Blue Skies and Possible Second Chances

I’ve had a social media account on Bluesky for quite a while. I hadn’t been using it much, to be honest. One update a week, generally, a link to the blog post. Maybe a reply or two here and there, the odd ‘like’. Nothing major. In case you’re wondering, it’s like Twitter/X but nicer.

Then, a few weeks ago, it kind of just took off. After you-know-who won you-know-what, more and more people jumped ship and turned up on Bluesky, which was the equivalent of the ‘RMS Carpathia’, if you know what I mean. Old familiar faces appeared, Tentative exchanges and sapling conversations sprang up. It was nice. 

Could it be something? A possible second chance at a working social media interface, without the barriers and the blocks and the forced information and adverts? We’ll see, I guess.

Today will be the first day that I won’t do a tweet on ‘X’ for this weekly blog post. That’s been pretty much the only tweet I’ve done for some time now. It’s been a pointless exercise because ‘X’ won’t share a tweet with a link like that in it. Two or three friends will see it, that’s all (as far as I can tell). I’d got used to that. But what I hadn’t got used to was the fact that I was giving some kind of support or acknowledgement to the current owner of ‘X’ and that is something I don’t want to be doing. Hypocritically, maybe, I’ll hold on to the account for another while but won’t use it unless I see a friend who needs a word of support. I should terminate it but there’s 15 years of friends and stuff put into it and maybe someday someone else will come along and it will be a good thing again. I know, I know, but that’s how I think. A tad naive, at best.

Meanwhile, there’s Bluesky.

Something small but nice happened to me on Bluesky yesterday. It started, as nice things sometimes do, with the excellent Moose Allain. I had the pleasure of meeting Moose once, but it was on a very sad day, and I don’t feel I was as outgoing or genial as I wish I had been. Moose is very clever, very creative and very, very inventive and you should go and look him up and support his Art. He and I share an’ involvement’ in Architecture but I reckon he’s way better at it than I am. (Ed: That’s enough about Moose now, what did he do yesterday?)

Okay, yesterday Moose posted a message on Bluesky. I really don’t know what people call that. A Bluesky-Tweet. A Bleat, maybe? I have no clue. Here’s what he bleated. No, doesn’t work, anyway…

Just thinking about dad jokes I’ve made which have annoyed/embarrassed my children. For example in a restaurant I ordered a coke. The waitress asked if I wanted a pint or a half. I said, “Better make it a half, I’m driving.” No one laughed, apart from me.

I read it, enjoyed it and was about to move on when I suddenly remembered that I’d had my own spontaneous Dad-Joke moment in just the last couple of days. So I typed that up in a message and sent it as a reply to Moose. No reason, really. I didn’t even think it was all that worth sending. But I did anyway. Here’s what I sent back.

Just the other day, I was buying two of the same book, in the bookshop, as pressies. The lady asked me if I was sure I needed two and I said yes, I'm going to read it twice. She just looked at me.

On of the good things I always found about Twitter/X/Bluesky is how it teaches you to edit yourself. I could have made a whole blog post out of that (true) story. I suppose, in a way, I have. Anyway, Moose replied (kindly) that this was ‘Marvellous Stuff’ and passed it on to the people who read his stuff. This was kind and much appreciated. One would expect a little traction from a Moose seal of approval like this. I kind of figured I would see about three ‘likes’ and maybe one repost of my thing if I was lucky.

As I l glance now at my little message, I see that there are… 370 likes and… twenty-nine reposts. A brace of new people has come and followed my mutterings. Yesterday was a pleasant experience, the few times I checked in to Bluesky saw more and more reaction and replies to my couple of lines and new people dropping by. It was an experience reminiscent of old school Twitter from ten or fifteen years ago. It was not really about being ultra-clever or super-funny. It was something considerably more subtle than that.

It’s a twofold thing, really. The first part is a renewed spirit of generosity that Twitter had beaten out of most of us. ‘That’s kind of good, I’ll give it a like’ is no longer the Twitter/X way, not in my experience anyway. The second part is simply about seeing and being seen. Twitter/X shut me down to such an extent that no more than a literal handful of people were seeing anything I chose to say, which unsurprisingly became less and less and less. But, like a frog in slowly heating water, I never really took notice until I was virtual escargot.

This post isn’t here to say, look at me, I did a funny and got loads of likes. 370 doesn't even qualify as 'loads of likes' by old-school standards. But it is something. It is a positive sign. One of positivity and engagement. Stretching the point, it may be a possible sign of regeneration and of social media rebirth.

Do I go too far? Of course I do! Haven’t you met me?

Perhaps the likelihood is that Bluesky will mark time in a grossly accelerated fashion, rather like that water planet in Interstellar. It will warm up and cool down and congeal at ten times the rate of the other places we have landed, and we will hoof through its bubbling scraps again for a while before hopping on to some other doomed planet for another while. 

But maybe not. Maybe this is the place.

The place for us.