Wheat from the Chaff Blog

After 14 years and 1700+ followers, I finally deleted my Twitter account. It was disappointing. I’m a news junkie, and Twitter used to be an excellent tool for curating my news feed. Unfortunately, Musk has destroyed a once great social media platform and turned it into a sewer. The last straw was election day in America, when my feed was carpet bombed by thousands of new accounts with names like bob7398*1904 and smith6874930&5. Not so shockingly, all had blue checkmarks and were pro-Trump, and many demanded the genocidal destruction of Ukraine. I’ve blocked thousands of junk accounts in the last two years, but this orchestrated campaign finally convinced my stubborn ass that Twitter was a hopeless cause.

Thankfully, I think I’ve found a platform that might be a suitable replacement: Bluesky. It looks and acts just like Twitter, which is more than I can say for other Twitter wannabes like Threads. I’ve only been on for one day, but so far I’ve found most of my favourite news organizations, journalists, and columnists. These include The Tyee, the Globe & Mail, The Atlantic, and commentators like Robert Reich, Andrew Coyne, and David Frum. In addition, most of the key Canucks hockey pundits have started posting on Bluesky this week, so I won’t have to forego the minute-by-minute game night commentary that I so enjoy. Bluesky is actively moderated to block out the crazies, and its posts and discussions seem quite civilized. Some might miss the chaos and misinformation, but I find Bluesky a proverbial breath of fresh air.

I still haven’t seen a lot of educators on Bluesky. Twitter used to be an excellent forum for education discussions, and I found a lot of teachers who share my more traditional teaching philosophy. Hopefully, more educators will join soon. According to numerous news reports, Bluesky is enjoying phenomenal growth in the last seven days.

If you’re interested, you can find Bluesky in your favourite app store or online at https://bsky.app/.

See you there!