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a really big difference between 2026 twitter and bluesky is that tweets blowing up on the former means a handful of people retweeted it and then the algorithm decided to funnel it to a tens of thousands of people, whereas blowing up on the latter usually means that 100 people made an active choice
on twitter in its very sorry current state you can really feel the difference between the initial burst of direct human engagement and the horribly gain-boosted long tail of passive algorithm-feeder engagement. the algo really juices the tweet for all it's worth, it's miserable
you can feel it in a lot of ways. the replies are where it gets really annoying, but the sadness begins before that, when you stop seeing many profile pictures and bios that indicate someone who is actually meaningfully able to connect with you, and start seeing very… dull ones
before the bskiers start thinking this is praise for bluesky however, let me point out it ALSO has an obnoxious algorithm and it manages to be far more toxic than twitter's quite often. anyway
one of the problems with algorithm-driven engagement is that it's inherently passive. this means it can attract people whose engagement with the thing is extremely passive. they're not as fun to have. when I do a Suruga post it's most fun when I get the real monogatariheads yknow
and this all becomes so much worse the moment something could be considered political in any way in any context, which in the extremely long tail is of course literally everything
there is good that comes of the algorithm; cool people do sometimes find us, we sometimes find cool things with it; but it's the fucking definition of diminishing returns, it's hell in here