The Spell is Broken – Using Bluesky

I was once a heavy, which is to say, addicted, Twitter user. I quit a long time ago. As it is where a lot of Twitter people I know went, I got myself a Bluesky account, thinking it would be good for work. This weekend I thought of a funny "tweet" and posted it, because it fitted the medium perfectly.

I then flipped through a few of my friends feeds, seeing what interesting people they were following. Added a few people I know, a few people whose work I value, a few people whose commentary I admire.

Suddenly this extreme sense of boredom, isolation and tiredness overcame me. I don't want to follow these people. I don't want to know what they think about a recent events. I didn't want to add more.

Let's start again. Some of these people are my real and closest friends. I absolutely and in an ultimate sense do want to know what they think about everything. I don't want to see what they think about things arranged in a column, measured in characters.

The spell of the feed is broken. I don't care to engage in it. At all. Not really.

Will Davies once said that when setting up a new smartphone, installing apps is like putting up postcards on a prison wall  (ironically on Twitter). I thought about this when I recently set up a new smart phone, after six months with a flip.

I felt this again today. You don't need to engage with the feeds. It actively harms both thought and good conversation. You are going to occasionally come up with something that is, in terms of genre, a tweet. You are just going to have to accept it's a dead genre, like telegraph love notes.