Numbers and shit

Bluesky is getting more and more twittery with like everyone joining it after they've realised the dipshit who owns twitter is too closely associated with Shitty World News Event (as if he hasn't been a known dipshit for ages) and having landed there post-cohost there is like idk. I guess it is like the vibe of "people who are notable enough to have lots of followers" as distinct from like me. Like, on cohost this was an invisible distinction, or at least more veiled. Which I think meant I was in a better place to actually be noticed sometimes? Like, I have had maybe a dozen strangers read my silly decker zines (I have been forced by horrifying evidence to up this estimate from "half a dozen"). And I do not think that would happen on a twitter-like platform, because nobody I don't already know would pay any attention to me, because attention is for celebrities and internet micro-celebrities with podcasts.

Oh god I'm going to go off on a tangent, fuck it my blog my rules. I think the way social media sites purport to let you see things from friends but actually are based around showing you things from podcast-hosting micro-celebrities and up can lead to brain confusion. I recall an acquaintance distraught that they had less followers on instagram than they were following, and all I could think was "actually I think that's normal". But if your frame of reference is "look at all these other people I'm seeing on instagram, they're popular" without adjusting for the bias of "the people you're likely to see are more likely to be popular" then it can lead to a warped perspective.

Like this is a thing I had to fix in myself by taking an attitude of "actually, seeking popularity is gauche". Because it fucks a brain. That's a belief I have had to make myself hold for the sake of my own sanity.

So like in genuinely not having an algorithm and just having the tag system Cohost was more like "oh if you post a thing in this space then people looking in that space would see it" and like I got a bunch of attention when I posted my weird decker synth project in the global feed. Bluesky meanwhile is a site where people go "hey there is no algorithm here" inexplicably even though there's a discover tab right at the top of the screen, and getting noticed seems to be "be already known". It's like the "either you get a big audience or you're nothing" thing. And I don't want a big audience but it's nice that some people notice me?

God it's fucked. The vibes of the world lately are "we could have nice things but whoops we don't and the world sucks" and the blame goes to a bunch of people who are "actually the bad things are good" and that is a universal rule of the world I guess. Fuck it.

I do not want lots of followers. I just want to exist in a space that's not so "either you're already popular or you're irrelevant and invisible". Cohost for its faults at least did that. Bluesky in imitating twitter does not.

I should go and lie in bed and listen to loud music to flush whatever this is out of my brain.