A little while back there was a big flood of us, enabled by that joiner pack of people we’d be inclined to follow. Plenty of waving and recognition of former Massive.
For me it has been pretty meh. Not much interesting debate, little news breaking or compelling stuff.
Meanwhile over at the other joint the exodus continues its mojo well and truly lost.
So 2 underwhelming platforms. .
.
So, Blue sky then – how has it been for you?
by 55 Comments
Could not agree more, bored with both and over the past month my Facebook feed has been full of right wing Americans gloating and being generally obnoxious, thinking seriously of taking a long break from all of them.
There is very little engagement on BlueSky which is a pity so I gave up on expecting any. I post a snapshot of some of the music I’m listening to and the books I’m reading but very little else. I gave up on Fartbook and Twixxer a while ago and BlueSky will fall by the wayside too in the fullness of time, when it does I won’t miss it.
Bore Da!
Prynhawn da butty. 👍
I use BlueSky to follow people I know. I have it locked down, to avoid seeing anything else. There are plenty of other platforms for news or whatever.
Seeing what Pencil is listening to is one of the few things of interest.
Blimey you must be finding BlueSky very tedious Junior if my listening habits are enlivening.
That’s what I mostly do too.
Great scott!
An awful lot of the record covers you post are really good designs, too.
That’s entirely coincidental but unsurprisingly I do love good or interesting cover art.
It’s not something I think of opening ever day, just appears slow and little interaction. Pencil’s music listenings always look interesting but I know nothing about them so I can’t respond.
Threads the same.
It’s probably down to what I’ve been clicking and/or re-posting, but there are a lot of stories about dogs and some cracking Dad Jokes, neither of which I’m averse to. I only use it on my phone, which is rarely in use in the evenings, and I’m not desperate for likes, so it’s not really an attention vacuum.
I post my banal observations on Bluesky, but most of the content I want to engage with and reply to is on The Other Place.
It had that promise, as “everyone” joined. It seems nobody reads the fucker, tho’, so a bit pointless, something to sit amongst others of the washed up apps on my phone, along with Threads and Substack, neither of which I recall joining, each both just seeming to drift in.
Are anyone of us actually still on X?
(I never was…)
Yes, I am that idiot. There are still a few people I follow whose posts I value, but as with Facebook I spend most of my time blocking people.
I’m finding Threads surprisingly satisfying, considering it’s another Zuck enterprise. I’ve encountered quite a few mutual followers from Instagram, plus hooked up with a load of word nerds and a surprising number of Aussies. For now, it all feels very civilised, although I blocked my first idiot the other day. Current topic: just how many vowels are there in the Aussie pronunciation of no. My best guess: naeoiu.
I created a BlueSky account for about 10 minutes, thought better of it and deleted it. A couple of weeks ago I finally deleted the Facebook account I have had for 15 years. I was tired of unsuitable content infiltrating my feed – everything from fake news reports to pornography, all of which I reported to Meta, and all of which generated the same response: “this post does not contravene our community guidelines”. What does, for God’s sake? Blatant lies, it seems are acceptable. Sex and nudity are acceptable too, even though they are trumpeted by Meta as not being so. The more you click to prevent this stuff appearing, the more of it appears.
This week I was emailed by Instagram to check if activity on an account I had forgotten about was by me. The person accessing my account was in Kyiv. I checked to see what had been posted but it was blurred out as unsuitable. I’ve no idea what it was, but I’ve now secured that account and deleted it.
Social media is the scourge of our time and I no longer want any part of it. Other than this place I no longer have any online social presence, and sadly I don’t log in here very often any more either.
Well, you did ask.
@boneshaker
Completely agree about Facebook. The last two months has seen an influx of ads, reels , spurious “people I might know,” etc etc. I’ve adjusted my “Ad Preferences “ as much as I can but it’s a deluge. Even when I remove some companies it takes an age for them to go. First world problems for sure but very annoying still.
