It’s now been over a month since I stopped regularly posting on X/Twitter, and I’m now feeling confident enough in that decision to talk about where to find me. The key for me was finding another place for AvGeekiness, and Bluesky is that place. You can find me there @crankyflier.com.
I’ve been on X/Twitter for years, amassing over 150,000 followers, some of whom may actually be real people. (I just assume it’s at least 149,000 bots.) And while I still find Twitter useful for identifying breaking trends and getting news, it just gets harder and harder to stomach the experience over there. I’m sick of having to dodge ads from Cheech and his gummies or Temu or sex toy sellers or whatever other garbage is infiltrating my feeds. I’m also increasingly unhappy with the content that gets pushed on me if I dare venture out beyond my “Following” tab. And lastly, I am not happy with some of the changes that are made from on high, most recently evidenced by the change to how blocking works.
With all that in mind, I started looking months ago for different options. I didn’t like Threads, and Bluesky didn’t seem to have the features that mattered. That has changed enough in the last few months that I’ve started paying more attention over there, especially in May when they added “chat” (direct messaging).
Thanks to Seth Miller who created his Twitter AvGeek Refuge starter pack and Sky Follower Bridge, it was easy to start following a lot of the people who I’d been following on Twitter. (Also, for baseball fans, here’s the BaseballSky starter pack.)
I’m a big fan of the ability to use your own domain as your username. This requires having control of the domain to actually verify, so it is more useful than paying for a check mark elsewhere. It’s not required, but it sure does help. And I also like that it is decentralized. In other words, if something changes that you don’t like, you can do something about it. Read this TechCrunch article to learn more.
This doesn’t mean I am abandoning Twitter completely. Bluesky has “Feeds” so you can customize the trends you want to pay attention to, but it doesn’t have a lot of companies onboard yet, and it’s harder to follow breaking news. If someone tweets me, I will respond, but I may post that simultaneously to Bluesky in hopes of continuing conversations over there. And I will probably keep scrolling through there occasionally, even though I generally feel worse after I do it.
But if you want to have a conversation about airlines — and possibly some baseball too — then come on over to Bluesky and join the many AvGeeks who have already joined the community.
31 comments on “Join Me and Other AvGeeks On Bluesky”
Don’t know why, but I would have thought you’d have access to « special » writers / professional newsfeed and were not relying on tweets from airlines and industry companies to get the most recent news !
I’ve seen many people leave X recently and found it quite surprising that all of the decisions was based on a true downgrading of X value in their minds !
I don’t use X services enough to bother yet, but the trend to migrate to Bluesky is becoming noticeable !
Bluesky will about as successful as Truth Social or Threads. The notion of leaving X because you don’t like Elon Musk’s politics is just as stupid as not inviting him to a summit on EVs. X still has the highest amount of signal and the most breaking news and I don’t see that changing. Please continue to post on X and don’t make us follow yet more social media.
Musk is toxic & that is why people are leaving Twatter.
Brett didn’t mention Elon Musk’s politics at all. He had specific, concrete issues with the experience using X as a product, which is a completely reasonable reason to stop using a product and switch to a competitor.
That might’ve been true awhile ago, but in recent months any reach most of us might’ve had has been effectively throttled. Add to that the fact that X suppresses external links and it makes no sense to stay there if you’re a creator.
I don’t think anyone is leaving twitter because of Elon’s politics directly, but there’s a huge interplay between his politics and the severe degradation of the usefulness of the site. It’s a bad product now, and the decline is directly related to his decisions.
Since he bought Twitter, the quality of interaction is just garbage. The verification system is terrible, which makes the replies awful; the algorithm severely downrates any sort of sharing of an outside link (which are the things that make the internet the internet!)
I honestly think Elon’s decisions with Twitter have been even worse than they might first appear because Twitter has been coasting on the network effect for so long.
Bluesky, however, has great functionality and feels like a better version of the old Twitter. All it needs is more people to join, and I’m glad to see people voting with their feet.
Thanks for this Brett. I needed a nudge to get to Bluesky (or anywhere) after deleting my Twitter account 6 months ago.
Blue Sky is still a lot smaller, but it is growing fast. I spent some time on there today and was really surprised how many more people that I had followed on Twitter were suddenly there.
As for its functionality and feel, it honestly reminds me a lot of the Twitter I joined back in 2010.
Well done CF. Right on! I left twitter/X a month ago for similar reasons and will be happy to try bluesky!
Thanks for all that you and your team do!
See you there, Brett! Thanks for the starter packs too. Just in time for hot stove season…
Last time I hopped on Bluesky there wasn’t quite critical mass, but in the past week a bunch of folks have made the jump and thrown together starter packs, such that I’m already following over 500 accounts there.
I’d still prefer folks use the Fediverse (Mastodon, Threads, whichever) because that’s a lot more decentralized in practice (I help run one of the instances, albeit not an avgeek one), but I’m not gonna die on that hill, so I now have three social apps to watch (as some folks haven’t made the jump from Twitter).
Thanks for showing the way.. and doing the research… Looking forward to read you there… and here.
Congrats on leaving Twitter. Bluesky is a nice place, away from the swine.
Go back to Twitter. It just works better.
Wow, the TDS and EDS really is severe here. Finding small issues with an app that has a very easy core use case seems like a reach. You post, you engage, you get more followers. But, the thinly veiled “reasons” for leaving don’t overshadow your general dislike for Trump, and now by proxy, Elon. You’ve taken jabs at Trump in just about every post here that is connected with bureaucracy, and in any way you can connect it to Trump. If there’s a legit reason to connect something to an administration, I’m all for it. However, taking a jab because you disagree with an administration is dumb, as is your decision to engage less on X.
