Goodbye X/Twitter, I’m flying high into the fresh atmosphere of Bluesky, if you’re there, do follow me!
I haven’t been posting much on Twitter/X for a while, not since Musk took over, but I cherish the following I’d built over the years, I had intended to hold on to my account, just remove posts and leave the handle, but the enormous growth of Bluesky over this past week, with virtually all the old accounts I liked to follow setting up there, has persuaded me to wash my hands of X and Elon Musk for good, so I’ve deactivated.
I hadn't actually suffered much on Twitter directly, most of the accounts I followed, and followed me, were pretty benign, however seeing so many bots and aggressive trolls pop up on threads I followed was getting too much. Twitter was also constantly recommending me to follow accounts I have no interest in (for some reason Lady Gaga had a permanent place in my recommendations list - why?), and only showed trending topics of fiery controversy. Sure, I followed a lot of in-the-news topics, but I barely ever saw posts from the children's book community, or other friends I followed. Taking Tweetdeck away made this worse, Musk's open-speech policy was encouraging conflict, final straw for many of course is his elevation to Trump's cabinet, but also there's X's new terms, widely seen as engineered to allow Musk to bring in AI scraping wholesale. Old Twitter has turned into a Musky miasma, it's not going back, it's done, so in the bin with it.
Bluesky is really rocking at the moment. It has that atmosphere of the first hour of a party, when everyone has just arrived, the corks are popping and all the introductions made, the canapé's are on their way, there’s a lot of optimistic activity as new joiners get to poke around the see how it all works. I’ve actually had a Bluesky account for quite a while, having signed up to the beta version over a year ago. Many glitches have been worked through, but the huge surge in new accounts has slowed the servers, so still a few things to iron out. For a long time most of the posts relevant to me were ‘Kidlit’ themed from the US, in comparison the UK community was slow to engage, however this is changing now as people abandon Elon’s sinking ship, it’s a fast-evolving platform. Let’s see how it works out.
Personally, I always preferred the chat-based conversation of the Twitter / Bluesky model than the streaming image swipes of Instagram. I’m happy to post to Insta when I have things to share, like Inktober, or sketches, or some news, but I resent the pressure to post images almost daily. I don’t see how you can have a conversation on Insta, and struggle to curate the constant stream of ads and “recommendations”.
Discourse is what I’m after, not a bombardment of promotions. Threads did not attract me at all, as its part of the same sly network, and I found Mastodon hard to fathom. Cara is another image-sharing alternative to Insta, which I’ve not really warmed to for the same reasons. Bluesky is a lot more my cup of tea.
The other think I’ve been recommended to is to start a newsletter on Substack - that’s a different thing, which would I guess replace this much under-used blog - I’ll be looking at this.
Isn’t it strange how each of these platforms has a pot of gold waiting for us, just out of reach (for most of us anyway). To span that last stretch we’re encouraged to always post and engage, grow our audience, but our audience are looking for something too…. it’s the same old story. I don’t think that’s going to change, it’s the way of social media, however, what I really like about Bluesky is it’s ability to separate your topics of interest, so you can create communities easily, and keep on-topic.
My tips for Bluesky starters -
1. Use lists! Create lists of the people you follow, to separate topics you follow. I have lists for illustrators, publishers and the book trade, but also military history (I’m still a Napoleonic Wars nut), archaeology and astronomy. I can click on any of those lists to see the posts of those in the list only.
2. Look for, or create starter-packs. These too are really easy to work with, more grouping of accounts you can promote with a link, to find people to follow, or use to grow a community. I’ve currently created starter-packs for accounts of UK illustrators, and UK indie bookshops.
3. If you were comfortable using the old Tweetdeck, the equivalent for Bluesky is DeckBlue. There are a number of 3rd party developers working on new tools for Bluesky, as it’s decentralised most of these are small teams working on start-ups that tie in to the platform, so look what else is out there.
4. Follow feeds - using hashtags helps channel the feeds, you can create your own feeds too, though I’ve not tried this yet.
Anyway, that’s enough on Bluesky for the moment!
Things have been bubbling along steadily in the old illustration kitchen of late, unfortunately most of it is for projects that for one reason or another remain under wraps. But watch this space.
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