Agree, I only have a FB account for friends and family (and occasional Marketplace browsing), but it is now totally full of crap. no viable alternative but I have heard good things about Friends Reunited 😉
Same here. How come it changed so much, I’d like to know (but not enough to investigate)? It used to be full of my friends’ and family’s exploits – their news, kids and pets pics, meals, birthdays, moans and political rants etc. Now it’s all articles from strange sources often seemingly written by AI and about things that might have vaguely interested me once for a nanosecond. I rarely bother checking it anymore.
Mine is convinced that what I want to see is a stream of quotes by Anthony Bourdain and, for so me reason, posts by a community which feeds crows and takes photos of the shiny things the crows leave in return.
I get Anthony Bourdain and the crows a lot too. Plus an awful lot of John Cleese complaining about how you couldn’t make Fawlty Towers these days.
I rarely get as far as seeing what my own friends are up to.
I remember simpler times when MySpace and Friends Reunited ruled the waves for a brief period
I hooked up with a woman on Friends Reunited who I had an almighty crush on when we were at school 20 years earlier. We chatted for a while then went on a date (a Radiohead concert), it didn’t go well 🙁
Did she sing along? 😉
Arf @bingo-little
Holy Shit, you took a date to a joy-vacuum? What WERE you thinking??
Concert was awesome and she was a fan, but we didn’t hit it off. Support was terrible though, Ian Brown I think
Sounds like some Unfinished Monkey Business
I’m not sure how people end up with so much unwanted, unpleasant content on Facebook. Ads are unwanted but barely register on my consciousness, I just pass them by. I limit my exposure to friends only, doesn’t everybody? I have a curiosity about people I no longer meet and their lives and travels. How they age, what they get up to. It’s fascinating I think. I follow certain publications and celebs, musicians etc I am interested in. Accounts that post old, nostalgic images, music scenes of old, that kind of thing. It’s the digital equivalent of browsing pictorial magazines and coffee table books. There’s stuff to read also. It is what you make it. It’s about life and people, arts and sports and more. Instagram can work that way too. Blue-sky and X are more inclined to make my feel anxiety and raise the blood pressure. Not so good. The Afterword is better as participation but even then there’s the old unease from schooldays of wondering if I can fit in and be one of the guys. Not entirely a warm, safe place. Nowhere is though. Anupand down experience.
Like most on here I’ve muted certain words and people and I’m quite enjoying it. But I only really do #NowPlaying posts and that stirs quite enough interaction for me. Instant block for even a hint of unpleasantness. I’m ip33 there as well.
Yes mute is very handy . No M*sk, no cats
I like it a lot. No nasty arseholes and the lists thing is great. I’m very much enjoying the Cafe Racer list which is all things motorcycle. I see little from folks here to engage with though I do like (and Like) Pencil’s posts when I spot them. An Afterword list world probably ginger up engagement but I have no idea how to set one up.
I mean feed, not list!
I think it’s the best ELO track
A couple of years ago I went through the trauma of a divorce after a 24 year relationship and Facebook having obviously scanned keywords in “private” Messenger DMs informing others overseas of this life news started relentlessly serving up so-called alpha male ads claiming “it’s all her fault” etc on its feed aimed at me.
It wasn’t. Although it did make me angry that, if someone was inclined to believe this, it could tip a man into abusive behaviour towards an ex-wife and women in general.
Musk and Zuckerberg are shameful examples of manhood and it’s so sad they control so much of the global current narrative for the unwary on our internet connected devices.
On a more positive online note: I lurked here a lot during the worst year following the divorce when feeling very lonely and I’m rather fond of you all.
Sometimes there are skirmishes here but overall it’s a nicer place than a lot of other online forums and it feels good to be virtually amongst fellow music and pop culture lifers.
Blue Sky has indeed been disappointing and perhaps generic social media has peaked for most people not wishing to engage with trolls, fascists and the unhinged on all those platforms.
You don’t have to lurk Mr Guy. Jump on in
Thanks! I do comment sometimes. Perhaps some time soon I’ll actually *gasp* write a forum post.
Facebook groups are much better than the newsfeed which is useless and anything but news. The groups are usually moderated and fairly twat free.
