I’m completely not sorry I left Twitter for Bluesky

Technically I still have a Twitter/X account but I’m not using it. Going there to taunt or confront right-wingers doesn’t feel satisfying any more, and that’s about all I did. I’ve moved to BlueSky, which is an improvement.

Right-wingers are mocking BlueSky as an “echo chamber” where we liberals hear nothing but our own voices and opinions. That’s because it’s easy to block trolls and the trend at the moment is to do so. Don’t engage. Don’t feed. As someone said, not responding to them there or even reading them doesn’t mean we’re blind to right-wing views: they’re accessible anywhere on the web, if we want or need to find them.

And not dealing with right-wingers is a perfectly legit choice. As Mo Ryan puts it, leaving X means “I’m missing incels, nazis, crypto shills, brainwormed rich people, VC dipshits, fascist lickspittles, bothsides mediabros and wall to wall ads for gross/weird stuff. I have to come clean, I’m DYING to get back to that toasty fire of rancid vibes.” We don’t need any of that.

It’s frustrating to right-wingers, however, because they do need us. A great many of them (not all) want to troll us, dominate us, trigger us (as they assume they’re doing). Some of them boast about it in their profiles on BlueSky (I blocked ’em). They can’t do that if we don’t engage.

BlueSky is designed to resemble Twitter which is a small drawback: tweets and threads don’t work for me as well as blog posts of FB posts do. So I’m not as engaged as I am on some of the blogs I follow heavily.

A bigger disappointment is that I used to promote my posts on X using Science Fiction Writers of America’s hashtag. I stopped doing that a while ago. Apparently it worked better than I realized as the number of clicks on this blog has gone way down. I much prefer stats move in the other direction.

Still not going back. And hopefully we’ll get a BlueSky equivalent tag soon.