Anyone still need a Bluesky invite? I have a few.
Yes, please. Might as well see what the fuss is about.
In your DMs.
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Also yes please. Might finally get me away from the bad place.
Yeah go on then.
I will take one if you still have.
I needed to google to find out what you guys are talking about. Seems like I’ve missed some hype.
DMs out for @SpiceTheCat, @OhBollox, and @kennfusion, and that’s all I have at the moment. Happy to bring more when I get more.
@Blackfyre, if you liked Twitter, but don’t now, Bluesky is the most Twitter-like not-Twitter I’ve found. I still use Mastodon, but I never really found enough people to follow there.
Things to know: by default, you see the replies of people you follow. This largely sucks and should be changed, but there’s a setting so that you either never see replies, or specify a number of likes a reply by someone you follow must have to show up in your feed. The big, prolific accounts I follow are John Scalzi, Neil Gaiman, and Chuck Wendig; their replies often get enough likes to cross any reasonable threshold, so I turned replies off entirely.
If you go to my account to check out who to follow, you should know that there’s some stuff I’d like in my feed (e.g. miniature painting, landscape photography) for which I’ve followed promiscuously. My goal was to quickly have a well-populated feed, and then, as the platform fills out, have reasonably high churn of who I follow until I settle into something that suits me. So there are probably some folks in there who are tiresome or objectionable; no endorsement is intended. I’m already noticing more “look at this bad thing” than I want, for example, and that’s going to start inspiring some unfollows.
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Thanks @rinelk for explaining and taking your time to elaborate !
It’s very difficult to keep up these days. One platform gets replaced after another….
Actually I deleted my account on facebook over a year ago, the last time I had used it was 5 years ago. I made an account on instagram years ago, but stopped after only one week, finally I deleted it. Never had Snapchat or TikTok. I had twitter, but barely used it. After this whole X thing, I stopped even that. Those are all I am aware of.
I have WhatsApp, and I feel it’s all (and more than) I need.
The good thing is, I never felt I missed anything important in my life. Only that a lot of people I meet outside of my core friends, seem to have a lot to talk about of people on social media and I can’t participate.
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I also had various things at one point, but they’ve made a move to license all police officers in NJ and as part of the licensure law require you to reveal all of your social media sites. That was kind of a bridge too far for me / straw that broke the camel’s back, leading me to get rid of the few accounts that I still had remaining. I’m with @Blackfyre in not missing it at all; I don’t even have WhatsApp as I think Meta is the least trustworthy of the bunch…
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What’s WhatsApp like? I’m moderately checked-out of, well, culture generally, really. But I had thought it was a messaging app with the distinctive feature that your messages went away after a short while.
But then, I also thought Discord was … something. Anyway, I don’t know what it is now, and every time I open it to get rid of the notifications, I’m overwhelmed and decide not to explore.
But, yeah, totally with you on Meta. I deeply distrust Zuckerberg; deleted my account years ago when he went to Congress and said the consequences of his actions are not his responsibility.
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WhatsApp is fine, albeit there’s zero privacy; even scheduling your messages to disappear doesn’t save you from whatever you discuss getting advertised to you. The way it easily incorporates itself into your phone (and contact list) quickly made it ubiquitous, so a lot of people got it to message the older generation for whom something like Signal was unheard of. This extended to a lot of businesses and work chats, so it has quickly become difficult to avoid. I keep pushing friends to try the likes of Briar or Signal but they need WhatsApp to stay in touch with older and/or less tech-savvy family and friends.
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I’m convinced WhatsApp is just iMessage for Android users who then convinced iOS devotees to download it. As far as I can tell it doesn’t do anything more than iMessage does - end-to-end encryption, videos, stickers, gifs, etc - but with less privacy cause Zuckerberg is reading your stuff while he Scrooge McDuck’s into his piles of cash.
I’m with @OhBollox on it being used a lot for work, but there are perks to being a DC and being able to dictate how people get in touch with me lol.
Also agreed on Discord. It’s one of my last surviving social media accounts but I haven’t used it in forever. I like to think Discord is just for gaming chat, but now Xbox does the same and does it better. Plus I dislike Discord’s hands-off attitude when it comes to the rampant kiddie porn that’s supposedly on there…
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by default, you see the replies of people you follow.
This is just odd, isn’t it. It’s worse than Twitter in a way (may my tongue turn black for saying so) because you don’t even click to get into someone’s mentions. That said, if you follow some good people, it’s not awful, just weird.
The only thing I use Discord for these days is finding the odd interesting channel and running RPGs in my own channel; I have messed around with a bunch of VTTs and none of them are what I would call good; Discord at least is easy and reliable.
Yeah, I found it was tedious, not aversive. But, still, the existence of a setting to change it is the thing one sees posted every few days as a new user tip. So, yes, a very strange choice, and one I hope gets fixed soon.
Also the app needs to go universal soon. For some reason, using the phone app on an iPad causes occasional problems where images continuously refresh (I think?), so the whole timeline bounces up and down and is wholly unreadable. But, while there’s lots of room to improve, it’s been good for me so far.
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