Welp… I Finally Got my Bluesky Invite

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the U.S.!

After Twitter imploded when Elon took over, I made the switch and became a pretty active user of Mastodon. All told, I haven’t been the biggest fan of Mastodon since joining almost a year ago as of my writing this.

This is almost entirely a me thing, but I find a lot of the people I’ve come across on Mastodon to always be at least one degree of separation away from whatever demographic I’m a part of. I’m not a programmer, I’m not into kink or furry content, and I’m not an older Millennial or Gen Xer who is incapable of posting about anything other than Elon Musk. I’m sure this is largely down to the fact that I joined a larger instance, but I find a lot of the smaller instances to be too niche. Admittedly, I haven’t done a lot of looking around, but still…

Because of all of that, I’ve kept an open mind when it comes to other platforms. I’ve made my thoughts on Threads known and I still stand by those thoughts. I find it goofy that people are still trying to make it work given how poor the user retention seems to have been and the fact that it’s owned by Meta of all companies.

I had put some small faith into Bluesky as an alternative, but barely, given some of the things I heard about it. That said, it looked like it picked up far more Twitter users than Mastodon ever did. For that reason I at least found it compelling as a platform.

Well, today, on Thanksgiving of all days, Bluesky decided to give me a turkey-day-blessing and I received my invite code after at least 6 months of waiting. And after going through the onboarding and scrolling through my, admittedly sparsely populated feed I have some thoughts…

I’m underwhelmed.

I don’t know… Bluesky feels a lot like Twitter. A lot. And to be honest, I had a terrible relationship with Twitter back in the day. I didn’t really enjoy it as a platform at all and when I made the jump to Mastodon back in November of 2022, I began distancing myself from social media more and more. Of course, this process was expedited when I left Reddit after they made all of their idiotic API changes.

Mastodon’s not my favorite platform by far, but I appreciate that it feels tangibly different from Twitter. I also appreciate that Mastodon is built on ActivityPub and is reliably open, as I don’t have much faith in whatever Bluesky’s AT Protocol is.

While I’ll keep an eye on Bluesky (and I’m glad I was able to reserve my preferred username), I doubt I’ll ever use it. I’ll stick to Mastodon for now and maybe one day I’ll find an instance or community of people to follow who I resonate with.