My Bluesky

 Recently, there’s been another wave of think pieces arguing either that BlueSky is dying, or that BlueSky is thriving but rotting away liberal discourse, or somehow paradoxically doing both at the same time. Both Nate Silver and Noah Smith have recently weighed in, along with many other names I don’t keep up with (if I decide to discuss them, I'll link to them. In the mean time, they can get their own clicks).

Looking through these pieces, it strikes me that the social platform they describe doesn’t look much like the one I check in with once or twice a day. Perhaps this is on me. It’s entirely possible that my experience with and approach to BlueSky is grossly unrepresentative. But even if so, I thought it might be informative to explain what my feed looks like and what I use it for.

For those of you who haven’t used a microblogging site, most (all?) generally give you the option of either seeing posts from people you follow or from a list generated by some algorithm. I have a hard rule to only use the former. That means the posts and reposts I see are coming from fewer than 20 people, all of whom I know to be worth listening to. A little over a third of them are tech reporters or professionals focusing on some of my fields of interest such as AI, transportation, and robotics. The next biggest group are econ and business writers mostly associated with Kai Ryssdal and Marketplace. The list is rounded out by some journalism critics and a couple of personal acquaintances.

The majority of the posts I see cite articles, often but not always accompanied by some kind of comment, either in the form of a preface or a reply. When the source being cited is unfamiliar to me, I take a few moments to vet it, but most come from places like The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, etc.

The result is basically a curated and annotated news feed provided by a small group of distinguished journalists, technology experts, and business reporters.

Is this a broad, representative, unbiased cross-section of the news? Of course not. Josh Marshall, James Fallows, Ed Zitron, and Catherine Rampell are going to recommend stories that reflect their distinct interests and viewpoints. Certain topics will feature much more heavily in my feed than they do on the front page of The New York Times, and vice versa. This is not a bad thing. One of the reasons I follow the people I do is because I have come to trust their judgment and insight, and because they are highly knowledgeable in fields that are important to me. That’s something I can no longer say about the editorial boards of most major news organizations.

Of course, this is not the only place I get my news. I subscribe to the LA Times, listen to All Things Considered, check CNN (mainly for the business section—Allison Morrow is definitely someone you should be reading), and I keep an eye on the other major papers. For the most part Bluesky complements rather than supplants my news consumption and I feel better informed for it and certainly better informed than if I were using what remains of Twitter instead.