Beyond the walled gardens
A month into a new way of being online has me feeling fresh and hopeful, even in the midst of the world's horrors.
It's been a month since I posted my reasoning for getting the hell away from Meta's walled gardens. It's been a cleaner cut than I'd anticipated!
Fine-tuning the Bluesky experience
I'm enjoying Bluesky. It's an excellent replacement for what Twitter once was. More and more of the people I want to connect with are there. When I posted about the song "Cannock Chase," I was tickled to find that both Labi Siffre (who wrote "Cannock Chase" back in 1972) and Matt Biffa (the music director on Hacks, where I first heard the song) are active on Bluesky, so I was able to tag them both to thank them. Joy!
My Bluesky feed is a bit of a firehose right now, partly because I'm following more accounts than I was a month ago, but more because the last month has seen a deluge of shocking news of destruction and cruelty by Trump, Musk, & co.—things that absolutely require our attention, and I'm grateful to have Bluesky to help keep me up to speed. But oof. I also need my peace sometimes.
An algorithm could help filter that firehose. But the abuse of algorithms, both by those who control them and those who behave in more and more distorted ways to be rewarded by the algorithm, is exactly what I want to keep away from.
I've found a couple of little tweaks that have made Bluesky even better, while steering clear of the problem of algorithms run amok.
There's a feed called OnlyPosts, which is an algorithm, but a very simple one that does what it says on the tin: it only contains the posts by the people you follow, in standard reverse chronological order, leaving out all of their reposts of others' content. Not much to manipulate there. It's a streamlined way to stay up-to-date, plus it's more focused on the actual people I chose to follow in the first place.
Similarly, there's a feed called Quiet Posters, which is posts coming from people you follow who don't post very frequently, so they don't get missed in the stream. I don't use the Quiet Posters feed because I'm not quite ready to trust an algorithm that's making those kinds of calls for me, but it seems pretty innocuous, so it's worth considering.
Instead I created my own personal list of "Low Volume" people. It is a subset of the people I follow, with those who post every few days, rather than several times a day. That way, I get to make the call myself of who qualifies, rather than leaving it to an algorithm. The downside is that I have to remember to add people manually. Functionally, it works the same as a feed, and it's pinned at the top of my home page alongside my Following and OnlyPosts feeds.
I've learned about Bluesky's Feeds and Lists and how to pin them on my homepage by poking around the app. I tried to find a good article or YouTube video with nice screenshots to explain them for you, and I didn't find one. So prepare to poke around. It's a little confusing at first, but you'll figure it out; you're clever like that.
A neat feature of Bluesky is that people can curate and share moderation "block" lists. It's not something I've found a need or desire to use much, but OH THE GLEE when I blocked this entire list of accounts that steal scientists' content. Satisfying. I love that side of Bluesky, where people are looking out for keeping the community healthy. Use caution with blocklists, though: I've heard that some folks with nefarious intentions have created blocklists purporting to be one thing but actually containing the opposite, such as a list saying it's for blocking anti-trans trolls but it actually blocks genuine trans folks.
If you'd like to follow me on Bluesky, my username is @humuhumu.com.
Building a better Internet
There has been much lamenting of late about the enshittification of the Internet. Between the horrific deterioration of the quality of Google search results, the inescapable sludge of worse-than-useless generative AI slop, and the penalization of independent content sources on Facebook and Xitter, things have been bleak out there.
But we know it can be better, because it once was. We humans are weird and creative and love sharing—it can absolutely be glorious again. That's another thing I am loving about Bluesky: if I post a link to a YouTube video, or to a webpage, it doesn't get hidden or penalized! It's freeing, being able to share good things again.
Greg Pak posted this great how-to for to carving out your own weird little corner of the Internet, someplace you alone control. Your own domain name, your own website, your own blog. It's about creating your own connection to the world, one that isn't mediated by corporate entities. It's easier and cheaper than you might think. He suggests using WordPress, I prefer Ghost, but there are lots of good options.
Greg
It doesn't have to be good, it just has to be. Create your own shitty site! Because it'll be the good kind of shitty. It'll be creative shitty, work-in-progress shitty, I'm-still-learning shitty. WE LOVE THAT KIND! And it won't be muted-by-corporations shitty, it won't be churned-out-by-a-cynically-designed-robot shitty.
In the spirit of supporting an independent Internet—it's a drop in the bucket, but I've gone old school and created a page on my main navigation bar on I Have Doubt! with a list of sites I like:
Humu Trott
We still need a better search tool than modern-day Google. I have a lot to learn about the alternatives out there. Some folks seem to like DuckDuckGo, I should remember to try that more. If I recall, it's using Bing under the hood. I recently read a bit about the search alternatives out there, and there aren't any good ones (yet!) that have their own index of pages, it's all on top of either Google or Bing. If you have well-informed Google-alternative search knowledge to share, I'm all ears.
I'm not missing Meta
I've found that I pop into Facebook far less than I thought I would, and for very short times. I'm glad to do it periodically, because I've been able to catch the news of groups I liked moving to Discord, and get some friends' Bluesky handles. But beyond that, it turns out that I don't feel I'm missing much. I still pop into Instagram now and again, but pretty much just for Giuseppe González. He's worth it.
There are people I love and adore who are still over on Facebook, but as I've mentioned before, they're posting less and less. Their posts are not what FB has queued up for me when I return. It shows me the same old irrelevant garbage. FB is noticing I'm gone, though, because it keeps throwing more and more obscure, weird notifications at me. "Please, please come look! A page you don't care about posted a reel!"
Real world community
Earlier this week, I attended a talk with a panel of longtime immigration rights activists. It was fantastic to learn some history from them. I'll post more about that soon, but one big takeaway was the reminder of the value and importance of connecting in person.
Whether it's online or in meatspace, it's going to be up to us to create the new world. I don't want to wait until the crash of the current systems, I'm ready to start building something beautiful and good now.