is it increase Bluesky engagement? Is it to try to shift to other social media sites? That’s all I care about.

3) quite literally no one thinks anything close to that. As in quite literally not a single human alive thinks what you are positing they thing in point three

1) none issue. No one ever interpreted that 2) quite literally no one feels any such obligation. It is absurd for you to suggest people interpreted you to suggest that because the suggestion itself is beyond the pale.

What happened was, Musk bought X & started pushing it in a nazi direction. This prompted a semi-mass exodus (including me). But the exodus basically petered out. To my dismay -- & to their eternal discredit -- lots & lots of prominent people, journos, institutions, experts, brands, etc. stayed.

It kinda feels like you were saying it would have been better if sane people had remained on X

I guess i'm late to the game. Tried to stick around there and finally had to call it quits

The other option to this lengthy defense would have been to simply delete a poorly worded comment.

You stepped into a space and said it (and by association every in it) is a net negative for society. Why did you not expect a pile-on? this was my very first thought

No, you made your point quite effectively. It just didn’t land as you’d hoped it would because folks can read through your passive-aggressive guilt-trip. Quit gaslighting and own it.

No. No you did not.

Whatever point you might be trying to make is hard to discern through your self-indulgent whining.

Wow, that’s a pretty big rant. I guess the question is why do you care?

Little boys love standing on soap, boxes and running their mouth

Whether they do or don’t… the masterclass here is your open. “Well i FAd, & since my most recent FO, i have “learnt:3(blah)” let us all hone this for all our tool belts. Solid.

YES !!! 👍

🤡

That's not on you. Leftists willfully misinterpret every criticism even vaguely aimed in their direction. This isn't a you problem.

The lack of self-awareness is amazing. The universal feedback you’re getting is “goofy” but you’re unwilling to actually listen to the feedback your getting and bc people disagree w you on BlueSky we’re a “net negative”

As I understand you, you're noting that the resistance to Trump has corralled itself on Bluesky when they could (and probably should) have been gathering here: www.earthcam.com/usa/dc/washi...

Thank you for making this admission, rather than continuing to question the reading comprehension of the people responding to you as you did in your first response. That's actually a big deal.

I think this just demonstrates your point.

Maybe just one more post, though ...

You’re better off without the people who blocked you. Piss on them.

I’ll continue to follow both you and @volts.wtf mainly because you both maintain journalistic integrity and fairness

This is not true. There is no “extreme hatred” for Stancil. There are just a lot of people who think that he’s very silly for regularly trolling his own readers and then pretending that he can’t figure out why people get upset.

Right, I think the blunt “Bsky is a net negative” probably isn’t a clear summary of your elaborated points further down this thread The Twitter/X/Bsky ecosystem is much worse on the whole *today* than it was in 2018 when it was just everyone on Twitter, no question

@volts.wtf the very next thing in my timeline after your thread was another post aimed at the sort of people who misunderstood your post, as it happens. Their advice for those people, while likely accurate, is as they acknowledge unlikely to get those people to understand what they read, alas […]

Either you communicated so poorly you need to seriously readjust your entire approach going forward, or you're backpeddling. If you're being honest, you made your point so poorly that you look like you're backpeddling now.

exactly right

(this was a 10+ year old account, good standing, 2000 followers)

When a billionaire Nazi buys your regular bar and fills it with Nazi memorabilia and has the bartenders wear Nazi uniforms and holds Hitler trivia nights, it is time to accept that your former bar is now a Nazi bar, you're not going to be able to buy/fix it, and you'll just need to find a new bar.

100000% this. unless we were willing to pay for blue checks and avoid talking about what we wanted to talk about, nobody was gonna move the needle we wanted to move

I think it's a big problem for the other place to be honest. They need the opposition so they can keep the arguments going. Now 'the opposition' is mainly bots. Bots arguing with bots isn't a great business model.

The algo in X became where lefties and most everyone was howling at the sky where here it seems that we can talk (and scream if necessary to vent) to one another in a somewhat respectful manner. Though bluesky has started to suppress information, free speech and accounts

This is my take also, though admittedly there's some daylight between the left broadly construed and the trans community specifically. I maintained an Assigned Media Twitter presence for a while despite having a growing Bluesky account. I stopped bothering only bc there was no traction.

Telling of what?

It is. Deal with it.

They are doing this because the thing you describe would have happened if all of us simply left the internet instead of moving to Bluesky. The negative consequences are the result of us vacating X, not anything we do here. So what you're saying here basically amounts to "leaving X was a mistake."

Only ~20% of Americans use twitter/X. It seems more important be cause >90% of the media is on there.

Well, in general at least I take it we're thinking that BS has corralled lib-left influencers in one place but also cut them off from political/cultural influence/impact. I worry abt that, think that too. But I also think we may understate its impact in those ways. I'm not sure. So not giving ...

it's unclear what the solution to X effectively crushing engagement with left-liberal voices is, though

If BlueSky is able to influence democratic politics in 2029+, this could all look really different in hindsight. But IDK how any of this plays among staffers today, if at all.

A positive here is that people who left X and are here on BS are not being pulled farther right by that site. No one is immune and if we'd all stayed, hoo boy

Very much appreciated!

I wouldn't know about Bolts if not for Bluesky, and you (along with @charlesgaba.com) have been immensely helpful for me in directing my resources in down ballot races. Thanks for what you do. This is a good reminder for me to donate.

