W a y m a r k s ~: Beyond the Dark Clouds

I’ve found myself feeling a bit like Cameron Frye in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) this week. Watching my follower count on Bluesky take off like the odometer of his father’s prized Ferrari when it gets boosted by two garage attendants, who take it for a surreptitious day-long spin, had me gasping in utter disbelief. It’s been several days now and there still seems to be no let up. But, so far (and keeping my fingers firmly crossed), this seems to be a good thing.

I moved over to Bluesky from Twitter a little over a year ago. This was when Twitter was beginning to shift irremediably away from all the things which, for me, had previously made it so invaluable. Back then, quite a few people also made the move. But, sadly, many of them soon seemed to drift back to Twitter, or rather X, as it is now meaninglessly known. In some ways this reflected the general disorientation of people who had grown so acculturated to what Twitter had once been. I think the problem was that there were too many alternatives offering asylum, and, at that point, it was impossible to reach a consensus about which platform would fill the malevolent blackhole-like void that Twitter was swiftly morphing into. Threads, Mastodon, or Bluesky? – People couldn’t decide.

I tried Mastodon first, but I couldn’t get my head around how it operated. I found it a frustrating and completely fruitless experience. I’m not on Instagram, and so Threads didn’t appeal. As for Bluesky, well – at this point, you needed an invite code. Initially this made me somewhat suspicious of it. But when I saw some people I knew and trusted announcing they’d joined Bluesky, I managed to get a code from a friend whose lead I was more than happy to follow. At first, I found Bluesky, like Mastodon, a bit awkward and clunky to operate. Plus, most of the historians who’d migrated to Bluesky all seemed to be medievalists – a field I’m interested in, but certainly not my academic specialism, and so there was little there for me to engage with. Consequently, for a long time, Bluesky seemed like a new planet which I was orbiting solo, like a lonely Michael Collins circling the Moon when left on his own during NASA’s Apollo 11 mission. However, I now see that this was in fact a blessing in disguise.

Firstly, the relatively diminutive size of this pool of people newly signed up to Bluesky (when compared to Twitter) meant that traffic on the platform was fairly slow. Consequently, it didn’t take long for me to catch up on what people were posting each day! – Another reason for this was the fact that most users seemed to be based in Europe, the UK, and the USA. I live in Japan. Hence the time difference meant that most people whom I followed posted while I was asleep, and, vice versa, my posts appeared during their nocturnal slumbers. The second boon to this new ‘slow-travel’ style social media was that it gave me plenty of space and time to see how Bluesky actually differed from Twitter, particularly in terms of how it operated.

Bluesky is all about ‘Feeds,’ (NB – plural). Like the newsfeed on other social media sites, Bluesky encourages the creation of multiple feeds, enabling users to filter posts using certain topic markers (e.g. #hashtags, emojis, or particular words). You can opt to follow a feed, thereby more easily allowing you to see posts upon certain themes or subjects (for example, ‘What Is History?’) without having to follow those particular posters directly. This really appealed to me and was probably the main reason why I persisted with Bluesky, abandoning Mastodon and slowly started to tune out of Twitter/X. On Twitter I had already set up for myself something very similar to ‘Feeds’ in the form of private ‘Lists’ devoted to certain topics. In order to ensure that my lists didn’t double-up on content, I realised it was important that I should assign a person or institution’s profile to one list only. This seemed to work well, and so I repeated the system by creating my own lists on Bluesky, which I use alongside the various feeds other people have set up. The disadvantage to lists, however, is that they show all of a person’s posts, whereas feeds are more specifically tailored to whatever topic they are dedicated to. This neatly by-passes the frustration of following Professor Stein because of their particular specialism (say, ‘Voodoo Economics’), only to find Professor Stein almost never posts about their specialism!

I’m certainly no computer whizz kid, but I now see that it was handy to have signed up to Bluesky at such an early point. I saw how some of the functionality of Bluesky evolved or was newly introduced by its developers. I think the fact that it wasn’t fully developed was one of the reasons why the site began as invite only. Having said that though, it is – to certain extents – still a site “under construction,” but this is essentially because it is developing elements of functionality which Twitter never had. So far these elements make it feel far more like the user is in control. Functions such as properly effective ‘blocking’ and ‘muting,’ as well as the ability to detached your posts from other users who ‘quote re-post’ it – these are great ways to manage how people interact with you and how you engage with the platform as a whole. The idea being to deaden the effect of trolling and the kind of angry collective bullying which could so easily and needlessly be sparked on Twitter. Specifically because of caring and well thought-out, user-minded strategies like these, it is vocally hoped by the majority of Bluesky users at present that a new and more equitable kind of social media platform will be created as a result of these innovations. A new social media platform which hopefully will promote a culture of mutual respect, one which will allow a more civil and welcoming mode of engagement to flourish.

This is what Twitter used to be for me when I first logged on. I was quite late in joining up to social media as a whole. It all seemed a bit unfathomable and somewhat geeky-cliquey to me. But after being badgered by many friends – especially those who were located overseas – who assured me that it was a great way to keep in touch over long distances, I was eventually persuaded to sign up to platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This seemed to me like voluntarily opting to plug myself into the sinister Matrix-like circuits of the world wide web. I still feel a bit wary of this ‘Brave New World’ and its insidious algorithms.

