Bluesky is in the middle of speedrunning the entire existence of twitter, up to and including the CEO contracting poster’s madness. After they (the moderators and executives of Bluesky) noticeably didn’t enforce their terms of sevice against noted transphobe and alt-right provocateur Jesse Singal the instant he showed up and started shit with the established userbase, people have periodically called on them to address their hypocrisy in any kind of meaningful way. This often happens more frequently following moments when Bluesky selectively enforces their terms of service against monorities or victims of various trolls and bullies the instant they dare to stand up for themselves or do something so horrible and disgusting as to comment positively on the death of a noted gun-rights activist who said that mass shootings were a worthwhile price to pay for continued access to tools of murder while also conveniently pointing his followers at people whose opinions he disagreed with in ways that undoubtedly ruined those people’s lives. Which means that, right now, Bluesky’s executives, who often use the platform to chat or interact with each other as standard users might, are in the middle of getting shellacked every time they make statements about their social media site. For good reasons! Their hypocrisy is genuinely sickening and it’s annoying to see them answer serious questions with jokes (including one that rapidly became a new alt-right dogwhistle), silence, or attempts at baseless refutation that amounts to them shoutinging “nuh-uh!” while sticking their fingers in their ears.

That isn’t to say the people calling them out are entirely innocent, either. Some of the things people are saying are just as sickening and clear terms of service violations in their own right, but there’s also a ton of people being normally mean to them and I can’t say any of them are wrong to do so. After all, the company is so clearly turning it’s back on the same minorities who made made Bluesky what it is today that I find myself wondering if social media companies can get (or give you) whiplash. Which, to be fair, the userbase will also do to itself at the drop of a hat. All the problems of Bluesky aren’t the fault of its out-of-touch executives who seem intent on following in the Poster’s Madness footsteps of Elon Musk after he bought Twitter (and subsequently turn it into the current nazi-infested festering sore of manipulated information and Grok posts that it is today), but a lot of them are and those problems are only getting worse and worse as the company seems intent on reproducing every misstep of every other big, corporate social media company (or tech company in general! They all kinda suck these days and the more time that passes, the more evidence emerges that all these shitlord Tech CEOs are friends). All of which makes me miss Cohost more than ever, especially since it has only just been gone for just over a year now (WHAT A LONG FUCKING YEAR IT HAS BEEN!). At least the problems with Cohost were just the problems of society reproduced in social media scale (racism, in-fighting, bullying, etc) between the various users. And while the team running Cohost weren’t perfect and absolutely made some mistakes, the generally positive and encouraging culture of connectivity was slowly winning out as the community learned and grew and, for the most part, tried to be better. If Chohest had been able to stay financially solvent the world would have been a better place.

Not a lot better, but at least there’d be one place where the CEO of the company wasn’t posting on the platform like they were hot shit while actually being incredibly embarrassing in their inability to be actually funny or clever. As I like to cite, John Scalzi was absolutely correct that the failure mode of “clever” is “asshole” and so many corporate executives of social media companies need to get this lesson tattooed on the inside of their eyelids. I mean, there’s a really good reason that most companies have communications staff! Addressing user complaints is not easy and requires a set of skills that most useless money-over-ability executives lack but somehow seem absolutely convinced they have because being “successful” (aka “rich”) warps your ability to accurately perceive the world since no one will call you out on your bullshit anymore. Only the ones working in tech, however, who got super lucky and have somehow convinced themselves that they owe their position in the world to their skill/genuis/power rather than because of random chance or being born into wealth, seem convinced that they don’t need those people no matter how many rakes they step on. I think Bluesky would benefit greatly from communications staff and someone to check their increasingly antagonistic impulses since they seem incapable of doing that on their own. It would probably also help make the core users of Bluesky feel more heard if they weren’t getting brushed off nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand by some wise-crack about waffles (the latest evidence of Poster’s Madness in the current CEO of Bluesky is posts of just the word “waffles” and a picture of a breakfast consisting of a single sad waffle) and maybe an outside voice could point out that the users absolutely have valid criticisms.

At the heart of all this bullshit is the unfortunate technical truth that it was possible to interpret the terms of service that existed at the time in such a way that Jesse Singal didn’t violate them. Given that Singal is quite literally famous for riding that line every place he winds up in increasingly blatant displays of contempt (if not outright hostility) for minorities and the terms of service were shortly thereafter revised in order to make that interpretation less of an egregious reach than it had been, it is difficult to grant that level of charity to the Bluesky moderators and executives. It’s clearly shitty behavior by Singal who was playing his same tired (and increadibly toxic) game of “I’m not touching you!” with the TOS and even more shitty behavior by Bluesky who made the decision in that moment that they were not actually going to protect the garden they’d been growing. Sure, we probably should have seen it coming since they spent so much time raving about how they weren’t building a garden so much as creating a method of building gardens (and, completely accidentally, in such a way that you absolutely cannot hold them accountable for it how dare you even suggest such a thing, creating a garden as a result), but it still sucks to spend so much time contributing to a new social media site before the rug gets yanked out from underneath you not even half a year after they patted you on the back for turning their garden-creating-method-that-created-a-garden-completely-accidentally-and-how-dare-you-accuse-them-of-not-taking-care-of-the-garden-that-come-from-them-using-said-method into such a lovely garden.

It’s exhausting. I have no idea how much longer Bluesky is going to last and I just might stop using that kind of social media when it does. I’ll have to find some kind of website group to join, if I even try to stay on the social internet at all. Maybe a webring or something like that. I dunno. My interactions with the internet only really started once social media existed (all of my internet usage prior to that moment was checking GameFAQs dot com for game guides and playing Runescape), so I’m not exactly sure what to do now that social media is a giant dumpster fire and I’m pretty sure the 100+ views my blog got today are some kind of scraping bot stealing all my text (I mean, how else could someone “read” twenty posts in an hour without spending more than a second on each of the incredibly random pages that has a single view). What’s left of the internet now that everything is being chewed up or destroyed by “AI,” poisoned by nazis, ruined by out-of-touch CEOs, or just vanishing as the company that kept it running got bought up, stripped for parts, and then junked in the pursuet of some venture capital firm’s desire for “growth”? Less and less, it seems. Just the tiny little corners we protect as best we can, little lights floating in all-consuming darkness, that can only find each other by huddling together as close as we can. What a time to be alive. What a time to be mourning the one place on the internet I ever felt at-home on. What a time to be mourning the one-year-anniversary of the death of the website that let me feel genuine human connection over the world-wide-web.