As an independent voter that's voted for Republicans as recently as the last election, you're partially correct. Bluesky is a little too lefty for me sometimes. But the alternative is engaging with a slanted towards fascism and racism algo on Twitter. People there are terrible. This is better

It’s fundamentally deeply naive. Elon Musk is literally a genocidal maniac with zero compunction about silencing people who disagree with him. It is delusional to believe any voice he disapproves of could find true traction or gain real power on his website.

I don't even mind it, really, if it's somewhat diluted by other stuff. It's just the uniformity & relentlessness of it around here...

Yeah, there are still plenty of those voices still on X anyway, they're just buried by the algo or have become Tucker Carlson stans.

While I think this is true to some extent, it is an exaggeration to say that Musk would or is capable of completely muting all those voices. He definitely tilted the algorithm, but there are plenty of big lib accounts still on there. If he'd *completely* wiped them out, X would have died.

You honestly thought holding up a mirror in a room full of vampires was going to do any good or validate your argument? That's cute. You're on the wrong site for a logical argument.

Not sure what the alternative might be. Online left-of-center people are going to find themselves in the same place, and the dynamics of that are sadly predictable...

Probably because is blaming BlueSky for failures that lay exclusively at Twitter’s feet.

It is. If you ignore the systemic changes at twitter to make it actively hostile to any opinion left of Hitler and pretend we'd be heard if we just stayed there then yes, you are defending it.

How should we be interpreting it?

I'm positive you're a better writer then I am. So, you know, take your lumps. Slanted framing, whether reflexive engagement baiting or whatever, is stupid. It's toxic. It's helped kill the news and that's really fucked things up. Cut it out. Tone influences as much as content.

Because it’s the counter to your “meanwhile”, in your statement. I think it’s your subtext, man.

Because that's what it is.

I don’t see it a defense of X, just a misunderstanding of cause and effect.

Telling of what, exactly

I think a big reason is how you failed to mention the myriad ways Musk has put his thumb on the scales. Plenty of the left is still on Twitter, but the algorithm minimizes their exposure while at the same time boosting right wing slop. That's going on regardless of what happens over here.

It's nonsensical bullshit that at best means nothing and at worst gives cover for "our institutions" turning into right wing propaganda peddlers.

Putting “very telling” anywhere in a written statement proves you’re just rage baiting people.

well you wrote "Bluesky has been a net negative" instead of "Twitter has been a net negative" so

I don't think he worded it poorly, I think he has a very dumb opinion and he laid it out perfectly well. It hinges on the idea that it's bluesky's fault that people left twitter, which is so stupid that everyone assumes he misspoke lol

Hiya David, The mere fact that people attack you for stating the simple truth is a great social truth about the liberal mind and why it keeps losing. Instead of being able to see the validity of your statements, they see red. That speaks volumes about how closed-minded they are. Liberal, hmmmmmmmm?

Well, that's the way you wrote it.

More of a "the left destroyed X" vibe

The only thing telling is you telling on yourself.

Only a brave truth-teller such as yourself could understand such nuance.

I don't. But its also a really poor attack of bluesky.

Meh I think X is over-rated in its impact as well as Bluesky. For the small groups that use both it makes sense that they have their own forums for debates. It is a niche thing and the impact of Twitter from 10 years ago will never come back...

If bluesky is a net negative, then its substitute would be a net positive.

I would never ever defend X and YOUR interpretations of reality vary from mine. Are you ok?

The problem is that Twitter is run by Nazis. Framing that as a problem with Bluesky kinda sounds like you're deflecting blame from the real problem, even if that wasn't your intent.

I don’t think of it as a defense of X so much as a way to push blame on a bunch of nobodies

The confusion may lie in the framing of ”Bluesky“ as the net negative rather than the musk takeover. If we’d be in the same boat getting suppressed on twitter and dealing with trolls, then the Bluesky exodus isn’t really the cause, just the symptom.

Yeah I mean, I don't think that's what he meant, he's just conflating "Bluesky" with "the slide toward fascism of other social media that drove users in search of newer platforms and resulted in Bluesky becoming largely populated by people who watched their last site become a Nazi bar"

God I'm so cooked today I even called Twitter X, I never call Twitter X

Very telling: your unresponsiveness to climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe's in-depth, data-supported, thorough explanation as to why staying on X and hoping that the increasing algorithmic marginalization of reality-based content would not continue to erode its utility, was a sucker's bet.

Yeah, well bud maybe if people didn’t get shit on constantly when they do try to come to our defense it might not feel so damn lonely. I see and experience it far too often to treat it like it isn’t a major part of the problem. People have their own shit to deal with too.

It's very telling that an entitled white dude thinks we should waste our time being abused by trolls all day. As if that changes a goddam thing.

Doesn’t this just fall into the narrative category of “whenever the right does something bad and the left reacts to it, any bad outcome is the left’s fault”? Just replace right/left with X/Bluesky. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just say “X (in particular, Elon buying it) has been a net negative”?

Yes. My assumption based on this is you are very much a defender of those who stay on the Nazi site.

Maybe the problem is all the people who stayed on the nazi platform?

I think you are either inventing their position or you haven’t critically looked at your own framing. Is Bluesky’s existence the problem? Or the manipulation of Twitter that drove much of the left off of it? Or even the fact that many institutions refuse to leave Twitter despite its issues?