Ranked Preference

I've been on Bluesky since before it opened itself up to the general public. Yes, there was a time, boys and girls, when it was still an in-development project and you had to get yourself an invite code from someone who was already a user. Me, I found my code in the comment section over at Defector.com, a publishing collective by of a bunch of sports-oriented leftists borne out of something as sinister as LABOR ACTION, so you know Bluesky is already suspect in its associations. Defector even writes regularly about women's sports, that's how far OUT THERE it is compared to the mainstream normals who, as we all know, are frightened and confused by ladies being sportsy. I can't see it ever starting to feel like a natural thing to watch until we get the right number of women doing online sports betting, which we all agree is the true mark of social acceptance. If it can't get a FanDuel badge slapped on it, it's probably actually communism. You can't be too careful.

I've been at it on Bluesky for a while now, always reading, never posting (some of us are shy) but now I'm being told that it is Actually Maybe Bad? So like any self-reflective person who spends any time online at all, I had to immediately make the response to any slight criticism of something I might enjoy MY ENTIRE PERSONALITY for an unspecified period of time. Honestly, Reader, I have not been this upset since I was informed I was too old to like Fall Out Boy in like 2006. Come on, they're only like 10 years younger than me! It's not like I was doing that plastered-down swoopy bangs haircut or anything, I just like some bouncy emo anthem pop-rock. And it turns out they were the last mainstream act to hit it big AND play instruments. And there, NOW I sound like a proper old person.

The main criticism of Bluesky is that it's a bubble or an echo chamber or whatever, a place for lefties to silo themselves off from the world because they're TOO SENSITIVE to have their Bleeding Heart blood thrown right back in their faces in a REAL COMBAT PIT like X/twitter. Just because X/twitter is owned by (in the literal sense) the richest racialist ideologue since Henry Ford, I'm supposed to accept it as some sort of global public square neutral ground while he actively pledges to tweak the code of his bespoke AI chatbot to make it more amenably racist.

Like, OK, a Muslim guy won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor the other day. I don't subscribe to any mainstream news outlets anymore and I live about as far from NYC as is possible while still being within the contiguous 48, so I got the news about Mamdani defeating Andrew Cuomo from my Bluesky cohort and it seemed like... fine? Normal-to-good news, really right in that range. It took another half day or so for me to see/hear the teeth gnashed and hands wrung hard enough to cracking in the rest of the news media, but in that 12-24 hours, honestly, what did I miss? And further, what did I miss that I couldn't have 100% predicted? Fox News is so sorry to tell you he's a Muslim, very unfortunate, completely disqualified from American public office. And the New York Times wants you to know that actually this is bad news for Democrats, for sure. And everyone else is brought to you by Draft Kings, who are now going to be in the predicament of trying to get this "socialist" guy to accept a campaign donation check and see if he'll go on TV with a branded jacket.

Look, I'm very much of the opinion that even if you intend something in the range of good-to-benign, you should occasionally do a check to see who is traveling with you after you start. Like I don't think Joe Rogan is an openly racist white supremacist, but once the podcast got going and it was all edgelord incel listeners whose main animating personality feature is trying to say the N-word as often as possible in public spaces, maybe that was time to re-think the direction of the endeavor? But I look around where I am on Bluesky and it's smart people who seem to want the best for their neighbors and their country, even though there are steep disagreements in the Body Politic at large about the right way to go about those aims. Which, yeah, tracks as fine to me.

I recognize also that my Bluesky feed looks that way because I'm allowed to curate it directly instead of having it algorithmically fed to me by twitter. I realize being bombarded by bots and burner accounts is now the American Way and my patriotic duty, but I'm being social on social media in a way I'm comfortable, which I guess could be described as "socialist" now, but that's not even a bar for a major party nomination in America's largest city anymore, so I guess I'll live with it.