I love talking about nonpolitical topics here and I think most of us do - you can honestly sense the palpable relief in threads where we’re all talking about Star Wars or some shit but the kind of person who joins a social media site entirely because of nonpolitical community is largely absent
(Star Wars is also political.)
It's why this website/app won't become the next big social media website that a lot of people, myself included, want it to be. It's anti-poaster
And how intensely galling it is when somebody pops into a non political thread and starts going “ha ha can this adorable golden retriever puppy fix politics next!” or whatever.
Do not mock the Golden Retriever of Rectification!
Oh god. I just want to grab those people and shake the shit out of them.
"how dare you post about when Trump exists" is an entire genre and I hate every last post in it
It’s such a privileged take, because it implies that there was ever a time in human history where there wasn’t countless horrible things that needed solving. If someone thinks we can’t have joy till X is solved, they don’t understand that misery is constant & joy is the oasis we create to survive it
As someone raised Evangelical, it feels like being told "your reward will be in heaven".
I have not and do not intend to survey this corpus of posts, but my sense has always been that the type of person who writes that sort of thing is not actually trying to help with X at all, either
I personally think this is one of a myriad of Buddhist hells. Buddhists have lots of hells.
These people are the most joyless people on a site with a reputation for that, who help it to earn it, and they give that Oompa Loompa way too much power over them personally. What they *should* do is refuse to give the Oompa Loompa that power, not demand everyone be as miserable as they are.
My response to those people is "He wants you to make everything about him. You're just doing his work." Not gotten any sass for it yet.
trying to share a love of worms, millipedes, slugs, chickens, fungus, etc. with a website this passionate about replying "that eats GARBAGE? reminds me of a certain 🍊 💩!! in the whitehouse! 🤣 😂" feels a bit sisyphean sometimes but I persist. because, look:
That is a very fine slug!
Heh, somehow the recent katydid...er...snack sack discussion didn't get hijacked.
Is that a banana slug?
One day I will get to see the majestic banana slug. Here we have an abundance of leopard slugs that don’t grow quite as long.
But leopard slug sex is truly extraordinary to witness!
Not when it's happening at 3am in the middle of your kitchen floor when you only wanted a glass of water Jesus Christ. One of the many reasons I'm glad we don't live in that house anymore
Best out of context post of the day!
I'm only slightly disappointed our giant forest slugs don't do the full cirque du soleil slime twirl like the leopards do, but apparently they engage in apophallation much more frequently. which is a fun vocabulary word everyone should look up if they don't know it already
Saw this truly special individual the other day who decided they weren’t feeling the “long” that day and went for “extra chonk”
What a lovely shade of yellow! I sometimes wonder what factors into a slug deciding between chonk and stretchy
They're so neat!
We visited Norway last year and I spotted slugs there that were stubby, thick, and dark brown like the chewed ends of cigars.
I had a friend who loved seeing the morning slug trails because she said it looked they were writing messages in a mysterious alien language :)
tell them I love them
will do! maybe i’ll leave some greens by the drain pipe where they like to hang out
I started vermiculture in a garden tower this year, and worms are amazing little machines that convert rotting organic matter into nutrients for plants !
ooooohhh nice slug
Slugs are awesome! They're hermaphrodites who (in some species) engage in "Penis fencing" while making love.
It makes the decision to block REALLY easy...
Yes, we’re all political, but I wish there wasn’t such vocal faction who get weird and indignant when we post about something not political Sir: we know orange man bad, but we’re talking about mayonnaise again—show some respect
Okay, I'll start the fight What's your favorite flavor/brand of mayonnaise?
Mint
How dare you The correct answer is CLEARLY Sriracha
Sriracha goes on everything. Except for those things that call for Valentina sauce, extra hot.
There isn't one. All mayonnaise is yucky.
Dukes of course
honestly? block more people. find a blue wave account following 60k and block all of them. then find a second and block all of theirs and you’ll see that one only pulls down like 5k because there’s so much overlap. there’s no reason to subject yourself to that if you don’t enjoy it.
I have no idea how to block 60k people. I just block the ones that find me
So I guess the reason I subject myself to it is incompetence
lol the original blockenheimer is dead because the guy didn’t want to deal with it, but someone mirrored the code. it uses app passwords generated by bluesky and which can be immediately deleted. it brings peace. block.alxtratrstrl.xyz
📌
Thank youuuu —your incompetent friend
oh stop. i blocked super liberally to begin with, but i only got to this point because i was in some big starter packs last november and was not at all enjoying the vibe i was getting back. america’s fraught enough. i’m not also looking to have a terrible time online.
this is why i'm glad i have never been in a starter pack and was deactivated when twitter came over. i put up with enough bullshit already.
starter packs are a CURSE. And the "November people" went *so* hard on them 😩
i think starter packs are fucking stupid.
okay it's a LITTLE funny that if you just signed up for an account here you have 12 followers or 18,000 and nothing in between
I think it is a blessing for you that you weren’t because you’d have been in a lot of them, gotten 40K followers, and logged off forever
i really can't be in any with the kind of violence content i post, it just wouldn't have happened.
