Sanity and Social Media, a Changing Landscape

If you are like us, you don’t want toxins in your food. Hopefully, you also do not want them pumped into your brain, either. Unfortunately, much of the media we consume in society is packed with toxins that can contaminate our minds.

That is why we cut the cord from cable TV news in 2003, during the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign in Iraq. Like any reasonably informed citizens, we knew that Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, and that companies like Halliburton had been pushing the Bush administration to find anything they could try to pin on Iraq so they could start a war there. We also knew that there were people in the news industry who knew this. Yet there we were watching respected TV news anchors, with specially designed and stylized sets and with custom graphics and dramatic special intro music, all stylized as though they were reporting on a football game. It was gross. The cable news organizations were helping sell a war that was based on lies and we knew that they knew they were lies. Yet, sell it they did anyway. That is why 21 years ago we canceled our cable subscription and have not returned yet.

Today, we are going through something similar with social media and we are encouraging others to join us.

You would have to be living in a cave to not know by now that the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, now called X, has become a raging cesspool of right wing toxicity and neo-Nazi shit, which have now become nearly synonymous terms. Since Elon Musk has taken over the company X has continued to degrade to the point where there are now several movements encouraging people to dump their X accounts and move to more friendly places, with names like Xiter, X-it and others. The place most people are landing is Bluesky.

For proof of that, you need only look at the following graphs.

To be totally honest, we left Twitter when Musk first took over. We could see the direction it was headed and did not want go along for the ride. More recently, we have also left Facebook, Instagram and all other mainstream social media.

We have, however, recently found Bluesky and after having been there for a bit want to invite everyone to come join us on this relatively new and shockingly different kind of social media.

One of the things X users liked about the platform was it’s openness to different kinds of content, like nudity and other adult content. Bluesky is similar to X in that way. You can post pretty much anything you want. Bluesky also provides a self-moderation tool that lets those who do not want avoid adult content to filter all such material from their feeds. At the same time, you don’t need to have Nazi hate on your feed. There are few Russian bots or right wing trolls on the platform. Even better: the platform keeps a list of such accounts and allows users to subscribe to that an other lists of users for following or blocking. We subscribe to a list of MAGA accounts and known Russian bots, which we then block with a single click. This keeps our feeds free of all of their crap. It is refreshingly nice to not see posts from bots and troll farms in your social media feeds.

Bluesky also allows users to easily create their own custom feeds to deliver content they are particularly interested in seeing, and that they can share with others who may want to subscribe to those feeds. Control of the platform is, therefore, very decentralized and users are encouraged to create and share their own experiences. This approach also allows even new users to immediately begin getting views and likes on content they create, because it is a much more level playing field where there, effectively, are no “gods” or “influencers.”

We hope you will join us over there!