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.
