a bluesky invite landed in my lap a few days ago thanks to even more recent events, as opposed to just recent events, that seem to have made those easier to come by. for the sake of my own curiosity, I’m mostly just glad to see what the thing actually is, and I do sort of see a vision for what it might offer going forward, but I’m not sure it’s really as the one-to-one twitter replacement that people seem determined to mold it into. instead, it feels to me very much like a twitter molded in the specific timeframe of the site’s history circa 2015, in what I’d now probably qualify as its twilight era.

there are no video uploads. quote tweets have not yet become the most corrosive feature of the platform. third party clients are here and they’re basically all half baked, but trending in a direction that doesn’t involve kneecapping them to 100k installs. most of the people showing up are the haunts of old anime blogs, as if they were invited to a reunion party for the anitwitter-sphere-shape of old when that was still a celebrated label. reshares of 2D bikini women have not yet dominated my entire timeline, which I am okay with, but secretly long to see more of. all in all, I’ve found it to be an unexpectedly cottage platform that reminds me of a point in time where twitter had not yet entirely made the shift into being a content slurry and was still just a pretty good way to post asynchronous status updates or take in a dril tweet. I don’t expect that to last forever here, and I fully anticipate a flood of open registration will probably wash me away with it if I’ve forgotten by then how to acclimate to a feed that never stops scrolling.

the blue sky branding is honestly cornball in a way that reminds me of the techno-utopianism you’d see preached in the 90s because people were getting access to dial-up. it’s also stupidly guarded about what it’s actually trying to accomplish, except as being some kind of oasis of posting. in some ways, I love it for that, like I love these obtuse claritin commercials blanketed by inviting backdrops of blue skies that forced the FCC to legalize direct to consumer advertising for drugs. in another way, it’s hard to make fun of a company for sabotaging their brand when their competition’s mascot is effectively a bunch of clouds. maybe the onus is on you to stare up at the sky and imagine what sort of content you’re supposed to see in it.