Jay Springett pretty much sums up my feels about the BlueSky land-rush:

And yet, here we all are, moving to a new table in the casino, hoping it’ll somehow feel different this time. It doesn’t and it wont. It’s the same old game with slightly different aesthetics. I know I’ve been harping on about “the rules of the game” for a while now, but it genuinely makes me sad. Sad that we’re so quick to rebuild the same dynamics in new spaces, instead of imagining, or even behaving differently.

I’ve secured myself a node there, too—but one look at the “discover” feed after my first log-in was enough to remind me why I left the birdsite the first time, and every time since.

Yeah, I know, I know—but leaving social media came with a pretty savage opportunity cost that I’m still paying now, both socially and professionally. You wanna judge a drunk for going back to the bar a few times, you go right ahead.

Meanwhile, as I said to Jay last week, BlueSky is seemingly full of people who seem joyously determined to not learn the lessons of the last few months, let alone the last few years. And that is very much their choice to make—just as it is my choice to limit my own engagement to the slipping of metaphorical postcards under the door.

So I’ll be POSSE-only at BlueSky, much as I have been on Mastodon for more than a season; I’ve just spent the morning setting up Zapier automations to pipe posts from here (and from Worldbuilding.Agency) to both of them without any need for me to actually log in.

So you’re welcome to follow along there, if you like. If you are among the hundred or so people still following VCTB by newsletter, this may present an alternative to switching to RSS when I kill off Jetpack at the end of the year.

Alternatively, real ActivityPub¹ diehards can plug in to VCTB as its own federated instance, by adding [ vctb@www.velcro-city.co.uk ] to their follows… though I’m currently not sure what value that option has to anyone, me included.

1. I absolutely refuse to call it “the fediverse”, or (god forbid) “the fedi”, because it’s really high time we stopped naming things like we were still at highschool. ↩︎