But signing up to Twitter, in particular, just at the moment when I was returning to university as a mature student doing an MA degree was actually a total gift. I found it hugely useful on an academic front. It was a great way to keep up-to-date with new innovations and trends in the subject fields which interested me. It was also a great way to network with other people with similar interests. I made so many useful connections, some of which also transitioned into real world connections. Writing this blog, Waymarks, was also a big part of that too. Initially I began blogging purely as a personal recreation, and as a way of fending off the paralysing effect of staring at a blank page – writing regularly, so as to hone my writing and editing skills; and doing so publicly, as a means to sharpen and clarify how I said what I said. Something which you can’t really do when you simply scribble in private notebooks that live only in your desk drawer, or type out manuscripts which sit unread by others on your hard drive, consigned and condemned to a potentially sightless posterity.

It’s been very sad to watch the demise of Twitter since it was taken over by Elon Musk. He’s still trying to tout it as “the world’s town square,” when in fact it is increasingly becoming his personal self-aggrandising stadium for political and socially coercive rallies. Cynically, I think this was always his aim and intention all along. It seems to have paid off for him as well. People were quick to laugh at the $44 billion he paid for the site when its value suddenly plummeted soon thereafter. But, ludicrously, that sum of money is nothing to the world’s richest man. I thought at the time that he’d merely bought it in order to run it into the ground; intending either to totally transform it beyond all recognition, or, if that failed, then simply to destroy it. And it seems like he has succeeded too.

It’s not the first time that I’ve watched something like this happen. Back in the early days of the internet, before Facebook et al existed, I used to enjoy posting on a regional UK internet forum or chat board called ‘Knowhere.’ Such websites were purely text-based, and this meant they required more effort in terms of engagement and attention. There were no memes, no gifs. You scrolled much more slowly and carefully. Reading, rather than looking. The Knowhere chat board for my hometown was a wonderful open space for kind and courteous, community-minded discussions, as well as a space for sharing local history stories, which is what I liked best about it. But it was slowly taken over by a band of nasty oiks whose sole intention was to totally hijack the site and overwhelmingly fill it with mindless profanities and unprovoked personal attacks. What seems most remarkable about this collective act of verbal vandalism, looking back now, is that this occurred long before legions of bots could be programmed to do the same. Anonymity, especially that offered by the internet, has always been the greatest enabler of the meanest, most selfish and wilfully ignorant, mob-minded sort of people to wreak unwarranted havoc.

In this regard, the social history element in the evolution of social media has been a fascinating thing to observe over the course of the last twenty years or so. The rise and demise of Twitter is just another cycle of waxing and waning in that process. It’s been amusing to watch, this week especially, as the so-called social media ‘big hitters’ who have resisted leaving the platform, presumably because of the significant size of their follower counts, have one-by-one steadily begun to realise that their faithful flock are now deserting the paddock in droves and are running for the hills! – Only when all the big names and big institutions leave Twitter en masse will it be deemed to have truly died, but the truth is Twitter was already dead long before that. The ‘elite’ need the hoi polloi, ‘twas ever thus. Bread and circuses are only one part of the silent deal.

But what am I to make of this sudden transformation personally, particularly in the form of all my 1000+ new followers on Bluesky? – I don’t imagine for a moment that it means anything in particular. The main reason for it is a new innovation on Bluesky, known as ‘Starter Packs.’ They work somewhat akin to the way feeds do. Essentially, they are lists of Bluesky users which a user can create according to whatever theme they choose – for instance, grouping all users who call themselves ‘Medievalists,’ ‘Retro-Anime Artists,’ or ‘Astrophotographers,’ etc – which other users can peruse and choose to follow individually, or they can press a button and follow all of the users listed in toto. I’ve been added to a couple of ‘Starter Packs’ and I have no doubt I have been followed as a result of people pressing that ‘Follow All’ button. Consequently, I’m sure I’ve been followed by a large number of people who probably haven’t even seen my Bluesky profile, and who will no doubt in due course wonder why my posts are showing up in their personal feeds when I post about things that have nothing to do with what they are interested in. For example, I’ve been added to a list of scholars who post upon the subject of ‘Buddhist Studies’ – and to be fair, I am interested in this and I do sometimes post about it, but, in truth, I will – in all likelihood – do so very rarely. Most of my posts will be about the ‘Histories of Exploration & Travel Writing’ (a starter pack which I myself set up), or only appeal to the niche interests of ‘Imperialism & Commonwealth Historians’ (a starter pack to which I was added by someone else).

There will, no doubt, be a reckoning in due course. Follower count odometers will be “cracked open and rolled back by hand.” Bluesky will eventually settle down and find its own sense of equilibrium. The current, Ferrari joy-riding sense of euphoria will come to an end and normality will prevail. But hopefully, that new sense of normality will be one which makes the world wide web a little less divisive and a lot more welcoming and user friendly. More power to the people; less power to the oikish oligarchs and autocrats who have muscled their way in! – We can evade them, if we want to. There is always a blue sky beyond the dark clouds – No Pasaran!