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This week, while on a lull between starting projects at work, I decided to check back in on the latest Bluesky drama (because there is always Bluesky drama). I setup an account a while ago and set all my previous follows from Twitter but due to just running out of free time, neglected reading it in favor of Mastodon and my RSS feed.

The official Bluesky app was a no go for me because of its data tracking, and most of the other 3rd party apps that I had tried like Gray Sky, seemed wonky so I instead repurposed the amazing Tapestry app from Icon Factory to just be a Bluesky reader since I prefer Lire for RSS, though Tapestry can do RSS too.

Once it had re-synced up to the latest timeline, I left it open for a bit, did some stuff and then clicked back into it. Holy shit, 200+ posts in under an hour. I follow 111 accounts on Bluesky and probably half are news orgs and sports writers but that seemed ridiculous.

On Mastodon, I follow 218 accounts but on a day where I don’t check it at all, I MIGHT pass 250 posts. There is some overlap in accounts/posts between the two services but besides the sheer number, the actual constant flow from Bluesky made me anxious.

It felt like I can’t keep up with it, that when I got to the top I could pull to refresh and another 40 would be waiting on me. When reading Mastodon, I never feel this. I think this is because while Mastodon is about 1/8 the size of Bluesky, it isn’t a breaking news platform really, nor one where you get a ton of shit posts. That’s by design and one of the things I really enjoy, the (mostly) thoughtfulness of it.

Mastodon is like walking into a large dinner party with a few different conversations happening you can walk up to. Bluesky is like being in a stadium full of yelling, screaming people generally talking about the same thing but from 6 different angles. It makes your head spin.

I loved the original Twitter before it became a Nazi bar and never minded the fire hose effect then. Bluesky seems to have a Twitter circa 2013 vibe to it now, with a lot of conversations and a lot of voices and more posts than you can keep up with and for a lot of folks, that’s the draw (especially if you’re liberal).

But maybe because I stepped away and got comfy with Mastodon, coming back to Bluesky just seems like too much. I can feel my anxiousness rise and those (totally unhealthy) dopamine hits of being “caught up” trickling back.

I don’t think I can go back to Bluesky long term now. My brain just can’t handle it. I’ll still check it every now and then, scroll to see what’s going on when bored or something, but making it part of my online diet? Those days have passed for me.