This post was originally published on the Distant Illusions Blog. I'm moving it here because it's more of a personal rant than something that belongs to the Distant Illusions site.

If you're one of the people who jumped ship from X to Bluesky, well, congratulations! You've officially joined the last great migration of a dying digital civilization!

I find the current interest in Bluesky...well, interesting! I mean, it clearly isn't just about the vibes or the features, and it certainly isn't about decentralization. It's about escape. Escape from a space that used to be about forming genuine connections, but now exists primarily to extract attention, warp discourse, and serve you an endless firehose of slop that makes you feel like you're losing brain cells by the scroll.

And yet here we are again. On another app. Doing the same thing, hoping it'll be different this time.

Spoiler: It probably won't be. But I get why we're trying.

What the hell happened?

A decade ago, social media was about people. Reconnecting with long lost friends, discovering cool artists, and more importantly, having weirdly meaningful discussions with strangers from the other side of the world about obscure Sonic games. There was chaos, but there was also life. But now, there's only chaos left.

X (or Twitter, whatever) is what happens when a social media platform stops respecting its very own users and starts seeing them as cows to be milked. You open the app, and you're immediately shoved to the "For You" feed, an algorithm curated nightmare of stolen memes, outrage farming, and Elon dickriding. Because, you know, that's what gets the "engagement" going. And if you want to get noticed, you either also play this game, or vanish.

Now you might say, "Okay, why would I even want to get engagement on X though?". Because X literally pays you for it. You get paid for the amount of interactions you get on your posts...if you subscribe to their premium service and make enough noise, that is.

As a result, we now have a bunch of "professional posters" on X who are more interested in collecting likes and sparking very surface-level conversations than sharing anything actually interesting, or fostering meaningful interactions. These people even get sponsors! Companies, especially gambling and adult entertainment related ones, pay them a ton. And the algorithm doesn't care if it's a thinly veiled ad or not.

You know what the algorithm doesn't love? Anything that contains links, or even mentions of other platforms. X does NOT want you to leave their app and click away, it wants you to keep scrolling until your eyeballs fall out. So it buries posts that try to point you elsewhere.

Say you made a YouTube video and want to share it with the world. Too bad! You got no choice but to drop it in the replies with a bunch of periods and slashes in the link. Wanna write a blog post? Just turn it into a 47-part thread instead! Or better yet, buy X Premium™ to unlock longer posts. Now you can have an obnoxiously large post in a timeline where everything else is 280 characters long. Who needs a blog when you got an X "the everything app" account?

The system feels hostile to authenticity. The second you try to say something meaningful, personal, or nuanced, the algorithm quietly nudges you aside in favor of someone talking about how the moon is not real (not the moon landing, the moon itself), or someone else quoting the said post with a low effort roast. Yes, this was an actual post I saw while I was writing this.

Enter Bluesky!

So, obviously, people were rather excited about Bluesky when it first started making rounds. And I get it, I was excited too. I mean, it feels like a time capsule in a way. A place where social media still feels personal, a little awkward, and, you know, social! A place where people are actually posting because they want to, not because they're chasing metrics. It's fun! I enjoy being there!

Unlike X, Bluesky actually respects you! Yeah sure, it also has an algorithm powered timeline, but you can turn it off really easily, and there's no bullshit like posting links downranking your posts. In fact, you can even add custom timelines, based on a selection of simple extremely simple algorithms made by other people. It's all about choice.

The big issue is that Bluesky is also built on the same foundation as X. Same microblogging format, same incentive structure, same basic affordances. The thing that made X rot wasn't just its ownership and algorithms, it was scale, moderation, monetization, and the gravitational pull of being The Place Everyone Had To Be At. And once you're big enough, every decision becomes about keeping the machine running. That machine feeds on people, not for what they say, but for how much they can be farmed.

Despite being "decentralized" (which means very little in practice anyway), Bluesky isn't immune to all this. The clock is already ticking, and the cracks are already showing.

Let's start with funding. Unlike Mastodon, Bluesky didn't just pop out of some idealist German open-source guy's bedroom. It was started by Twitter itself, under Jack Dorsey's own order, and is now funded by crypto investment funds, the same speculative vultures that tried to sell us Web3 as if it wasn't just a load of bullshit.

You might be saying "Mors, you're being too cynical. Maybe this is just the regular startup stuff they have to do to stay afloat. You know, you take the money you can, build the platform, and then figure out the ethics later!".

Wrong!!! The ethics aren't for later, they're for now. Every decision made in the platform's (relative) infancy will shape its direction moving forward. And by giving a voice to people whose entire business model is about creating artificial scarcity and milking the concept of art for money, they're just decorating the same coffin.

I mean, Bluesky has already begun censoring posts at the request of authoritarian governments, specifically Turkey. The same thing is happening over at X as well, which is exactly why Turkish people were fleeing to Bluesky in the first place, hoping for a freer alternative after X took down hundreds of posts and accounts critical of the Turkish government...only to find the same suppression waiting for them on the other side. Great!

You cannot claim to be the new free and open town square while simultaneously bending the knee to regimes that crush dissent. The excuse is, of course, "compliance with local laws". But if compliance means aiding censorship and silencing marginalized voices abroad, then maybe the dream was dead on arrival.

And as if that wasn't enough of a heel turn, Bluesky is now testing a verification system. You know, the one thing their whole URL-based handles system was supposed to eliminate. I mean, the whole point decentralization was to let users control their own presence without relying on the central platform as an arbiter...yet look where we are.

See, the problem isn't just that these platforms keep making the same mistakes, it's that they can't seem to imagine anything else. Their vision is just Twitter again.

Social media was a beautiful mistake

We weren't meant to talk to this many people, this often, this loudly.

I mean, the internet wasn't originally intended for social media anyway, it was for the message boards, IRC channels, Usenet threads... Small, insular communities with a barrier of entry. Not just technologically, but culturally. You had to want to be there. You had to learn the language, the etiquette, the context. There was friction, and that friction gave it a meaning.

As the internet matured, the edges started getting sanded down. More and more people joined, from all corners of the world, for better or worse. And where people go, capital follows. With that, companies essentially ended up colonizing (or rather gentrifying) the internet.

Social media started being focused more and more on engagement, turning every conversation into a show, every moment into content, and every relationship into metrics. We started measuring our worth in followers and reach. We were made addicted to attention, and to being seen a certain way...

That's the real sickness of modern social media. Not the interaction bait accounts, or the porn bots, or the scammers, or the nazis. These are just the symptoms of a much deeper problem. The real sickness is these massive corporations tricking us into thinking of ourselves as brands, where we forget how to just exist online without selling something, even if what we're selling is just a cooler, more clever version of ourselves. I know it because I'm guilty of all this too.

Earlier I blamed X's algorithm for encouraging slop, but the truth is more complicated than that. X only saw an opportunity, and capitalized on it by accelerating the process. No, Twitter saw an opportunity. Let's not forget that this problem has been going on for longer than Elon Musk has owned the site.

Bluesky was a chance to start fresh, but it ended up being a monument to our inability to let go. It's nostalgia wrapped in code. We wanted things to go back to how they were. We wanted the joy of posting dumb shit without thinking about analytics. We wanted our freedom back from algorithmic puppeteering, from platforms that treat us like meat for the content grinder.

And we're willing to lie to ourselves to get it, even if it's only for a brief moment.

...Fuck

The social media dream is cracking. Everyone's tired of being online and nowhere at the same time. That's why we keep reaching for the next thing. Mastodon! Cohost! Hive! Threads! Bluesky! Maybe if we just repackage the format, make it "decentralized" or something, and clean up the vibes... Maybe then it'll work!

I don't think it will. Not unless we rethink what we even want from being online, and stop building systems that reward the worst instincts of human behavior...

Don't get me wrong, Bluesky will survive. Heck, it might even end up replacing X! But it's not the salvation we need. It's a pit stop on the long, slow, necessary collapse of the social media as we know it.

Though, honestly? That might not be such a bad thing.