We need to talk

[firecat]

The New Yorker is trying to convince me that Bluesky has become annoying and everyone’s back on Xitter. Not linking because it’s paywalled. True or false?

I never got the hang of Twitter. I have similar problems with Bluesky. I don’t need a social site to deliver me more links. I want conversation. Is conversation dead? Where is it? (I know there’s some here…)

I miss Usenet, lol

Comments

[frith]

Try Discord? Generally a group or site with a specialized interest or theme will post a Discord "invite" to their channel.

[firecat]

I’m on a few Discords but there’s something offputting about it that I can’t put my finger on.

[nanila]

I miss Usenet too.

[firecat]

💜

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

I have no idea :/ I've never had any social media but this and LJ. I hope you're recovering though!

[firecat]

Thank you! I am recovering pretty well.

[ursula]

I think you should probably translate this as "Xitter is full of Nazis but Bluesky is full of people who keep annoyingly asking me why I'm hanging out with Nazis."

I do find Bluesky is less fun than it used to be, but it feels like that's because it's a place where people talk about current events, and current events are dire.

[firecat]

That seems like a pretty accurate translation…

[mrissa]

My sense of it is that Bluesky is somewhat better than Xitter, especially better at not forcing horrible things into your feed that you didn't ask for. (Things your friends put in your feed...well.) But it hasn't ever reached the really chatty water cooler status for me. If I want that I have to go to Discord or Slack now, and those are both walled gardens, which changes the nature of the chatting both for good and for ill.

[firecat]

Discord doesn’t do it for me, so far..
I should check out slack but I had the impression it was for techy talk only.

[mrissa]

Like Discord, the specific Slack you're on makes a huge difference in what it's all about...but also some people just don't take to one of those interfaces or another, or don't happen to have the right combination of friends using that interface, and it just never clicks for them.

Right now I feel like I'm trying to make an effort to stay in touch with people in the mode that works well for them, whether that's Slack, Discord, Bsky, one orphaned Twitter groupchat, FB, DW, texts, phone calls, video chats. But I'm better at some than at others, and most of those modes give me staying in touch with people individually rather than long group conversations.

[firecat]

Right now I feel like I'm trying to make an effort to stay in touch with people in the mode that works well for them, whether that's Slack, Discord, Bsky, one orphaned Twitter groupchat, FB, DW, texts, phone calls, video chats

That sounds exhausting…

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> I never got the hang of Twitter. I have similar problems with Bluesky.<<

They're too small for me and useless for any of my needs.

>> I don’t need a social site to deliver me more links. I want conversation. Is conversation dead? <<

Conversation is not dead. It just relies on people to create it. My recurring posts include the Wednesday rotation (Good News, Hard Things, Cuddle Party) and Saturday is currently Philosophical Questions. Sometimes the Hobbies post on Thursday will spark a discussion. I'm also prone to posting about articles I've read -- science, politics, civics, etc. -- and those sometimes turn into discussions.

>> Where is it? (I know there’s some here…) <<

Here is a masterlist of active communities by topic. Look up topics you enjoy and see what comms are active. Some are strictly formatted comms, like only posting reviews, but many are open to discussions. Some have a schedule where they post questions or themes. You should be able to find some that are lively.

You're also welcome to drop by my Poetry Fishbowl on the first Tuesday of each month. Next up will be October 7 on "Witches and Wizards." There's usually plenty of crosstalk among the audience.

>> I miss Usenet, lol <<

Yeah, good times. *wist*

[jenett]

I like that Bluesky is (as mrissa says) good about not dumping other stuff into your feeds randomly. I have a list called "key reads" (aka people I want to make sure I see their stuff - friends, people who reliably post interesting stuff.) I have others for things like local area politics when I want to dip in for five minutes to see responses to Latest Thing, some for different reading genres, etc.

It's not a place for Deep Friendship Forming for me (though the improvements in threading have made it a lot easier to do longer-than-single-post thoughts for me - you can chain them before you post them all, which is great for me in breaking the thoughts at post-useful lengths). But it's a great place to keep up with certain kinds of info, and especially a couple of friends who find Bluesky accessible for disability stuff in ways other places aren't reliably.

(This is mostly a 'can't be at computer sitting up for long' problem for them, not the specific tech in play, but 'can reply from phone or tablet lying down' has a bunch of benefit in that case.)

I get deeper ongoing conversation with Discord (knownish group of people, it feels more like Usenet to me albeit with shorter individual comment length and harder to keep particular bits persistent and findable.)

[firecat]

albeit with shorter individual comment length and harder to keep particular bits persistent and findable.)

Yeah, it’s precisely those things I miss, the long rambling convos that were visibly threaded if you had the right newsreader. For short, non-persistent conversation with people I know, FB still works. I just hate being the product on a platform that stands for what it stands for now.

