Bluesky: the opposite of doomscrolling

I'm actually a little embarrassed about how overjoyed I am to have Twitter 2.0 with all of the absurdity and none of the baggage.

I don’t want to go on and on about how great this new thing is when it’s not actually open to everyone yet (and no, I sadly don’t have any invites left). But this is the week that Bluesky arrived.

Bluesky is a decentralized Twitter clone that was catalyzed by Jack Dorsey, but is actually being deployed and run by Awesome Woman CEO Jay Graber. It’s the one I sent that snotty text about two weeks ago, saying it was bereft of anything interesting except dessert pictures and rude comments about 80083, remember that? That’s when I was like, oh wow, Notes is the next hot thing! And then I joined Mastodon and I thought, “well. This is fine. A little slow, but I’ll try it. Maybe we don’t need a new Twitter.”

And then the good folks at Bluesky sent invite codes to all the Twitter power users and journalists and it was like coming home. I spent a disturbing chunk of time yesterday just refreshing the feed and watching it all develop in real-time and sent texts like, “get on Bluesky AOC just joined and everybody is bullying Jake Tapper and this is the most fun I’ve had in years,” and then the community spontaneously named the posts “skeets” (sky + tweet, get it) and you could actually just feel the palpable relief of having a place to post that wasn’t under the baleful, unpredictable glare of either Elon or the army of new blue-checks whose awful hateful responses keep showing up first on all kinds of tweets. It. Was. Wonderful. I even tweeted about how great it is and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s among my last tweets ever.

I even figured out how to change my username to @mollywood.co after this!

It felt like sweet, snarky, wild, throw-your-bra-away freedom. And I realized … I do need a new Twitter. Maybe it isn’t a net positive for humanity, but as I said, I love it. It re-wired my brain and I want the hot takes and the constant stream of new! new! new! and the personalities and the memes and the wild ranges of experience and opinions and the dopamine hits yesterday were hitting with almost physical force. I am thrilled. This is what I was missing.

The vibes

Now, of course, it’s sort of a battle of the witty comments as the power-user self-declared shitposters compete to see who can get famous fastest. That’ll be exhausting for a couple more weeks, and then it’ll probably get a little ugly when everybody rushes in before there’s even a block button. There will be angst and moderation fights and purity tests over whether it’s sufficiently decentralized and all of the growing pains of a social network and maybe it won’t even work at all! I don’t know! I don’t even want to overcomplicate it with all this thinking! I only know that for that brief, shining moment, Twitter as we knew it before was reborn, and goddamn if it didn’t feel like some kind of miracle.

Watching:

Can confirm, The Diplomat on Netflix is so totally worth it. I got there a little late, just started it last night, but I can tell you that after a long day goofing off on Bluesky, I had planned to do some work once the sun went down and it cooled off in Oakland some, and, well. Instead, I watched the first three episodes and am certifiably obsessed.

Still have not started this season of Succession. Is it just me?

Oh and also, the NBA Finals, which is taking up a lot of time, and can we all agree that Round 1 has almost been a little too exciting? I’m almost hoping the next round is a little less interesting, because I want to go to bed earlier. And this leads me to another observation:

F*ck horror movies. Horror movies are a thing again, and I, for one, am not happy, because I am a giant chicken, and live sports are the only time I really ever see live commercials, which, at the moment, means tons of damn horror movie trailers and I demand a content warning! NOT COOL! Kids are watching! And their giant chicken moms!

Reading:

A lot of things are on my shelf right now, including this (thanks, John P., for recommending your actual textbook from MBA school!):

And there are the sci-fi reads I mentioned recently, as well, but here’s the straight truth. A new audiobook in the Gray Man series came out and that’s all I’m doing until it’s done. I joked to my son that I might have to shut down the company until I’m done listening to it, and that was before Bluesky came out! Paging the focus fairy!

Weekend entertainment:

In case you missed it, I was on Daily Tech News Show with my cohost-for-life Tom Merritt, alongside Sarah Lane and Justin Robert Young, and we geeked out on data center energy consumption, haptic feedback in VR, and when you even need to bother upgrading a smartphone anymore.

For patrons of the show (I am one!), the extended show has a long conversation about how, let me just say, I do not love the converging storylines that are: low birth-rate panic, rapidly spreading abortion bans, and technological innovations that just make it easier and easier for people to get pregnant and have babies well past the time their bodies have suggested that they stop. If only there were some kind of fiction to imagine where this might all lead.

But in much lighter conversations, Tom and I also, with the help of producer Rich Stroffolino, made another absolutely delightful episode of It’s a Thing, discussing noods, Mixue boba and ice cream, the return of malls, and how that Rusted Root song “Send Me On My Way” is apparently the required instrumental intro to any TikTok featuring cute animals or other heartwarming material. Required, I tell you.

Please enjoy any and all and thank you, as always, for reading and subscribing. Please tell a friend!