Zarf Updates

I set up a Bluesky account at the beginning of September, just to see what the process was like. (Easy, turns out.) But I didn't give it a push until around October 23rd. That's when I pinned an intro and started following people.

My motivations, I admit, were mercenary. I was two weeks out from launching Leviathan and The Beyond, and I figured I needed swing all the social media oomph I could reach.

Well, the launch happened. (Went okay for small narrative games. Not going to pay the mortgage.) I'm still on Bluesky. It's been a sociologically interesting few weeks. I figured I'd write down my impressions.

So, the backstory. I joined Twitter "late" (November 2010). Like a lot of nerds, I enjoyed Old-Time Twitter. Then Twitter got big and people started talking about the toxicity and harassment. If I may condense a messy decade into one sentence.

I watched the whole will-they-or-won't-they Twitter acquisition saga with amusement and disgust. (Should have been terror, but we weren't thinking far enough ahead.) But I drew a line: if the deal closes, I'm outta there. Thus, in October, I said goodbye to Twitter. I logged out for good(*) and deleted all my Twitter clients.

At around the same time, I started using Mastodon for... well, about the same stuff I'd used Twitter for. That is: (a) following people who I knew personally; (b) announcing my games, blog posts, observations, and general status to a large circle of followers; (c) responding cheerfully to anybody who wanted to discuss (b).

Notice that's an asymmetric relation. On Twitter, I had way more followers than the number of people I followed. (Twitter stats looked like 3797/275, as of my 2022 data export.)

If you followed me and I didn't follow you back, I hope you weren't offended! That's just how I chose to use Twitter. I'm both introverted and mildly obsessive, so I needed to keep the Twitter (chronological) stream down to something I could absorb in short glances. If the firehose scrolled in faster than I could read it, I would try to read all of it anyway and that would be real bad.

I also needed to not watch my numbers go up. I turned those follow/like/boost notifications right off. This means that those 3797 followers certainly included a lot of bots and fake people; I didn't try to filter. Couldn't afford to.

Anyhow, I decided to use Mastodon the same way, and that worked fine. (Masto follower/following stats are 1969/247 right now, and I'm sure that's mostly real humans.) In fact I think it worked better, because I joined the mastodon.gamedev.place instance. That tilted my interactions towards "people I run into professionally or socially" and away from "the entire shuddering mass of humanity". Great!

(* I logged back into Twitter one more time, on Nov 7 2024, to press the "deactivate account" button.)

I didn't think so much about this when I waded into Mastodon. Mastodon felt quieter, but of course I was starting with a fresh account. (I certainly didn't have 1900 followers on day one!)

But now I'm wading into Bluesky, again with a fresh account. (Currently: 325/154, going up daily!) And it really is like coming back to Old-Time Twitter....

...I have mixed feelings.

In retrospect, Twitter had a lot of stuff that I was not into. And I'm not talking about the toxicity and harassment (which, I am relieved to say, never landed directly on me). I'm talking about the good social interactions. Forwarding the news of the day. Finding a new twist on the meme everybody is repeating. Retweet with your last book/teacup/Simpson's quote. "You may not like it but this is what peak <whatever> looks like." Shitposts, in the most enthusiastic sense.

People manifestly love this stuff. Bluesky is getting a huge wave of people who feel like they can finally leave Twitter without giving that stuff up. But it's not what I was on Twitter for. It's what I rolled my eyes and scrolled past so I could get to people talking.

To be clear: I'm not complaining and I don't think Bluesky needs to change. (I don't think you need to use Bluesky differently.) But scrolling past all that stuff is a bit of drag, a bit of daily energy cost. When I bailed for Mastodon, this little muscle in my neck relaxed. I didn't realize how good that was until I got onto Bluesky and felt it tense up again.

There were other surprises.

Twitter had a dense, juicy client ecosystem. I lived on Echofon (mobile) and Tweetbot (desktop). The ability to pick your interaction UI was a big part of what made Twitter work.

Mastodon was built by nerds and they brought the "client ecosystem" mindset with them. (Often the same nerds that had built the Twitter clients, after Twitter burned down the client API.) I settled on Mona but there are many options -- desktop, mobile, and web.

I took it for granted that Bluesky would work the same way. Nope! There are several web interfaces, but few client apps. On mobile I found just three: the official client, Graysky (possibly already end-of-lifed), and Skeets. Oh, I see OpenVibe too. For native desktop: nothing. Zilch.

(MacOS now lets you run iOS apps on the desktop, but this fails badly for the official Bluesky mobile app and for Graysky. I didn't try the others.)

I wound up using Safari's "open this web page as a fake app" feature on the main Bluesky page. I expect Chrome and Firefox have similar features, although I haven't looked. This works sufficiently well. In particular the web-app window doesn't share cookies with regular Safari, and it doesn't disappear when I hit Quit in Safari. (Shut up, I quit Safari all the time. I don't use tabs either.)

So I can use it, but the ecosystem speaks to a pretty narrow idea of who the Bluesky user is. Twitter got used a whole lot of different ways by different people. Mastodon embraced that plan. Bluesky may evolve that way, but it's not the current notion.

