It’s been in the works for a while, but SCIFI.radio is finally beginning the process of shutting down its old Twitter account and moving to happier climes. The decision wasn’t made lightly. We’ve been on Twitter/X since 2009, and in all that time we’ve only gained about 2500 followers. The algorithm there, frankly, doesn’t like us very much. It’s hard to compete with automated spambots and all that strife. The new service BlueSky works very differently, and we think we will have a much easier time there of reaching our followers, since BlueSky seems to reward friendship and actual people.
Bluesky is a decentralized social media platform that offers a microblogging experience similar to Twitter. It was founded by Jack Dorsey, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, in 2019 as an internal project within Twitter. The initiative aimed to explore decentralized social networking protocols to address issues like content moderation, user control, and platform interoperability. In 2021, Bluesky became an independent entity, focusing on developing the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Protocol) to support decentralized social networks.
The motivation behind Bluesky’s creation was to develop a social media ecosystem not controlled by a single company, thereby granting users greater control over their data and online interactions. By leveraging the AT Protocol, Bluesky enables a federated structure where users can choose or create custom algorithms for their feeds, enhancing personalization and privacy.
That means that the algorithms are in the hands of the users, not the corporations. This, we can work with. We’re going to be announcing our departure from Twitter/X two or three times a day, or as much as they’ll allow, for about the next month. After that, we’re turning off the lights on Twitter.
If you’re on Twitter and follow us there, we invite you to join us on Bluesky and follow us there. You’ll get a much better sense of what we’re publishing, what we’re doing and generally what we’re up to here at the station, probably even better than Facebook allows for.
Thank you for being fans of SCIFI.radio all these years. The best is yet to come.
SCIFI.radio is listener supported sci-fi geek culture radio, and operates almost exclusively via the generous contributions of our fans via our Patreon campaign. If you like, you can also use our tip jar and send us a little something to help support the many fine creatives that make this station possible.
So instead of Pink Floyd singing “Goodbye Blue Sky.” it’s:
“Hello, Bluesky.”
It’s too bad about Twitter aka X. But yeah, take over a company with a name so famous a word comes from it (“tweet”). And then change it to a generic name that could be anything. Not a good sign…..