I guess I’m glad I was never a big Twat, so Bluesky wasn’t a place of refuge for me the way Lemmy was when Reddit went off the rails.
I guess I’m glad I was never a big Twat, so Bluesky wasn’t a place of refuge for me the way Lemmy was when Reddit went off the rails.
I didn’t realize bluesky was corporate.
I did try it when it was new, but it always felt like kind of a circlejerk. Like it was good to be surrounded by mostly like-minded opinions, but I felt like everyone was trying to say something profound or boldly controversial and I was just like… “Yeah, we all pretty much agree, so… that’s that, I guess?”
But then again I was never really into the whole microblogging thing even before, so maybe that’s always how it was supposed to be…
Before I found the fediverse my main platform was reddit, though. Good ole anonymous forums, that’s all the social media I need…
If something isn’t very specifically only fediverse (and not just able to federate) or open source it’s corporate. You’ll always know because everything that isn’t corporate is very obviously not because it’ll tell you. I’m very surprised that anyone could think bluesky isn’t corporate.
It was before I really knew about the fediverse, so when I read about how it was able to federate I didn’t really fully understand it but I thought it was this new radical thing that could revolutionize the internet.
I didn’t really discover the fediverse proper until I found matrix and lemmy, and the word kept popping up until I finally read about it.
I always considered myself tech unsavvy, but I now know that was because I’ve spent my whole life being gaslit by proprietary tech that’s virtually unusable because of the corporate obsession with control, and deliberate obfuscation of settings. I just kept despairing about privacy infringements and bad UIs, and felt resigned to that being the norm, so I avoided technology as much as I could. I didn’t truly understand FOSS and why it’s so important until maybe less than a year ago. Anything that sounded like tech jargon just kinda went over my head.
And then I found Linux and read a whole lot about it, got really excited to try it, and eventually got a computer with Endeavour. Now I’m in love with it. All my life, I thought I hated computers, but it turns out I just hated Windows (and Mac, hated that too).
I feel reborn, like there’s so much potential ahead now, so much to learn and explore. Sure, maybe tech jobs are dying out. I’ll never get a job as a software engineer, even if I learn programming. But outside of that I mean, pursuing tech as a hobby, there’s just a whole new world opening up for me, and it’s cause I finally opened that door labeled “FOSS”
Back when meta was pushing threads a lot of lemmy was suggesting blue sky as the “safe” alternative. I thought it wasn’t corporate at that point, though I never looked into it. At the time I thought federating was proof a site was one of the “good guys.” Lots of us here aren’t really techie, and we’re just bumbling along picking stuff up over time, with none of this as a priority, just trying to take baby steps towards a safer, more private net experience.