Geez. Now you’ve got CDS.
I recommend you ask for and get a refund of your full $0 and leave.
As others have said, Brett complained about the functionality of the site, nothing about its owner.
I don’t know what TDS or EDS is, and don’t care to even look it up, but I do know what being triggered looks like.
Nobody who isn’t emotionally compromised should care what social media application someone uses.
Don’t be a jerk. I don’t know what TDS or EDS is either, but I really don’t care. You clearly just want to pick a fight that nobody else wants to have.
Am I excited to use Starlink when United deploys it? Hell yeah. Do I get excited every time SpaceX launches a rocket? Damn right. If Elon wants to build something that works well, I’m all for it. But X/Twitter is not working well.
I just reread your post, and I want to highlight something for others. You said “…you get more followers.” As if that actually matters.
I’d bet many people really would rather have good and interesting interactions on social medial, and have fewer followers, than have lots of followers but poor interactions.
I find this sort of thinking endemic as to why I think the US isn’t a great place. Everyone is always competing, instead of enjoying ourselves and being kind to one another
Just like money and toys, the person who dies with the most followers, still dies.
Well done. Elon Musk is toxic and his increasingly outsized influence and participation in far right, fascist policies and programs led by the incoming administration are reason alone to leave X. Sadly, no other platform has the flex and gravitas of X, but that doesn’t mean one needs to remain there.
A social media site named Bluesky seems absolutely PERFECT for avgeeks! See you there!
The ugly adds on Twitter are basically the only revenue they can get. The blocking doesn’t really seem to be an issue. If you were blocked by someone in the past and you wanted to still read what they said, you could easily just make a new twitter profile to do it.
Does BlueSky generate any revenue? If it gets big, eventually it will have to to, and will push adds onto everyone’s space there as well. Agree that for Aviation discussion Bluesky is now the place to go, but disagree that Twitter is that bad.
I’d had an idle BlueSky account for quite some time, but when I first investigated it, it felt like there were but a couple people and mostly crickets.
The new tools to scan your Twitter follows and cross-reference with BlueSky, plus Seth’s work compiling recommendations (and the platform making it really easy to follow such lists en masse if warranted) basically made it feel like I’ve moved houses in an afternoon. Pretty much everything I want to see, minus a few wayward accounts, are there and active on BlueSky. Other than that, yeah, it kinda feels like a better evolution of what Twitter was a decade ago. I’m still very new, but quite pleased with the product and communities now on offer.
Bluesky only has 19 million users but only 1 million daily active users.
X has nearly 10x the number of active users as Threads, and 250x that of BlueSky, see below.
Social media platforms Number of users
Facebook 3.06 billion
YouTube 2.5 billion
Instagram 2 billion
WhatsApp 2 billion
TikTok 1.58 billion
WeChat 1.34 billion
Facebook Messenger 1.01 billion
Telegram 900 million
Snapchat 800 million
X 611 million (250m daily active)
Threads 175 million (28 million daily active)
Bluesky 19 million (1 million a day)
Pinterest 498 million
“…progressive friends are leaving X saying that it’s all MAGA now. But that just isn’t true; it’s now more balanced than ever before. Progressives are leaving X because their perspective isn’t the dominant one anymore. Dems should learn, not leave.”
“CNN admits that @X now represents the average ideological makeup of the US better than it ever did before @elonmusk bought it. Incredible to see them admit this after all the fearmongering they pushed about X since Elon bought it.”
https://x.com/sbkaufman/status/1859042454647042439
Bick – So what? The number of users is irrelevant to me. It’s all about what works best for the areas you care about. For aviation, Blue Sky is quickly becoming the place to be. And it’s an easier place to discover than X/Twitter is now. Will that change in the future? Who knows? As I said, I’m not deleting my Twitter account. But I just don’t find the same value in participating over three as I do at Blue Sky now. This isn’t political. This is just about pursuing quality over quantity.
So what? Good question.
First of all. My heart goes out to everyone having a hard time with the coming political transition. I don’t like the division between the two parties. It lowers quality of the discussion and replaced IQ with tribalism.
Re CF, I wonder if think a social media management tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, or SocialBee would let you increase distribution while limiting your exposure to disagreeable content.
A lot of what makes your content attractive is your organic and genuine nature. I have no doubt that this shift is a genuine reflection of your experience. I guess I feel sad for seeing anyone isolating because it demonstrates how polarized everything is.
Keep up the good work. You’ll be successful no matter where you go and no matter how many people follow you. The value of your work to avgeeks speaks for itself.
This wasn’t a decision made hastily. I thought about a variety of different ways to approach it. The reality is that for social media, I’m doing it for me with very specific purpose. I’m not trying to amplify content or earn street cred, or whatever. I just want to be able to chat to a good group of avgeeks/baseball lovers. X/Twitter was not working for me, so now I’m at Bluesky where I like the community better for those purposes. I find social media in general to be toxic and problematic, but when used in the right way, it adds value for me. So I’m using it in the right way.
Could you follow @ap.brid.gy so that people on Mastodon/Fediverse can follow you using that bridge? Details at https://fed.brid.gy/
Glad to answer any questions in case it is unclear what this does or why you’d do it.
I can do that ! Done.
It worked! Mastodon/Fediverse users who have opted into the bridge should be able to follow you at @crankyflier.com@bsky.brid.gy