Pie In The Sky

In this week's P.O. Box:

I was badgered this week by a handful of people to join Bluesky—an upstart social media alternative to X that attracted millions of users this past week in the wake of the election.

Let me say off the rip, I have zero interest in discussing social media platforms through the lens of politics. I’m not sure anything better illustrates the braindead nature of tribalism in politics than caring about where your favorite content creator posts/shares their content. Grow up.

The most compelling aspect of Bluesky to me, though, is an algorithm that doesn’t suppress links. This is an important feature for someone like me who shares links to all of their streams/articles/videos on X.

No social media platform is excited to provide you an offramp to another site, but it’s reached absurd levels on X in the past year. Any post with a link might as well be shadow banned. It’s essentially worthless to share a link these days (although I still do it out of pure habit).

But beyond that, I really have zero interest in adding another micro-blogging platform to my online stack. Over the years, I’ve wound back my social media usage to the point that I use X strictly for utility (promotion + news) and rarely for interacting with others or entertainment (outside of the occasional tilt post on a Sunday afternoon).

Because of this, I just don’t have the desire to flee to a new site only for it to capture whatever market share of my time/attention is still available.