A quick example: Mastodon clients typically have a preference for "show images full-size or as thumbnails." And a preference for "hide the like/boost numbers". These allow for the different ways people with brains use the platform.

The Bluesky web interface (which, again, I'm using on desktop) does not have these prefs.

I love your cat photos, I will click on your cat photos, but I don't want my stream to be 90% pixels up front.

I expect the variety of Bluesky clients will increase (even if it's all web clients). But this is the current setup. And, like I said, it's just exhausting for me in these small ways.

I said "sociology", right?

There's a pretty uniform Mastodoner take about Bluesky. This is my paraphrase, not a quote, but it's what I hear:

The folks flocking to Bluesky don't realize that it's run by the same jerks that built Twitter. (By Jack Dorsey, by venture capitalists, by crypto bros, etc.) It feels like Old-Time Twitter right now but it's going to turn into Late-Stage Twitter real quick. Or else Elon will buy it.

It's important to realize that this isn't true! I mean, yes, that's what will happen. But the people who are flocking to Bluesky, including me, know perfectly well what happened to Old-Time Twitter. And to every other VC-funded social network. The #1 thing people told me about Bluesky a month ago, when I asked, was "Enjoy it while it lasts."

I feel like this is the big shift, the reason there is no true "Twitter replacement". People are still willing to use centralized, corporate systems; but they now think about exit plans. They know that Livejournal Twitter Bluesky does not love you.

(The Bluesky protocol is in principle decentralized, but all the growth right now is the main site. Again, this may evolve over time; but today you have to think of Bluesky as having a single point of corporate failure.)

Of course this goes both ways. There's also a pretty common Bluesky take about Mastodon:

Mastodon is confusing and hard to use and the people who use it don't care. They are elitist jerks who want to keep you off their precious defederated network.

Well, I'm not saying I'm not an elitist jerk. But I hope it's clear that a small cozy network with a circle of familiar people has social value. I am genuinely happier browsing Mastodon.

This take isn't just Bluesky, either -- some of Mastodon sees itself this way. A couple of days ago I posted:

No, I didn't crosspost that one to Bluesky and yes, it was a bit of a subtweet. (Subtwoot.) But that got a storm of replies. (45, which is a storm for me.) And the replies were about 96% "Amen"; 2% "You're wrong, federation is the Next Big Thing"; and 2% "You are everything that's wrong with Mastodon!" I blocked that last one, but wow.

Again, to be clear, I want Mastodon to get easier to access. (Although I have not contributed to the codebase.) I just think that being the Network With Momentum is not either an obvious or necessary goal. Especially in this time of defederation.

And, again, I will keep using Bluesky! But I will use it in a more structured, bounded way. (Also true of Discord, e.g.) I will step in, post, interact with people, and step back. I don't need to carry Bluesky on my phone -- at least not today.

I guess that, for completeness, I should cite the Bluesky/Mastodon take on Twitter:

Twitter is collapsing. Finally!

Sigh. It's a nice thought, but it's not true. Twitter is surviving just fine.

The scale of a successful Network With Momentum is genuinely hard to think about. (I'm certainly bad at it.) Twitter had almost a quarter billion daily active users in 2022, and most of those people were not your crowd.

This means that the "holy crap, everybody left Twitter and now it's just an echoing graveyard" event isn't new. It happened in October 2022. Then it happened again -- to different people -- in January 2023. And probably February and March. And several more times after that, as Elon deployed increasingly repellent rounds of shenanigans.

The point is, everybody you know can bail on Twitter and there will still be a whole lot of people left on Twitter who didn't notice any change.

I don't know how many. Twitter doesn't report meaningful numbers. Yes, I'm sure we're in the middle of a significant outflow. But this is a story of the month, not a change in the social media landscape.

The more important point: Twitter is not doomed. There is no "tipping point" beyond which it must fail. This is because Twitter doesn't need to make money.

Oh, Elon hoped it would make money. His 2022-2023 shenanigans can be comfortably explained as a series of ideas for making money off Twitter. Each idea failed (remember blue checks?) and was abandoned almost immediately in favor of a wilder idea. (Remember the universal payment app?)

But we haven't heard one of those in a while, and that's because the last one worked. To wit: monetize the tweet firehose for the input-starved AI industry. Twitter's terms of service now include LLM training; that went into effect a few days ago. And, hey look, Elon's xAI company is in the middle of raising six billion dollars.

The Generic Boring TwEslaXSpAIce Empire can lose lots of money on Twitter if that brings in $6B in xAI investment. No matter how many of your friends leave, there will be a heck of a lot of people left. Enough for a while.

And that's not even considering possible regulatory changes in the coming year. I can think of many bad, bad possibilities. But I won't borrow trouble for this post.

Where does this leave me?

I'm using Mastodon. I'm using Bluesky. No Twitter or Threads for me. Discord is a yes, but only for a few servers.

I intend to post all (ok, nearly all) of my comments on both Bsky and Masto, so you're welcome to follow me on either platform or both.

For both platforms, I am sticking to the plan of following a small list of people. Again, I mean no offense if I don't follow you back. You're welcome to reply to me or @-mention me at any time. I'm here to chat; I'm just keeping the firehose pressure low.

If the platform situation changes in the future, I'll adjust my plans. I think we all get that now.