What a breath of fresh air Bluesky has been coming from the trenches of Twitter “X”. Even a battle-hardened poster like myself found Elon M*sk’s Twitter to be too much.

From the icon, to the feel of the app, everything about Bluesky reminds me of Web 2.0, the possibilities, and of course early peak Twitter. I found jobs on Twitter. I met my best friend in the entire world because of Twitter. It’s sad to see what pure-greed and hate incarnate, Elon M*sk, has done to it.

Now, a movement for the federation of social networks is growing, and I love it! This feels like real Web 3.0, not that Crypto BS. For the first time in a long time, its netizens are empowered through custom feeds. Most importantly, a default follow-only chronological non-algorithmic feed. It’s a sad state for the internet when what should be the default is a major innovation. Luckily, the internet remains open and free. It’s still open to grand communal experiments. We can course correct and fix what M*sk and Zuck have broken.

You won’t find me on Twitter anymore. I just requested an archive of all my Tweets, and with some free time this weekend I’ll be importing them to Bluesky and closing my Twitter account. Instead, you can find me at @sethrubenstein.info on Bluesky.

The best part of Bluesky, for me, the API! A free and open API again! The API apocalypse that M*sk kicked off was awful for researchers and developers. So many things that make the internet better are built on a an ethos of open and free APIs. Speaking of, the Skeet (teehee) auto-generated when posting this is brought to you by the fantastic Autoblue plugin. As of posting, it is in early but very polished Alpha from @danielpost.com

See you under bluer skies 👋