Category: Book Club News

By Andrea Menzies

Bluesky is a new social media app people are using. My profile is here @Poedaughter7.bsky.social if you want to add me to friends. I am fully terrified of how many crazed right winged politicians keep showing up in news photos with social media owners these days. Also my email is getting packed with spam from all the social media that said it would “never” sell my information. I can see why people want to try something new. Old social media uses an algorithm to decide what we “want” to see, and it often picks very wrong. Somedays I think we should all just switch back to Myspace, Yahoo, and Livejournal for updates.

Here is the NPR story on Bluesky:

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/19/g-s1-34898/bluesky-traffic-surge-after-election

The day after the presidential election, the social media landscape shook.

On Elon Musk’s X, more than 115,000 users deactivated their accounts, the largest-ever mass exit from the platform. At the same time, traffic on Bluesky, a smaller rival to X, began to soar, with daily usage climbing some 500% in the U.S., according to data from Similarweb.

“We’ve been growing by about a million users a day for several days,” said Bluesky CEO Jay Graber in an interview with NPR on Monday. “It’s proving out the model that we thought would be the right approach to social [media]: Give people the tools to control their experience and they’ll have a better time.” Putting more control in the hands of users is what distinguishes Bluesky from X, formerly Twitter, and other rival social media sites.

Rather than having one “master algorithm,” Bluesky allows for a more personalized experience. By default, there are three main feeds: One shows accounts you follow, another shows what your friends follow and a “discover” feed surfaces posts linked to your interests.”