As this current wave of people have been leaving the rampant fascism actively being pushed by Musk on X, many people have ended up on Bluesky. I’ve also seen people finally getting fed up with Meta’s tampering with the main timeline and doing the same.
Which, y’know, is cool. Bluesky is a hell of a lot better than X or Facebook. You can find me there at @stevensaus.com or alternately, follow my Mastodon account at @StevenSaus.faithcollapsing.com.ap.brid.gy.
However, I’ve also seen others be wary of enshittification. If you aren’t familiar with the term, take a moment and read the linked Wired article from Corey Doctorow. TL;DR: profit-seeking makes things worse as companies shift from serving the users to serving the investors.
Bluesky may feel different now, but so did Twitter then. What’s to prevent it from happening again?
Nothing.
This is the tradeoff you make when you use someone else’s service that’s being run with an expectation of making a profit. Whether through the consumption of ads on the site or through making purchasing ad space a requirement to reach your audience, any for-profit company is highly incentivized to… well, make a profit.
That’s not inherently bad; it is very possible to make a sustainable profit and not completely enshittify something.
But that’s not what typically happens. Instead, corporations tend to focus on maximizing profits, particularly in the short run. That combination is what really slams the gas pedal down on the enshittification process. Whether it’s shrinkflation or predatory inflation or shoving ads in your face or not letting you see what grandma posted because she didn’t spend money to , the net result of enshittification remains.
So what are you to do?
For people who are mostly just being social and consumers, I would make sure that, aside from having good blocking tools, whatever service(s) you use have the ability for you to export your data easily, and migrate servers if possible. Both Mastodon and Bluesky allow this (though "selfhosting" Bluesky doesn’t mean quite the same thing it does for Mastodon). Aside from making multiple accounts, you can use RSS feeds to get user feeds from Bluesky or Mastodon natively; there are services that claim to be able to do so with Threads.
The ideal solution would be something like Mastodon, but even moreso, where there are many, many, many individual instances. But that does require some degree of technical expertise, and a lot of folx either don’t have the know-how or the time or energy to set something like that up. Community servers — like wandering.shop — are a compromise, but rely on donated funds and time (for moderation).
Failing that, the next best thing would be an app (or apps) to combine the feeds of multiple services into one (or one interface). I would love a deck-style app (or even better, a TUI) where you can have a column for Mastodon, a column for Threads, a column for Bluesky, a column for Tumblr etc. It’s probably feasible at this point in time, but I’m unaware of such a tool as of yet.
For producers — those of us who write blogs, create art, or otherwise share "content" in one form or another — you cannot have your primary online identity be any social media site that you do not control. Plain and simple. Just like how this blog post is being pushed/posted to Tumblr, LinkedIn, Medium, Mastodon, FB, and Bluesky. Even if the full text is at those sites, the original can always be found at the blog itself. If someone followed me on X, they’ll now find my account is fully deactivated there… but they can still find me here, always.
Not only does this protect you from a service going toxic overall like X has, but it also means you’re not as hurt if you get caught by an overzealous moderation bot that doesn’t give you a reason for why you’ve had your account restricted. It’s happened to me on G+, Discord, Threads, Instagram, TikTok, and Pintrest. Many of those I do not know what I supposedly did wrong and cannot get an answer from the service; for Threads and Insta, they claim the weekly flash fiction challenge site is a spam/scam site, even though I’ve jumped through the hoops to verify it.
It can be a pain in the rear to do it this way — I still have to post to Bluesky manually, for example, at least for now — but overall it’s worth it. That reduces the "sunk costs" of being on any particular service for both you and your followers.