I have two Bluesky invites if anyone is interested. However, I’m only considering requests from people who will swear never to call posts on Bluesky… what lots of people on Bluesky are calling them. It’s not okay.

I’ve been poking around Bluesky and it seems like they’ve really opened up the gates over there. I’m seeing far more familiar names and avatars. And everyone seems cool, as long as you can avoid the crypto/web3 nonsense.

(This isn’t about Jack, or any of weird takes he’s been dropping lately at Bluesky.)

And using my domain name as my username is really, really cool.

But what made me want to write this is that the Bluesky team is actively involved and genuinely listening to positive and critical feedback, which is probably my favorite part of it so far. And I realize now that an active presence by the people who build it is what makes a social network appealing to me.

I can find a community of folks I like anywhere. Geeks are like water: we just keep spreading out until we’re everywhere. But my favorite communities in a long, long time, omg.lol and micro.blog, are fun and comfortable and challenging because their founders/owners/developers are constantly present.

They built something they love, betting that they could at least make it self-sustaining from a business standpoint because they had a sense of the kind of communities that were poorly served by pre-existing platforms.

for themselves because they wanted it, and then they realized other people would probably like it too, and then they realized that they could charge a really reasonable amount of money per user and build a business out of it.

I’m trying out cross-posting from Micro.blog to Bluesky. Come & say hi if you’re over there. There are more people there all the time, but there aren’t many of my people (read: users of Micro.blog & omg.lol) there yet. (I’m also cross-posting to all the others services I’ve added because why not.)