Bluesky gives me a fresh start online – and more

On By Feminist Asian Dad

Social observers and commentators have said much in recent months about how the Left has left social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. With my thirteen-and-a-half-year-old account now gathering a lot of dust, and being left-leaning myself, I suppose I fit into that category. I’ll probably reinforce the stereotype of me as a Leaving Lefty when I tell you I’ve joined the expanding social media platform Bluesky, just as many other progressive-minded folks have after leaving X.

NBCNews.com

But I haven’t actually joined Bluesky to find a safer space to talk about political views. Really, it’s the exact opposite. I’ve purposely designed my new Bluesky feeds to avoid politics, and in fact, almost all news. My therapist suggested several months ago that I should get away from the news overall, due to feelings of sadness and anxiety that sometimes overwhelm me when I read or listen to coverage.

PC Mag image. The total number of Bluesky users on all platforms now exceeds 25 million. Gee, I wonder what happened in early November?

Enter Bluesky. In my month or so on the site, I’ve really enjoyed the chance to have a fresh start on a social media platform that’s new to me. My X account was structured for a different time in my life, when I was working as an activist on issues of relationship and sexual violence prevention and on advancing the rights of women. So I had several hundred connections there with fellow activists and journalists who reported on those matters. I learned a ton from these “tweeps,” as Twitter “peeps” were called back then, and those relationships helped tremendously with advocacy organizing. Some of my “tweeps” are still in my life, having come to be personal friends.

Near Times Square in New York City in early 2015. Doing the activist thing.

But given how so much of the news triggers a debilitating sort of reaction in me these days, I need a different sort of social media account – not one designed to give frequent alerts and updates in the struggle for justice, but one that helps me to breathe and renew my strength.

Pretty logo.

Bluesky gives me that, at least for now. Here’s how:

  1. Bluesky has no ads. None. My moments of enjoyment on the platform aren’t interrupted by them. Being on a site with no ads makes me realize how much ads took away from my experience on X, and how much they bog down my experience on other platforms. (If anyone from Bluesky is reading this, please keep the ads away, if at all possible.)
  1. Bluesky’s main page lets me put all my lists together in my desired order; I don’t have to click over to a separate Lists page. This lets me quickly find what I’m looking for, as soon as I get to the Bluesky page. This is what I see when I open it up:

And there’s room on the right for more, as I scroll over a bit. Note the “Following” column; that’s like the main X feed where all the accounts that a user follows are jumbled together. I’ve put it all the way on the right because I almost never use it:

And that’s another benefit of getting right to my lists from the get-go; I don’t have to activate the part of my brain that’s needed to sort the scramble of subjects on the combined X “Following” feed. I certainly got used to that aggregated feed, but I do remember how disconcerting it was when I first started a Twitter account to read a bunch of consecutive tweets about so many different subjects.

  1. Bluesky is still fairly free from toxic trolling types if you don’t have a lot of followers, which I don’t. I can interact with other folks on the site with confidence that our dialogue will be as constructive as we make it.
  1. Bluesky has a variety of types of content feeds, both ones that use words and others that consist of images. Perhaps X also had this, and I just didn’t notice. But on Bluesky, I follow several accounts that have beautiful pictures, which lift my spirit. Some are run by real people, while others are bots; all warm my heart. These accounts include:
Ahhhh. So nice.
See the link to Becky’s account above.

I also follow accounts that post some of my favorite comic characters, past and present. These give me a pick-me-up in a different way, through humor:

The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes were two of my favorite comic strips when I was a teenager!

Examples of the brilliance of Gary Larson (of The Far Side) and Bill Watterson (of Calvin and Hobbes).
  1. With the variety of feeds I’ve been able to follow on Bluesky, including ones for pop culture (like K-pop), my favorite sports teams, and fellow math teachers, I’ve been able to essentially put all the content I want to take in on a regular basis in one place. It’s my one-stop shop, and I like the simplicity of that. It’s something I tried to do with Twitter many years ago, unsuccessfully. I still check out Instagram to keep up with what friends and my students, past and present, are up to, but besides that, the only social media platform I feel like I need on a day-to-day basis is Bluesky. (One caveat is that Bluesky doesn’t yet have a lot of sports teams with official accounts, if that’s something you want. But there’s a growing number of sports journalists who are on the site, and I’ve been able to find ones that cover my favorite teams.)
AllKPop.com (https://bsky.app/profile/allkpop.com)was the first K-pop feed that I saw on Bluesky.

Others have written about additional things they like about Bluesky, especially children’s author Debbie Ridpath Ohi (https://bsky.app/profile/debbieohi.com), who’s put together pretty much a user’s guide for important features like blocking unwanted followers (who are truly blocked on this site, like they used to be on Twitter before it became X). But these are the features that stand out to me the most. I definitely recommend trying the platform out! For me, it’s been more than just something new and fun. Without exaggerating, I can honestly say it’s been good for my well-being.