blocking

There are many, many articles out there about the rise of BlueSky. There are so many more about the fall of twitter (yes I’m fucken deadnaming it). But even now, in the twilight of the latter, have had to rarely deal with shitty ads, spam bots, or crypto bros. There’s, I believe, a single reason for it.

We don’t use the official app. At all. We never have.

Currently we use the PWA version of the site via Firefox. This means I get

• uBlock Origin to filter out ads.
• Control Panel for Twitter to hide shit the apartheid muskrat came up with, defaulting my experience to the chronological timeline.
• ClearURLs add-on bypassing tracking methods when linking in and out of the site.
• The app (and thus, the company plus the apartheid muskrat) doesn’t get to siphon any of my phone data.

On desktop we used to use tweetdeck right up until the muskrat took it away. On mobile we used a variety of apps (Talon, Fenix 2, others) before those were also taken away. The official twitter app never held my attention. Using the PWA takes care of the technology side of things so I can concentrate my efforts elsewhere: Spending the time to curate my experience:

• You follow me, but you only retweet and quote-tweet? I’m not following you back. Tweet things you came up by yourself.
• Farming of any sort? You’ll probably catch a block.
• Use of genAI tools to “create content”? Miss me with that.
• You come into my mentions telling me I’m wrong about something? Yeah, you’re getting muted.

This effort took years and years. I grew up on the Old Internet; constantly doing this kind of thing was necessary to keep your sanity more or less intact. It’s why BlueSky is nicer:

One thing that makes 🦋 different is been created by people who have seen it all. Like if you think you’re going to shock them with gore,vore, scat, 4chan, 8chan, 256chan, inflation art, 2-girls-1 cup, lemon party, Tumblr lore, you name it – they saw and became immune to all that when they were 12.

David Aronchick ‪@ironyuppie.com‬

On BlueSky we have the nuclear block. I personally think it is the one innovation that will give it the upper hand over all the other would-be twitter competitors, or even social media at large.

the nuclear block is the single best product decision bluesky has made

yes, it’s sometimes annoying when you want to gawk but that’s part of why it’s good

Micah ‪@rincewind.run‬

Building on top of it are moderation lists and blocklists, which build on top of the block function. Like darth says, “just moving on really does work micah tbh“. If you want to gawk at someone posting stupid shit, you can use alternate methods if you really want to, but the vast majority of the time you just… move on, and that way you don’t get enraged or saddened.

Twitter had everything to stay the “town square of the Internet” for this decade, but the greed of it’s C-suite was bound to cause its downfall sooner or later. But even now, at the worst twitter has ever been, you don’t have to suffer the experience the muskrat wants for you.