I have doubts about rejoining a microblogging site after leaving Twitter, testing the waters of Bluesky and Mastodon, and leaving them too. Twitter – I’m sure its current owner is fine with deadnaming – is out of the question. It got much worse after the CEO change in 2022, but it was already frustrating to me before that. I had enjoyed it when it was a place to have public conversations with internet friends and live-tweet reality TV.
But as it happened with Instagram, I ended up forced to see content from people I had no interest in, just because they were viral. And on Twitter, viral usually means triggering. Besides the discovery tab, even the people I followed would quote whatever far-right politician was rage-baiting, and giving them a “gotcha” answer. The intentions were good, but the result was me having to read the original tweet, and usually feeling worse than I did 10 seconds earlier.
I don’t have a Bluesky account right now, but browsing the main feed without logging in reminds me why I left. Even though most of it looks very Twitter 2010s, with news and dad jokes, 1 in 20 posts in the general feed are shirtless, sometimes trouserless, sometimes everythingless guys. It’s a content that has become very popular on Bluesky Spain, with captions like “just woke up” or “brushing my teeth” next to a nude photo. I even checked in a private tab and also on a library computer to be sure that it wasn’t just my browser cookies or IP outing me as a gay man, and showing me this content because of that. But no, that content is suggested to an immaculate computer even before creating an account.
When I had an account on Bluesky, and since most of my friends and acquaintances are also interested in men among other amusements, some of them tended to interact with these accounts, and I ended up seeing the original posts in my feed. And being exposed to 50 ripped guys a day is not the best for my self-esteem. Not being on Instagram, Twitter, or Bluesky, has removed my exposure to this kind of content and, after some time, I feel better about my own looks. The people I compare myself to (and I know that I shouldn’t, but that’s a topic for another day) are the people I see on the street, where I see every body type.
Out of the social networks I ever had an account on, Mastodon is the one I’ve used the least. I made an account on a Catalan server. I don’t speak it, but I like exposing myself to Catalan and learning some words and phrases. I did write some toots and learned new words by looking them up in online dictionaries. On Mastodon, just like on Bluesky and Twitter, I was exposed to triggering quotes from far-right politicians, via well-meaning people reacting to news.
I’m very interested in politics, but sometimes the news get overwhelming, and I can turn pessimistic. In those moments, I allow myself to take a break from the news for a couple of weeks, which is easier with no social media. I’m under the impression that Mastodon can feel like a bubble if I only check the local toots from a certain server, and right now, I could benefit from that. Maybe just focusing on LGBT+ issues, art and technology.
I think I can benefit from Bluesky and Mastodon if I set them up so that they only show me posts from certain accounts. Seeing sketches and digital art motivates me to draw more and, right now, I don’t have a lot of that influence around me. I’ll give it some thought, inform myself on how to personalize the Bluesky and Mastodon experiences, and probably rejoin. If I don’t like it, I can do as I’ve done dozens (dozens!) of times these past 15-20 years and just delete my social media again.