If you’ve been around the block at all you might know about some pretty dicey stuff going on over at Xitter, their most recent stunts being allowing users to view posts of people who block them12 and training AI on your tweets23. Now, it’s actually been exactly a month as of today since I left the platform. After realizing the platform has generally been horrible for my mental health, experiencing huge amounts of hate, antisemitism, homophobia, and more, I decided to pack up and move over to Bluesky. Bluesky is, in the simplest terms, Xitter, but without Elon’s musk.

The moving process

Here's the quick and easy process I actually followed to leave Xitter

  1. Lock the account and add a pointer in my bio to my links page
  2. Change the account password and disable 2FA
  3. Write the new password on a sticky note
  4. Delete the password from iCloud
  5. Lock the password stickey note in an inconvenient-to-access safe in my room
  6. Watch as your heartrate naturally lowers itself to a more typical human rate

Because I decided to move away that fateful day, I was really surprised to see the amount of people actually moving to Bluesky. People consistently say they’ll switch, but more often than not very few actually follow through4. This time is different though, just in the past few days I’ve been able to find a huge chunk of the people I would actively follow and interact with on Xitter, on Bluesky including various game developers, 3D animation friends, and content creators. As I and many others get more interested in this platform, there are 2 main things that really jump out at me:

It just makes sense

By “it just makes sense,” I mean, a lot of the features, especially in the space of moderation, just make perfect sense for the type of platform that it is. A lot of Bluesky moderation is created and run by the community, which makes sense as an open source project. On Bluesky you can create a blocklist that users can choose to follow, automatically blocking accounts featured in it such as this content scraper list. Additionally, labellers allow one to place labels on certain accounts, such as in the official moderation labeller, as well as having other uses like identifying people in the games industry. Checkmark verification is now a thing of the past thanks to AT Protocol identifiers, allowing someone to verify their ownership of their webdomain and use it as their Bluesky @. I LOVE this because it means that anyone who has a website (anyone who really needs to be verified probably should have a website by that point) can verify themselves as the site owner, without needing any level of human intervention, as well as just generally making it far easier to verify account authenticity.

It feels nice here

Along with these features, and things like starter packs (lists of users you can follow with a single click) which I shared a few of in links above, the general mindset around the platform’s users is to simply block aggressors and annoying people. Strange concept, I know, but it turns out you tend to have a far more pleasant experience if bad people are left ignored. usually fighting fire with fire just makes the fire grow. The platform feels nice and safe, because that’s part of its design.

Community-based moderation allows you to make any change needed to your feed’s moderation in order to ensure you feel safe, and the algorithm isn’t actively fighting to push a political argument5. If you’ve talked with me about political stuff you would know I hate polarization, especially in social media; constantly showing everyone every extreme does nothing but push us further apart, but I’m not going to get into it here. My feed is predominantly game development and art posts and it makes me feel happy :3. Custom feeds created by community members are also able to do way more than your basic Xitter feed ever could by amplifying certain tags or only showing you posts that your neighbour’s dog liked, allowing you to see exactly what you want.

Moving forwards

Maybe it’s just because it’s a new platform, but I genuinely think that Bluesky is one of the few social platforms that actually has the users in mind over just plain profits. Mastodon is around too, but I think it scares people away trying to understand how federation and different instances work. All of this is to say… you should totally follow me on Bluesky! I don’t plan to be as active there as I once was on Xitter for obvious reasons, but I hope to be around and see more people in this newer, more positive era of social media.

(Xitter = X + Twitter, I didn’t even consider that X could be pronounced “sh” until way after I started using that term but it fits too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

P.S. Feel free to share your Bsky @’s in the comments as well as a little description of what you do, or reach out to me via email :)

References

Note: News is biased; I try to find sources on both sides of the political spectrum when possible. Feel free to check the credibility of anything I source at mediabiasfactcheck.com or your favourite fact checker.

  1. “Block is going to be deleted as a “feature”, except for DMs” Elon Musk, Xitter ↩

  2. People are flocking to Bluesky as X makes more unwanted changes Mia Sato, The Verge ↩ ↩2

  3. X is the latest social media site letting 3rd parties use your data to train AI models Jenna Benchetrit, CBC News ↩

  4. The Main Advantage Bluesky Has Over Twitter (Besides The Obvious One) Paul Tassi, Forbes ↩

  5. Twitter’s algorithm favours right-leaning politics, research finds BBC ↩