I made my migration over to Bluesky from TwitterX, last week, and I am already enjoying it. The place reminds me of what Twitter used to be, which was for all its warts a much better place than what Elon turned it into.

I no longer have to deal with awful people and/or bots who are more interested in trolling than engaging, and I can better control my feed. The changes to X’s blocking (people you block can still see your posts) were a dealbreaker, as was the feeling that I no longer wanted to be on a site owned by someone who is an illegal co-president with Donald Trump. I also like its much more passive version of an algorithm, so I am not deluged by right-wing propaganda in my feed.

I have found a lot of the people I followed on X, and I continue to build my follow list. Occasionally I encounter a troll, and I block them, easy-peasy. What’s not to like?

Well, apparently there are a lot of people not happy about Bluesky’s popularity and not just the X trolls. The Atlantic published a piece lecturing us Bluesky people that we exist in an echo chamber, and the Bari Weiss/Thomas Chatterton Williams radical centrists of the world are whining that people are blocking them.

After that election, many of us want to get away from the assholes. By assholes, I mean both the Trumpers and the people who want to lecture us that not wanting to put trans people into the Gulog was why Trump won. It really is tiresome when people are yelling at you about things that didn’t happen, such as Harris centered identity politics in her campaign like trans issues was not a thing, were actually the problem.

It’s not “existing in an echo chamber” to not want to be harassed. Bluesky’s blocking features offer a stronger safeguard against harassment compared to Twitter. Blocking someone not only halts their access but also breaks the conversation thread, leaving readers with a notice that the post came from a blocked account. If someone weaponizes the quote-tweet function, you can choose to “detach quote,” removing your post from their response and cutting off their ability to draw attention through your content.

This functionality disrupts common tactics of outrage farming, where figures like Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, and LibsofTikTok thrive on hostile engagements to grow their audiences. Without a central algorithm to amplify conflicts or trending topics to exploit, provocateurs lose a key tool for visibility. Even workarounds like posting screenshots add friction, making Bluesky a less hospitable environment for orchestrating harassment or gaming the system.

None of that shit is what anyone would call productive engagement. It’s nothing more than bullying and harassing, and people should have a right to reject it.

And this seems to upset Atlantic columnists and so-called centrists. I hope they realize that getting angry at us for not wanting to deal with that now, that enough is enough, feels a lot like holding someone down so the bully can beat on them. I know that people like them give every benefit of the doubt to the right, that saying Matt Gaetz is probably a pedophile and has no business being attorney general is actually worse than a pedophile being attorney general. Such is the current mainstream media environment. Some of us would rather not be part of it for our own mental health, and that doesn’t fearful of debate. We just don’t want bad faith in our streams. Click here to follow me there.

Speaking of mainstream media environment, I decided to add an addendum to this post because this morning, the stars of the Hit MSNBC Marriage Comedy Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski went to Mar-A-Lago over the weekend and came back talking about reestablishing communication with Trump and how he is hoping to reach out to Democrats. This is, of course, capitulating to an authoritarian and not what we should be doing now. I would imagine they are going to lose viewers over this, as well as they should. You can’t go on for months and months about how someone is the devil and then go break bread with Satan.

The last word goes to ELO (of course).