Bluesky is Twitter in 2025
Part of being online is having a place to exist online, and by exist I mean post about and talk to other humans about the things that are happening to you, and also maybe a shared interest like videogames.
Previously these used to be IRC Channels and Forums, and around the mid 00s these became Social Media sites as we know them today. I used to occupy a website called Xanga and I followed some random people and knew about the comings and goings of their lives. i might have had a MySpace account. I had a facebook account back when you needed a .edu email address to have one. Then twitter happened, and for a decade or so it seemed like Twitter was going to be it - the entire posting loop condensed into it's barest form and with small messages. Essentially a big chatroom going 24/7 with everyone on earth online at once.
I don't remember a time when twitter was good, it was good for a period of time - it must have been - maybe around 2010, fifteen whole years ago. It became insufferable around 2016, and for nearly a decade it has been a source of constant psychic damage. I would load the website and within 30 seconds see a post that would deeply anger me. There were some solutions - like a script which would turn off retweets from everyone you followed - so it was just the posts that they were making. Posts "doing numbers" felt important because twitter was the only website that mattered, but it was a liability because it contained everything you ever wrote, so sometimes you'd be unemployed and angry at the world with nobody to talk to - so you posted your thoughts publicy...
And then Mastodon came along, the less I write about this the better - but just imagine a bunch of infighting but each group has their own channel - and being on a channel was problematic because someone running it was problematic - and that made you problematic by proxy - so you would have to migrate your account to another channel which would implode after a few months. I finally gave up on Mastodon when I wasn't allowed on a certain channel because I didn't pass a certain vibe check.
AND THEN years later, a few websites came up. One of them was Bluesky - which felt like twitter 2, mostly because the Silicon Valley VC money was backing it and it wasn't going to dry up. And another was Cohost, which felt like it was going to implode like all those Mastodon Channels before it, but I embraced both because twitter was unusable. Both of these required invite codes at the time, which I got from the same person.
Cohost immediatley felt different, but it took a while to notice why. There were No Numbers. Posts could be liked or reposted, but you would never see how many reposts or likes each post had. You couldn't see follower counts either, or know how many people followed you. I realized, in noticing these, how their removal turned the tempurature down immensly. I felt freer to type whatever I wanted. The longer post length meant I didn't have to split longer thoughts into tinier posts. I felt hesistation in putting money down for Cohost Plus, but I wanted the website to work even though it felt like it was going to go down in a bunch of drama.
Bluesky was...basically twitter but without all the hysterical people screaming at all times. Crucially it re-implemented what I considered the worst of twitter's sins: the Quote Retweet. The Quote Retweet is the Discorse Engine. With a Quote Retweet you see the worst shit of all time with the worst dunks of all time, it eliminates context, it's like clipping 2 seconds out of a 10 minute video. Unlike the removal of numbers, Quote Retweets turn the tempurature up. It encourages users to share things that upset them, say that this thing upsets them, before you see the thing that upsets them. I rarely see good things in quote retweet posts. Their inclusion in the bluesky feature set meant that Bluesky was eventually going to go down the path of Twitter, and indeed, in the year of luigi 2025, it feels just like twitter does.
Cohost is now redirecting to TheWayBackMachine as the site ran out of funding. Some people were keen to spit on the corpse before it was even cold, but the better people i know still mourn the loss of community. They weren't perfect, but given the size of the team and the task of running a public blog platform with all the problems that come with it - they did pretty good for the most part.
Cohost's demise got me to make this blog in the first place, and got several people I followed to make their own. We had tasted real flavor for the first time in a while - a place to post without "numbers" and with a lower tempurature.
Bluesky was touted as "Twitter but from 2014" or "Twitter from 2016" and the date that Bluesky was from began to shift later and later as more and more people migrade off twitter to bluesky, now able to take it "seriously" due to the critical mass of people and the endless parade of corporate boners that Twitter leadership was making. But now bluesky, after the 2024 election, has turned to twitter in 2025. I regularly see garbage and endless political content which I can't do anything about but get incredibly angry about. The difference now is that I'm a decade or so older so I know not to "post through it" when I'm having a depression episode.
About 3 years ago I also joined a very nice videogame forum and I have integrated myself into the community well. We have weekend cabin retreat every year where we play things like Bomberman on the Sega Saturn or Videoball. It's nice.
I am going to keep a bluesky account in the off chance I find a way to get a job with it, random car posts and things happening in my day to day life. People have this idea that the leadership of a website should be 100% with their own ideologies, and given profit motives and a desire to be "neutral" Bluesky's managment is going to disappoint you.
It was really amusing to see people on bluesky try and cultivate a "block and move on" culture and try to not replicate the errors of twitter, but in replicating the features bluesky has replicated the culture. It was very funny watching people several months ago talk about how you didn't need to explain jokes on bluesky lest people read them wrong, and now are making jokes about how people are reading their posts wrong due to a lack of explination.
Predicting that bluesky continues to become twitter until it's just constant screaming. see you around.