Bluesky is better. Move there now, and thank me later.

Don't let billionaires frog boil your brain this October

You probably didn’t even notice. But last week, one of the more disgraceful acts in the history of the American elections happened on what used to be Twitter.

Hours after he “joked” about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris being assassinated, Elon Musk boosted a quickly debunked rumor about explosives found around a Trump rally in New York. And Musk has not yet corrected his error, according to CNN:

While Musk’s pithy reaction to the fake threat is still live on X, the initial post has since been deleted. Musk’s own post has been earmarked with a crowd-sourced “community notes” fact-check that makes clear the claim was false. Still, in the post’s first two and a half hours, it garnered 4.3 million views and was reshared 9,800 times.

Musk obviously thinks carelessly focusing on threats to Trump, along with Blood Libel about immigrants, helps the Republican nominee. And this is Elon’s number one goal in life right now, and why he continues to drive the value of the site he bought for $44 billion closer to $0 while making sure anyone left of Liz Cheney will pick any EV over a Tesla.

But, again, I’ll bet you didn’t even know about this disinformation nightmare. It may seem trivial, but it could have easily prompted chaos at the rally. It could have been used by those around the rally to create distractions to carry out other violence. The right’s use of Twitter to spark and spread violence, especially against immigrants, is undeniable.

And if you did know about it, you probably just thought, “More weird, awful BS from that weird Apartheid heir.”

There are two ways to look at how such fuckery by the wealthiest person ever to live on earth could be perceived as largely irrelevant and not a national scandal.

• Good.
  This shows how irrelevant he’s made both Twitter and himself.
• Bad.
  Maybe we have no idea what this kind of high-voltage, non-stop disinformation will do to an America where our freedoms are at stake, and about a hundred thousand people in seven states will decide if we continue on with this experiment with democracy.

However, I do know two things for sure:

• It’s terrible long-term.
  Elon’s concerted effort to spread disinformation around the country and the globe, radicalizing millions and destabilizing life for everyone else, will have enormously negative consequences. It probably won’t be as bad as the long-term effects of Henry Ford buying the Dearborn Independent and using that as a vector to popularize the same sort of antisemitism that inspired Hitler. But that’s probably the best historical analog.
• He’s trying to use us, our networks, and our attention to defeat multiracial democracy.
  So we should do as little as possible to help him.

So I want to make the case to at least start using Bluesky for news now and first, before you check Twitter. I bet before long, your brain will thank you and go there by reflex.

If you are still on Twitter, you probably don’t need a lesson in why it’s worth continuing to use the site to access the network of followers and followers you have surely spent years, if not 15 years, building.

But it’s worth reminding you why you should move away from Elon’s site and adopt, at least, a Twitter Last approach. And the number one reason to leave Twitter right now isn’t negative, it’s that there’s a better option.

Don’t believe me. Believe one of the best posters out there.

Bluesky is already better than new Twitter or old Twitter or Threads, for too many reasons to list. But at the risk of being redundant let’s list them!

• You get your regular chronological feed, no algorithm.
• You can make custom feeds that can use algorithms but you opt-in to those.
• It’s built to minimize harassment. Blocking really works—it zaps the blocked person from anything you post. And you can take your post out of a quote skeet to avoid dunking.
• Deck.blue is better than Tweetdeck when you use the aforementioned custom feeds.
• People actually engage, often in good faith, and people click links.
• No Elon posting (though he does get posted there sometimes because spending $44 billion to pollute the world with your emotional semen does work and he was super famous before that).
• It’s already a better newsreader than Twitter with funnier, better posters. With one click of my “Politics is my Passion” Starter Pack, you’ll already have a feed that’s better than any Twitter algorithm. And there are a bunch of other Starter Packs that may be more fitting to your brain.

I keep trying to say that we are all the Brave Little Hummingbird trying to do our little part. Thus we have to consider how we help shape the information around us by what we ingest, click on and share. You could be sharing Downballot for Democracy, for instance!

We should stop trying to get people getting people pregnant with Elon’s ideas. It’s the least we can do.