Bluesky and Numbers
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Something that keeps flashing up about Bluesky over and over that irks me is that they're trying to present themselves as "better" or "safer" social media. This is totally hollow, particularly because it's brought to us by largely the same people that made things as bad as they are now, and also it's just Twitter 2 in presentation and tone. Sure, it's cute to think it somehow "belongs" to the people who currently use it, but how long is it really going to be before we're back to algorithmic For You feeds, ads everywhere, and corporations talking at each other once it hits critical mass of acceptance and / or runs out of initial investor money?
What really gets me, though, is that starting maybe a day or two ago they had a big celebration about 10 million users. I find it hard to believe that it's ten million individual, distinct people, I'm guessing the actual metric is accounts, but whatever. I'm burying the lede here. The thing they seem to be celebrating this with is telling people what number they are in terms of sign-ups, with a special little marker if they were in the first 10% (so one of the first 1 million). For a site / app / technically a work in progress of the AT Protocol presenting itself as having a healthier relationship with social media, they sure are ready to create a numbers-based hierarchy where big number = more growth = more better or, in the case of sign-ups, lower number = better social reputation for being there early.
Nothing ever changes.
(For what it's worth, I don't know my number, nor do I want to. I don't think I even have one. Since I set up my own PDS, I never got any indication of what number I am because I'm not on Bluesky itself.)