Yes. I read the AW’s group and a couple of other moderated FB groups. Twat-free FB experiences are to be had when groups are sensibly moderated.
I also use Social Fixer for Facebook which, despite being deprecated these days by Google as a Chrome extension, still works reasonably well at keeping the worst of FB’s general feed’s crap at bay.
I make their algorithm work for my participation by constantly barring advertisers I don’t want to see again. I see that as an unwinnable game in which I’m at least holding my own.
I’m finding Bluesky a bit of a disappointment, but I’m not very engaged with it as yet.
I just made the mistake of looking into an American created thread on Orange Baby/Zalenskyy and the range of unbelievably ignorant opinions was a research project in its own right. There are a lot of very strange people out there. It just reinforces (again) my view that our cultural commonality is with Europe not America.
Our only ACTUAL connections with the USA are the English language (tenuously) and the music that Americans stole from slaves but think was created solely by them.
Well a fair bit of their music arrived with immigrants in the form of European folk music too.
Local Facebook groups are definitely not twat free.
You’ve never forgotten our little spat, have you? Words were exchanged, insults were bandied and in the end a costly, and mostly embarrassing, legal action did neither of us any good. Bygones be bygones, eh?
I did say fairly twat free. There are always twats.
I signed up.
Nothing since.
Didn’t take to Twitter as I soon predicted it would be bad for my mental health (and so obviously avoid X) But i tried Bluesky to change online social life, yet cannot seem to get much traction there, so disappointing.
Strongly agree with the rapid decline of Facebook: My feed is now like an issue of Classic Rock Magazine written by AI about musicians I don’t like. But I treasure most of my contacts and enjoy some of the nerdy groups, so will stay there for now.
Same here with Facebook. I can’t help but read an article about certain bands but I can spot an AI piece a mile off. There’s so many of them now, it’s very annoying.
I diligently joined Bluesky, set up a lot of lists on subjects of interest, and followed Afterworders only, so as to keep things neat and compartmentalised.
Then I forgot all about it until yesterday, when I opened it up to see what was happening. Not surprisingly a lot on the Zelensky Oval Office visit and its repercussions – which was quite interesting to get a gauge on mood, and some interesting articles dotted around on climate, permaculture, and culture more generally. But it was quite shallow.
What I had found with Bluesky, and why I hadn’t touched it for ages was that it’s neither a newspaper nor magazine – I have the Guardian online for the former, Feedly for the latter. One gives the latest news, the other, categorised longform content – both nicely signalled with suitable headlines. Bluesky very much depends on the whim and nature of the individual poster. Some are focused on their theme, others do lots of reposting of other’s articles. Some post daily on all sorts of trivia, some hardly post anything at all.
Essentially, it seems to require a lot of (doom)scrolling, to sieve random wheat from the chaff. Potentially, there could be a lot of good content there, and it seems to tap more directly into a wider field of the thoughts of experts and academics than the other two sources I use. Maybe it just needs more finessing, and irregular consulting, rather than the daily visits I make to the other two sites.
I’ve found, like on Twitter when it was worth being on, you need to be careful not to follow too many others (or you won’t be able to find the stuff from the posters whose input you particularly value, amongst all of the chaff) and similarly not to bother with too many followers unless their contributions are pertinent.
Lists mean I don’t need to follow almost anyone. And that way the ‘follow’ news feed I have is fairly similar to The Afterword in content, good or bad, as that may be.
It certainly doesn’t seem to generate as many threads as on here, which is where the fun comes from. And they may be why I don’t bother with it so much.
Til this week, I had accounts for my Bowie podcast on X and Bluesky. I just deleted Twitter last week, so I am an ex-X. Wherever I looked, it seemed to bring the worst out in people, from smug, twee virtue-signalling to outright demented conspiracists. I’m happier following a much smaller pool on Bluesky and get enough reaction to my podcast related posts to make it worthwhile.
Also shout out to @pencilsqueezer on Bluesky for some very helpful advice on DACs!