An obvious abbreviation–but somewhat unfortunate (!)
I’m not on Bluesky yet but am looking at it. I was on Twitter for several years and got something out of it; maybe I could give Bluesky a few minutes on most days the way I did with Twitter. Also, I’d be pleased to be involved with something that could inconvenience that South African git.
I’ve been looking at the link that @Yodalicious posted, but haven’t found anything that looks as though it was made by Dopers for Dopers. (I’ve used search terms like “Straight Dope” and “SDMB”…“1,000 matches” to the former, so there doesn’t seem to be a way to search for the phrase rather than for each word separately.)
I also clicked on “Discover Bluesky” and though there are posts that seem unrelated to my Internet history (pics of the moon, for example), I AM seeing a lot that mirrors what I used to see on Twitter, pre-X: posters I used to follow like BrooklynDad_Defiant! @mmpadellan.bsky.social and Mueller, She Wrote @muellershewrote.bsky.social and The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social ,
etc.
So apparently the page has grabbed cookies or something. (Fine by me.)
I, personally, use Mastodon and bluesky (don’t have a threads account yet), but my advice is to join everything and use whatever gives you the least angst.
Brand loyalty to an app, social network, or corporation is silly. They are all out to extract value from you via manipulation and spying (except Mastodon, but it’ll never be good for non-techies).
Got on Bluesky … sometime last week. Only used X for local weather, and a “following” a few celebs.
I never even heard of Threads, except in passing. All I know is Bluesky people/accounts have mostly migrated (or likely will soon) from X.
It’s a really godawful name, but the name is an upgrade from either “twitter” or “x”: seems almost immune to make-funnability…what’s the worst someone could say? “I just blueskied a bluesky to a blueskyer”: silly, but not that bad.
Bluesky now has some 23.7m accounts, growing at about 2/sec. That’s way lower than Xitter, but no doubt many of those accounts are for bots or spammers. There’s a couple webpages with counters for Bluesky out there (one linked below), but I couldn’t find an equivalent for Xitter.
A lot of people are quiet quitting X. They don’t want someone else taking their name so they are making the account private and deleting all of their content. That still counts as an account.
You don’t understand people having different needs than you? Or someone having different handles for different uses? Or someone having a handle that someone else is already used elsewhere?
My bluesky is my actual last name. My handle here is only used here and on the Giraffe Boards since I don’t want to use my real identity (although at this point someone with enough time on their hands could mahybe figure it out).
If you don’t mind a name ending in “a”, try Maura or Froda. The first is his actual Westron name and the second is a Germanic name meaning the same thing (“wise, experienced”) with the ending changed.
When I started using Twitter, I used my real name and interacted with real-life friends. When I signed up to Bluesky, I used basically the same name as here.
I have a different handle for Reddit as well. Some things I prefer to keep compartmentalized.
Bluesky has had a big surge in number of user accounts the last week where it often grew at 2 to 3 per second. It’s now closing in on having 30M accounts. Should be there some time later today (27 Jan). I understand that last Sept, it only had 3M accounts.
