Like with anything new and shiny, I’ve become quite keen on Bluesky as a social media service, and have started to build out my feeds for the best mix of writing from hard news reporters, independent journalists, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ authors, and other entertaining jesters and jokers.
It reminds me of Twitter or Tumblr circa 2012, right before the big microblogging boom, where the most interesting voices were starting to join these services and stake their claim on the next big thing before every schmuck decided to fight for their piece of the engagement pie.
Ah yes! Brand new social media platforms starting off. What a wonderful thing! Now time to take a nice sip of coffee and check my feeds–
Hmm. Okay. Not ideal. Let’s just go to the debug page and see what servers are down…
The fun thing about new Internet ventures is that as they go viral and get big, they will invariably strain under the tidal waves of attention and pressure on their staff and their servers. New users will immediately demand new features, and when those features don’t appear on top of increased downtime due to system stress, the new users will turn tail, but not before cursing out the venture as a failed experiment. The growing pains of Bluesky, therefore, may cause handfuls of new users to return to Twitter, regardless of why they left it in the first place.
This happened with Twitter, back when the Fail Whale was a common sight when the site would go down almost every hour on the hour. And it occurred with Tumblr, where Tumbeasts (those little green demon babies with an appetite for server machinery) would appear on users’ screens while trying to post Harry Potter erotic fan fiction. And if you think back far enough, this happened with Facebook and Myspace and even fucking Google back before these jokers had a trillion dollars in their pockets and access to all information in the known and unknown universes. Oh yes, lest we forget: Before Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk and all their homies were oligarchic tech shitlords, they were a bunch of nerds who couldn’t score. (Two footnotes here. One, Elon Musk did have his mommy’s apartheid emerald mine fortune to fall back on, so fuck him anyways. And two, David Karp is safe from criticism, because he is legitimately an okay dude.)
Anyway, this is all to say that while Bluesky may have some kinks to work out, no new service – analog or digital – has been without its issues at the start. As it continues to grow, and as developers fork the code and create new ways to improve the service, Bluesky will become a great tool for communications and connections. The staff seems dedicated to this mission, and so far no asshole with $44 billion has shown up to carry out a hostile takeover and then kick everyone out and burn everything down for the sole purpose of impressing a megalomaniacal autocrat. So far.