[ravan]

IMO, Xitter is still a right wing dumpster fire. The New Yorker is just sucking up to Musk and the right. Threads has all the problems of other Meta properties - no anonymity, weird and rightward tilted content resetrictions

BlueSky is still gaining ground. It's not perfect - no social media site is. But to me it's better than Xitter and Meta stuff.

Discord is meh. Some games and groups I'm in use Discord, but it's not my favorite platform. I can't discover new content on it like I could on UseNet.

IMO, Dreamwidth is like a long form UseNet with the trolls. I like that.

[firecat]

The New Yorker is just sucking up to Musk and the right.

Yeah, I keep forgetting that it does that. >:-(

[redbird]

I suspect that of being another "lifestyle" article that basically means "the six people I saw at the last dinner party said they're doing X."

I'm prepared to believe that fewer people are on Bluesky than there used to be (I keep forgetting that I meant to go look at my feed), but not that they're back on Xitter. Maybe the article writer (or editor) is/was following the wrong feeds?

[greghousesgf]

"I suspect that of being another "lifestyle" article that basically means "the six people I saw at the last dinner party said they're doing X." "
I think you hit the nail right on the head with that one. The New Yorker has some great moments but some of their articles are absolute nonsense, and I'm not even going to get into their weird obsession with hyphens.

[redbird]

Do they still have a thing for the diaresis, as in “coöperation”?

[greghousesgf]

yup

[firecat]

I suspect that of being another "lifestyle" article that basically means "the six people I saw at the last dinner party said they're doing X."

Hahaha perfect description of those articles, of which the New Yorker has many.

[bitterlawngnome]

the whole "which site is most popular" debate is poisoned. if you want to go strictly by the numbers, bsky is growing faster than xitter. but the content on those sites tends to be very much of the clickbait / advertising variety, with a tendency to rage farming and many many many bots. bsky is less bad but it's a matter of degree. if you want conversation, Mastodon is the best choice. there is a tiiiiny bit more work in using Masto but it's enough to keep the clickbait types away - a feature, not a drawback.

[firecat]

I’m on Mastodon but the people I followed there aren’t posting much, I’ll have to see if I can find the conversations.

[snippy]

I have done some conversing on reddit, some on mastodon. Reddit is seriously the closest thing to Usenet I've read in the last 15 years - it has threading, blocking, you can keep going back into old threads to read new comments, and it's somewhat moderated. Finding the right groups for your interests matters.

[firecat]

Reddit is the closest I’ve found too, as far as wide ranging but slightly restricted by topic conversations, but I’ve not participated enough to get a sense for any of the people behind the posts or comments. The other site I’m on sometimes that has interesting convos in some forums is fetlife, oddly enough, although it’s off-putting in a number of ways. (I’d rather see a picture of a cat as someone’s user icon rather than a picture of their genitals.)

[prettyarbitrary]

No, people are not going back to Twitter en masse.

People are reaching the end of their honeymoon periods with Bluesky, though. It is by and large the same as the Ye Olde Twitter--with all the pros and cons thereof. Now that it's fully up to speed, a lot of folks are remembering that meant Twitter often used to be a tire fire (compared to what it is now, which is a toxi waste acid bath).

There are some people going back to Twitter, admittedly. Mostly these are the smug right-wingers who think they're "moderates" who declared loudly they were going to Bluesky to Diversify The Conversation, and then discovered everyone had them blacklisted and nobody noticed a thing they said.

I get a fair amount of discussion on Discord, but it's hard as hell to find the good spots. All the best communities are invisible unless you find someone willing to give you the secret code.

[firecat]

Your experience aligns with mine.

[silveradept]

Doubtful that everyone is going back to Xitter. Might be that they've decided the Nazi bar at Substack is more to their liking, or they've decided that the official Bluesky instance is no good and are now looking for something else.

It's probably mostly going to Discord, honestly, and maybe a bit here and there to other places. Discord provides the real time that many crave and enough of a barrier to get in that they feel reasonably good about it being "private."

DW is what it is, where you have to find a bridge and them walk over it to find interesting people and then cross their bridges. Time-intensive and all that.

[firecat]

I don’t like real time internet convos except with people I know. That’s why I liked the threading on Usenet and the culture that it was fine to reopen a topic at any time. So I guess that’s part of my issue with Discord.

[silveradept]

Understandable, and I also like the pace of threaded conversations compared to the real-time, but a lot of people going away from social media sites that prioritize speed of takes and the massing of large groups still apparently want those features, just with fewer obvious fascists doing the orchestration of takes and groups.

[eeyore_grrl]

i'm technically on Blue Sky, but i never go. SURE AS HELL not on twitter.

[firecat]

That’s where I am now, mostly

[deakat]

I miss Usenet *so much*! Fell into a hole the other day reading alt.shoe.lesbians.moderated on google groups. Good times!

[firecat]

Yes, reading archived Usenet is one of those bittersweet nostalgic experiences for me.

Another positive to USENET

[jesse_the_k]

was structural asynchrony. With the exception of here (and Reddit, sometimes), the other sites thrive on real-time interaction. My timeline is just different than most folks'.