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> Who is using Bluesky in the US? A lot of writers and creatives who could not stomach X.com anymore (and were then likely burned by Mastodon's geekiness). >

• itsoktocry 1y ago
  I tried out Bluesky during the great migration about a year ago. It was incredibly toxic, but of course the "left-wing sphere" thinks they are the purveyors of universal "good", thus their toxicity is fine.
  • delecti 1y ago
    I suspect our politics are just too different for my attempts to defend the culture itself to be relevant, but it is super easy to cultivate what you see on Bluesky. You can detach your posts if you get quote-reposted, you can limit who can reply to posts (to followers, people who follow you, people you've mentioned, or only to yourself), blocking someone also means that 3rd parties can't even view the threads (and so can't jump into drama that one side has attempted to disengage from), you can hide replies to your posts, blocklists let you immediately prevent large lists of users from seeing or interacting with you, and there's a culture among many users to immediately block people who are thought to be potential agitators (a very proactive culture of "don't feed the trolls"). If your experience was toxic, you probably just didn't use the tools available to you to avoid that toxicity.
    • whimsicalism 1y ago
      i consider myself left-wing and found it very toxic. the ubiquitous blocking features are also a pretty big negative as i found myself blocked by a considerable portion of the site simply for following people in AI site features can only go so far when there is a broader cultural ethos
      • _djo_ 1y ago
        Honestly, getting on those blocklists is a benefit in and of itself, it means anyone who is radical enough to follow blocklists that block people just because of whom they follow won’t cross your path. There is an extremely toxic component to Bluesky’s user base, unfortunately, with the many attacks on the CEO for not banning Jesse Singal being testament to that. But for what it’s worth in the circles I’ve cultivated there I now see very little of those toxic people, and I don’t see any support for their behaviour. So I hope in time a more open culture will win out.
• csallen 1y ago
  The fact that the left defined Joe Rogan as right-wing for not adhering to very specific far-left tenets (e.g. de-platforming personas non grata and cooperating with cancel culture) only served to push him and his listeners rightward, and thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  • djeastm 1y ago
    >only served to push him and his listeners rightward Kind of takes the agency away from full-grown adults, doesn't it? How about people have principles and don't change them to chase audience/money/fame, eh?
    • csallen 1y ago
      You're right. Change the words "they were pushed" to "they chose". There's your agency. > How about people have principles and don't change them to chase audience/money/fame, eh? You assume that "having principles" means having your principles, and that for someone to disagree must mean they are unprincipled and simply chasing money/audience/fame. This kind of attitude comes across as incredibly arrogant and un-self-aware, and people/voters en masse want nothing to do with it. The reality is that many millions of people are principled, and they simply have different principles. For example, "opposing views should be aired and discussed" is a principle widely held by many millions of voters that the left has had an incredibly hard time understanding, respecting, and digesting.
      • amanaplanacanal 1y ago
        I suspect the people that really think that are a small minority. "The South was right, black people are subhuman and needed to be taken care of by slave owners" is not going to be a popular discussion topic, for example. Or suggesting that Hitler was right about how people should be treated in Europe.
    • Levitz 1y ago
      For a communicator, no audience means you lose everything. Why would he, or for that matter, anyone do that? Look at JK Rowling. Stood her ground, if it wasn't for her books allowing her advocacy, she'd have disappeared. Instead she has to endure being among the most hated millionaires for a good bunch of the left. Say Rogan sticks to his guns. He would face similar, never-ending attacks, no left-leaning figure could attend his podcast without becoming guilty by association, so he'd end up interviewing basically the same people as he does now, only he wouldn't cater to some people that, given somewhat recent events, would most probably celebrate him getting murdered. I reckon we shouldn't take away the agency away from the adults who made purity testing a common practice, given the utter disaster we are experiencing as a consequence.
• Levitz 1y ago
  >If your friends are in the right-wing sphere (e.g. Joe Rogan listeners, etc), then yeah, likely. I reckon there's more of a correlation between this type of statement and being a Bluesky user than being right-wing and using X. I mean X userbase is enormous compared to that of Bluesky, you can't be serious.
  • toyg 1y ago
    It's also dropping like a stone, which is why they are resorting to these tricks to inflate one of the few metrics that can be observed from outside (how much traffic they send to other sites). Where I live, X has completely exited polite conversation.
• gardenhedge 1y ago
  Mentions of Joe Rogan like this set off alarm bells for me. It's never good faith comments