It's been a WEIRDLY EMOTIONAL morning for me today, all to do with the long prophesied MASS EXODUS from Twitter finally actually (probably) happening.
I mean, I know poeople have been leaving there for a while now, but it seems like this week a decision been made by Nice People Everywhere to go over to BLUESKY en masse. As far as I can see this has been caused by D Trump offering E Musk a place in his government as an Efficiency Tsar, and I must say I can very much see the reasoning. After all, if you have millions fewer uses of your system you need a lot fewer STAFF, which I'm pretty sure is SUPER EFFICIENT all round. If all goes to plan next year I expect him to change the name of the country to The UXA and sort out immigration immediately by having a third of the population up sticks and move to Canada immediately.
I got EMOTIOANL about it this particular morning because of STARTER PACKS. These are basically lists of people with Specific Interests that you can use to find accounts to follow, and the first one I saw was for BEATLES people, forwarded to me by International Rock Star Pete Green. I was very merrily following those when I noticed that my notifications had gone NUTS. "60+ Notificatuions?" I thought. "Surely that can't be right?"
Mr R Manuel had set up a B3ta Starter Pack what had my name on it, and suddenly a whole HEAP of familiar names were popping up. I went through and did a whole load of Folows Backs of people I knew, and then all of a sudden my entire feed was EXACTLY LIKE OLD TWITTER! Nice people! Saying amusing things! Without adverts or Nazis!
I had a quick look over on twitter to make sure I wasn't IMAGING the huge gulf of difference, and saw that "Bluesky" was trending. However, when I looked at what people were SAYING it was mostly snide remarks by people (often with blue ticks) claiming that they'd been for a look but Bluesky was "just like twitter in 2017" AS IF THAT WAS A BAD THING!! Twitter in 2017 is pretty much exactly what I wanted, and now it appears to be BACK! Just not on twitter!
Other dreary people were OPINING that all the nice people leaving twitter was a Bad Thing as it meant that we couldn't ENGAGE with each other. Personally speaking I never really WANTED to engage with arseholes and Nazis, and I certainly didn't want them FOISTED on me repeatedly along with weird adverts for AI Products, so that is entirely fine with me!
Anyway, all of this is mostly to say a) HOORAY for something GOOD happening on the interweb and b) if you want to find me over there I'm on https://bsky.app/profile/mjhibbett.bsky.social. Do come and say hello!
(PS and if anyone can set up a Starter Pack featuring People Who Used Go To Indietracks Who I Haven't Seen For Ages, that would be much appreciated!)
