I made a few endearing posts about Bluesky, the “Twitter/X/Musk circle-jerk replacement” which got huge a couple months ago and made dudes like Mark Zuckerberg afraid. Bluesky fanatics at the time claimed that the upstart social media platform had “the juice” since it was getting all sorts of celebrities and brands and government agencies to join. Of course, these Bluesky fanatics were mostly white liberals. Folks who had been on Bluesky from the jump – initial Twitter defectors, researchers, and BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ folks with an emphasis on the T – began to fear the worst was yet to come.
Well, perhaps the worst hasn’t come, but it’s just down the street for sure. Jesse Singal, a journalist to whom I fear I share a likeness, joined the platform the other day and immediately got backlash from the trans community and allies. Why? Because Singal’s writings have led to attacks on – and have helped spurn the current culture war against – transgender people. Singal has had many opportunities to come out and say whether he supports trans folks or not, but he’s failed to do so. Therefore, one has to assume that Singal harbors transphobic views, even if he meters them in his writing to appear palatable to a general audience.
Singal has even gone so far as to target particular Bluesky users who are either trans or supportive of trans folks. He’s also directed his Twitter followers to go after these Bluesky users. Since this activity goes against Bluesky’s Terms of Service, many users have hounded the platform’s moderation team, its Trust & Safety leads, and even its CEO to ban Singal. But Bluesky hasn’t done squat. In fact, it released a statement on December 13th stating:
Moderation decisions draw intense public scrutiny from many places. That’s why Bluesky’s architecture is designed to enable communities to control their online spaces, independent of the company or its leadership. We will continue to work on empowering people with more control over their experience.
Basically: Block him and move on, but we can’t be assed to do anything about him.
(Seriously: I can’t believe I sort of look like this guy. I invite you to compare the two images below. Actually, now that I look at these pictures, I’m much better-looking than Singal. That picture on the left is from 2019, I think. The dog is no other than my dearly-departed Max, who passed in 2021. He was a great and fearless king! May all recall his excellence now and forevermore! Huzzah! Huzzah!)
(Okay sorry about that. I needed to flex. Back to the actual point of the post.)
Bluesky is, at least theoretically, a decentralized social media network where no one client has more power over another. However, in its current state, it acts and feels just like any other microblogging platform. It’s essentially 2014 Twitter careening headfirst towards 2024 Twitter. At least Mastodon, the other premier decentralized social media network, allows for folks to join different servers with their own rules where moderators can block content and users even if they are on different parts of the fediverse. But Mastodon is still confusing to use, and it still can’t prevent folks from getting abused or abusing the system.
It’s time to face the facts: Social media on any platform acts as a microcosm of society, and if nosy pseudointellectuals like Singal or feral brainless trolls want to be pests and ruin things for everyone, they’ll do it no matter what tools they have to use. These platforms are simply hosts for the culture war. Wars are the weapons. Stochastic Terrorism 101.
So why even bother using them? Yes, they provide legitimate opportunities for people in various communities to connect. I used to have some good friends on Tumblr back in the mid-2010s where most of our conversations centered around a Manhattan public access television show. But even that community got chewed up by ne’er-do-wells and bad faith actors. No one wants to have actual discourse on social media nowadays: The idea of it being the watercooler or the watering hole or the watersports party died when more people decided they’d rather share AI-generated images of Trump shirtless on the back of a giant eagle double-fisting Bud Lights and dropping bombs on Beijing.
Frankly, I left Twitter because I couldn’t stand seeing folks I liked get attacked, and I always found myself wanting to play defense. But getting into it with the offenders often ended with them a) threatening to doxx me, b) parrying with some Trumped-up talking point which only doubled down on their bigotry, or c) turning out to be an AI bot. The same thing is starting to happen over on Bluesky, and although I will keep my account there for now, I wonder how long it will take before I close the door on that one too.
And yet, as a terminally online person who has spent almost two decades posting on various platforms – LiveJournal, Blogger, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, and WordPress – one cannot simply stop posting. It is an addiction, perhaps up there with smoking tobacco, viewing adult videos, or playing Balatro. (I have not yet played Balatro but apparently it is very good.) So what to do?
Well, I have tended to this website, WillSisskind.com, for many years now. It has hosted my professional portfolio, several versions of this blog, and various editing reels from a time when I tried to become a famous YouTuber. (I regret that period, although I still consider myself a damn fine video editor.) I have spent various amounts on keeping this site online, but currently I pay about $13.99 a year for the domain and about four bucks a month for the super basic hosting plan. That totals just over sixty dollars a year to have my own corner of the Internet. And I plan to use it more often to share thoughts and better control the conversations I have online. If I’m going to make a point about something or vent, let it be here rather than out in the public forum. The public forum has become littered with toilet paper and hamburger wrappers. My little space might not have much room, but at least I can keep it tidy.
I suggest anyone with the ability should get their own personal website. Obviously it is harder to block trolls from a personal page and bigots can easily access the site and take advantage of its content for their own nefarious purposes. But at least a personal website belongs more to the person, whereas an account on a social media platform belongs more to the platform which may or may not do anything about it. (I know that a personal website really belongs to the hosting company and the ISP and other parties who rent out the server space to the client. But I am not about to get into it with self-hosted webpages and VPNs. My point stands.)
The bottom line is this: When the social media apocalypse cometh and the great rapture swallows up the accounts of the meek and the wretched, the innocent and the guilty, the loving and the hateful alike, where will we turn to post? We should truly decentralize now, even if it costs a few cents, before we are forced to do so by the great dismantling of the institutions which claim to stand for “free speech”, but don’t seem to stand for anything at all.
And to end: I’ve said it on this website, and I’ll scream it from the high heavens and the depths of Hell: Trans folks deserve the world, and anyone who doesn’t like that statement is on the wrong side of history. That means you, Jesse Singal.
