Nostalgia will not fix this

Garbage Day Live is at the Bell House in Brooklyn this Wednesday! We’ve got great guests. A lot of fun surprises. Maybe even a special merch thing??? Make sure to grab your tickets now! You can do that by heading here.

Is Bluesky Ready For The Future?

Bluesky is blowing up right now. Hot off its huge spike in Brazilian users, following the country’s now-reversed X ban, another big cohort moved over after Elon Musk changed how blocking on the platform works. In 24 hours, half a million new users made accounts on the site, briefly taking it offline.

The block update didn’t affect me, personally, because I think I’ve only ever blocked a handful of people on Twitter. As a messy internet troll myself — and former community mod — I was always more of a fan of muting because it didn’t give people the satisfaction of knowing they had bothered me. (Yes, I am aware this is an insane way to live.)

But a different, new X update that seems to have rolled out this month has made the site pretty much unusable. My Following feed has long been a wasteland, even though I’m following almost 3,000 accounts. But now X has stickied posts from Musk at the top of the For You tab. No matter what, every time I refresh the app, regardless of the device I’m using, there will be at least two random posts from Musk sitting at the top. It seems to show you more Musk content the longer it’s been since you last refreshed.

I’ve also noticed that, just in general, using X is beginning to really mess with my head. In a sense, all platforms alter your understanding of reality. Whether it’s due to insularity or algorithms. But X’s increasingly inescapable combination of autoplaying gore, white nationalism, financial scams, pornography, and endless Tesla and SpaceX updates is taking a toll. Not unlike how it felt back in the early 2010s, when I had to dig through 4chan threads after terror attacks. It wears you down after a while.

So this weekend, as I was out and about doing stuff, I tried to replace the cigarette smoker-like e-breaks I would normally fill up with X/Twitter doomscrolling by opening up Bluesky and Threads. I can confidently say Bluesky is a better replacement in that sense than Threads, which is, honestly, a truly dog shit mobile app. Though, I do find Bluesky grating for the same reason I find Portland, Oregon, kind of grating. A sort of ragged tweeness that permeates the whole place and makes it feel like a millennial retirement home. As X user @JeremiahWiggles recently wrote, “It does tickle me that there's a functional twitter alternative that is viable in almost every respect except for the fact that it's culture is just mid-2010s Tumblr.”

But as the more of my internet life I move over to Bluesky, the more I’m warming to it. Part of that process is learning — and appreciating — the things that make Bluesky different from Twitter (or Threads). Bluesky developer Paul Frazee wrote a fascinating thread about how the site, underneath the hood, is essentially just a bundle of RSS feeds, with a few bells and whistles added to make it social. And this makes the world of Bluesky apps very exciting. For instance, here’s literally the site’s entire firehose live updating in real time (it eventually crashed my browser lol). I also found a very handy bridge for migrating X follows. And both Deck Blue and Skyfeed, Tweetdeck-like interfaces for it, are far superior to Threads’ own native version. Custom feeds are also extremely useful. I particularly like the “Popular With Friends” feed and “Gift Links,” which I discovered recently thanks to The Onion’s Ben Collins.

In fact, I think it’s these genuinely interesting differences between Bluesky and all the other Twitter-likes out there that the platform and its developer community need to focus on more than anything else. Every text-first platform on the web right now is running up against an internet-wide literacy wall. Unless something truly miraculous happens, it is reasonable to assume that every day there will be fewer people reading words on the internet than there were the day before. Bluesky has around six million monthly active users. Threads has 150 million gas leak victims — though its algorithm will never let you see them all. X has 250 million. But TikTok has over a billion. We are experiencing a shift in communication as existential as climate change with ripple effects just as varied and unpredictable. But what is already very apparent is that nostalgia will not fix this. Bluesky has built a better version of what Twitter used to be, but if it wants to actually build a better version of what Twitter could be, it needs to evolve into something else entirely.

I’m sure plenty of Bluesky power users will read this and say, “Who cares. I’m happy with a tiny site that feels like a memory of how I used to use the internet.” Fair enough. But one day you’ll be the last person writing words on the web and wonder where everyone went.

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at [email protected] and let’s talk. Thanks!

Keep Your Private Data Off The Dark Web

Every day, data brokers profit from your sensitive info—phone number, birthday, SSN—selling it to the highest bidder. And who’s buying it? Best case: companies target you with ads. Worst case: scammers and identity thieves. It's time you check out Incogni. They scrub your personal data from the web, confronting the world’s data brokers on your behalf. And unlike other services, Incogni helps remove your sensitive information from all broker types, including those tricky People Search Sites, helping you to protect yourself from identity theft, spam calls, and health insurers raising your rates.

Plus - it's cybersecurity week! Use Incogni's special code for Garbage day readers to get 58% off annual plans: DAYDEAL

A Good Before And After

Mr. Trump Goes To McDonald’s

Former President Donald Trump had a big weekend. At a rally on Saturday, he talked about how big golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis was and then, on Sunday, Trump “worked” at a McDonald’s. Honestly, not exactly an unusual weekend for 78-year-old man, I guess. The McDonald’s photo op was, obviously, faked. The store was closed and the “customers” were selected ahead of time. Here’s the notice McDonald’s sent out to franchisees about the appearance.

One bit of commentary about this that I found interesting, though. Semafor’s Dave Weigel wrote on Bluesky, “A Democrat clearing out McDonald’s to briefly pour fries for pre-selected supporters would be covered as a Dukakis/tank disaster. Having an entire media infrastructure where you can do no wrong is helpful!”

Meanwhile, Musk spent the weekend promoting America PAC, his super PAC, which is currently running a million-dollar giveaway for voters who sign a petition “to support free speech and the right to bear arms” in swing states. Is such a giveaway legal? Probably not. Oh well. If you’re wondering why he’s all in on Trump all of a sudden it’s because his entire business empire would likely collapse with even the slightest bit of regulatory scrutiny.

Oh, one more election thing: Click here for liberal psychic damage.

Here’s The Deal With The MrBeast Anti-Israel Billboards

Reporter Ryan Fae got to the bottom of the hacked billboards in Chicago that read “Fuck Israel” with a photo of MrBeast next to them. The hacker behind the stunt told Fae that it wasn’t meant to be anti-Semitic, but, instead, was supposed to “bring attention to the genocide in Palestine.” Well, it definitely generated attention.

According to Fae, the hacker used a tool called Zoomeye to locate billboards connected to the internet and targeted ones that weren’t password-protected. There was also no way to figure out where the billboards even were.

Lunchly’s Alleged Mold Problem

YouTuber Rosanna Pansino recently did a video comparing Lunachables and Lunchly. She opened the Lunchly box on camera and discovered mold in the cheese. And Pansino isn’t the only one discovering moldy Lunchly cheese. An X user named @DogPack404 reported a similar experience. I actually buy the theory that the brain geniuses behind Lunchly didn’t realize that “real cheese” would getting moldy a lot faster than “fake” cheese.

A Very Online Halloween Costume

By the way, if you don’t get this reference, click here. The band in the viral video is called My Son The Hurricane. And even though they’ve sort of become stuck in the internet’s various cringe compilations, I think they rip pretty hard. But I, also, really like ska music, so I’m comfortable admitting my music taste does not align with everyone else’s.

An Interesting Post

Some Stray Links

• “Did That Song Go Viral on TikTok Organically — Or Was It Paid For?”

• “Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode”

• “Can the Media Survive?”

P.S. here’s the worst urinal I’ve ever seen.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***