Comment by D-Machine
3 days ago
Also just curating your feed (i.e. judiciously using blocking and muting) and instead viewing just "Following" removes something like 99.9% of all common complaints re: Twitter, while still giving you access to a much less-biased (or easier to equally-bias through curation: e.g. you can't get an accurate view of RW ideology following only BlueSky posters) and far larger public square than anything else.
Curating your feed also works on BlueSky. Sure there are anti AI people there, but the crazy ones I just block. It’s really not that hard. And I know there’s no algo behind what I’m seeing.
I do admit that there is some FOMO, but that’s what HN is for, to surface that stuff so I don’t have to go read it on X.
I choose Bsky because I’m not giving eyeballs and money to an evil toddler. I’m already doing enough of that with my 401k and taxes.
You can certainly use both X/Twitter and BlueSky (and Mastodon, for that matter), and I did for a while.
Just if you curate your Twitter feed, you gain very little extra from BlueSky or Mastodon, and if you choose only the latter two, you get a much more biased and limited set of views. (Twitter has plenty of crazies from all parts of the political spectrum, but BlueSky and Mastodon run mostly left, and have much, much smaller user bases). HN also is extremely limited in what it discusses, so it doesn't make up for what is missed by ignoring X either, IMO. X is still one of the most efficient general public squares by a long shot.
If you can't stand Elon and don't care about what you're missing on X though, I can fully understand just not bothering with it. You aren't missing much.