Self preservation at your visibility level is important! I feel like things get difficult past 10k, I’ve been pretty lucky all in all. I agree, its stressful out there! I come here for a reprieve and to connect with the people I enjoy
i love this list bsky.app/profile/did:...
📌
Oh, that's handy!
One blockenheimer pretty much blocks them all! It's the easiest thing!
Keep in mind though bsky.app/profile/numb...
Unfortunately it appears to have gone away
Thanks. I failed to find that when I was looking the other day.
it's super effective tbh
I'm so glad college football season has begun.
or when they stumble in and start replying to things from the default feeds, we all block them 😩
one of the earliest tips Bluesky gave to newbies is "reply! reply! talk!" and I'm not sure that wasn't ironic either which makes me sad
I mean TALKING is good! Replying is good! but just picking a stranger and arguing with them context free or replying to them like they're not another person is NOT. LOL
OMG this. Like if I’m gonna hop in, especially if I want people in the thread to like me, I’m not gonna come in with a chip on my shoulder. The default mode should not be “pick fights”.
I've always been afraid sometimes that some of my replies are viewed as that and it's why I don't tend to reply -too- often
I feel this too a lot, which is why I try to pretty much never reply to anyone either disagreeing with them (unless I know them VERY well) or giving them advice they haven't asked for. It helps with the anxiety!
And conversely a thousand people replying “THIS!!!” or “💯” or the same tired picture meme isn’t contributing anything, it’s just noise. Just hit like, it’s fine!
also long pet threads
I would add - prior to the helltimes, it wasn't politics all the time. The reason its politics all the time is because well fucking fascism is here.
In the early days we talked about a lot of stupid shit and it was fantastic.
I think a large part of this is because the moderation tools result in a bunch of self-reinforcing silos. There are absolutely communities on here who are less frothy about politics, but they’re not visible from the edges of my sandbox.
🎯
Not all of us got invite codes… some of us v much would’ve rather have been on Bsky much earlier than we were able to join lol
reverse chronological is great but it really requires you to go seek out other content proactively
The nuclear block also prevents cross-pollination to some extent. I’ve just accepted that there’s swaths of this app entirely foreign to me.
And the nuclear block is so nuclear that there’s no organic way for reengagement to happen down the road
I feel like there are a lot of artists on here who are not here for politics... there are a lot of segments of this site that any one of us might not really see
I have several topics that had good online community on Twitter that are non-existent here (even some people I know from there don’t discuss them here). It’s one of the losses here that makes me use it less that I used to use Twitter. Maybe it’s for the best.
correct the kind of person who fled twitter in that era is unfortunately the kind of person who has to be at least a little political out of necessity I dearly wish the world was in a place where that was not true
It’s sad that “I do not want to associate with Nazis or use a product that supports Nazis” is a “political” sentiment. I mainly wanted to read and talk about sports, but the other app made that impossible. It seems backwards to me to blame BlueSky for the other app’s sins.
Just like the two sexual orientations, straight and political White and political. Etc.
For clarity- this isn't my phrasing, this was brought up on here recently by someone else (search fu has failed me), and I had seen similar before. I was attempting to reference it, NOT claim credit for it, just a sort of sardonic statement. But forgot not everyone has read what I have, so.
That was Nome, linking the post below. bsky.app/profile/nome...
THanks. I just had realized 'oh crap that looks like you're taking credit for something that isn't yours' and instant ick feeling.
It’s not an original thought. I’ve been seeing people say this for a decade.
And I think the reason we periodically have "Bluesky is dying, posts are down!" panics is that the type of who fled to bluesky is also the type of hyper engaged person that needs to disengage every so often to stay sane -- at least in this current sad, bonkers timeline.
Keeping up with all this crap is exhausting. Sometimes I need to pretend none of it is happening for awhile.
are we no longer saying "the personal is political" anymore? i used to love that one.
I would love to not talk about politics, but my trans sibs in the US and the UK are literally under threat, while the opposition party in the Australian state I live in are angling for election and want to bring that shit here.
I would love to live in a world where lgbtq people weren't a talking point but the republican party wanted me to be political
I wish I was in a world where being every component of myself wasn't political, but the Republicans have always hated atheists, hated trans women, hated unions, and hated indigenous populations (I'm of mixed descent). My entire existence is "make something Republicans hate, and I am"
yeah, extremely so.