Tag: Bluesky

Recent changes

Another change in the last month or two is the link to my Bluesky account at the top of the right-hand column. Click on that for smaller, more recent updates on what I’m doing.

Unless you’re very new to Journeys of Heart and Mind (JHM), you will have realised a few things have changed. It’s good to keep things fresh, and it’s good to make improvements.

Larger view

The most obvious change (and the most recent one) is that I’ve removed the banner image that used to adorn the top of the site. I love that picture of Cirencester’s attractive, old Market Place; but it clutters the page and means readers have to scroll down even to see the title of any new article. I’ve taken out the logo as well, and I’m considering whether to remove the strapline. I’m not sure it adds anything of value.

Another change in the last month or two is the link to my Bluesky account at the top of the right-hand column. Click on that for smaller, more recent updates on what I’m doing. It includes a brief post every time I publish an article here on JHM, but most days there are three or four other items that are not major enough for an article here. They are often just personal, a sudden thought, something that caught my attention in the moment, or a photo I want to share.

There will be other changes as the weeks and months go by, but I don’t know what they will be at this point. My objective will be to simplify, make the site more user-friendly, take away what is no longer useful, and add new features as and when necessary.

I you are reading this, and you have ideas or suggestions, please leave them in a comment below. Thanks!

Did you know?

You can view earlier versions of JHM on the Wayback Machine (navigate through time using the banner). Or look for old versions of many other websites. See how things looked back in the day.

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Why I finally ditched X

Bluesky … reminds me of Twitter in those early days, with quite polite conversation on all sorts of topics that interest me.

X (used to be Twitter) is no longer one of the sites I use. Not only have I stopped using it, but I also closed down my account. I joined Twitter in 2008 and for more than 15 years it served me very well indeed. But since Elon Musk bought it, the service it offers has become less and less what I want or need.

Bluesky logo
(Mediawiki)

There are a number of alternatives, and I’ve chosen Bluesky. It reminds me of Twitter in those early days, with quite polite conversation on all sorts of topics that interest me. The major drawback currently is that there are only 6 million or so users, but the numbers are growing quickly now, especially here in the UK. In July 2023 there were 200 thousand users, twelve moths later in July 2024 this had grown to 5.9 million, an increase of nearly thirty times. It’s a long, long way short of X’s 192.5 million. Another increase of thirty times this year would put Bluesky on almost the same number of users as X; that’s not going to happen, but realistically it might grow by another 3, 4, or 5 times. And who knows what will happen in 2026, 2027…

So what, in the end, made me leave?

There are several factors.

  • I used Twitter as a very up-to-the-minute news source. Type in the name of any town, for example, and up would pop the latest posts by anyone there at the time. This was also great for learning about ongoing events – the Olympics, Cricket, the Russo-Ukrainian war. That no longer works on X, the news function is cluttered up with so much nonsense and opinion that it’s no longer useful in that way – at least, not to me.
  • Arrogant rudeness, sometimes of the most extreme kind. It’s everywhere on X but very rare on Bluesky. Often, on X, posts like this are targeted spam (see the next item).
  • Spam, sometimes targeted to a receptive group of some kind, sometimes just random. There seems to be a lot of this on X these days. I don’t know about you, but I can do without spam!
  • Misinformation and disinformation is problematic on X. So anything you read may or may not be true.
  • I like watching YouTube videos and I dare say you do too. SpaceX used to post their rocket launches in high definition on YouTube, but now they’ve moved to X, initially in lower quality. SpaceX’s progress is something I want to keep track of, but from now on I’ll be watching these developments on third-party YouTube channels like Everyday Astronaut, Marcus House, NASA Spaceflight, WAI, and others.

Bluesky and other social networks suffer from the same issues to varying degrees. But Bluesky has strong policies and controls in place, they seem to me to be far more effective than any such controls in X. For more information on how Bluesky is designed and managed, read the Wikipedia article about it.

Useful? Interesting?

If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome!