We Don’t Do That Here
Before Brazil banned X, and sent several hundred thousand people to Bluesky, I could check my feeds once a day and catch up on everything that had happened since the last time I logged on. I could do a respectable toilet scroll in the morning and have the gist of all that had happened in the past 12-24 hours. The skyline got a little more noisy then, but quickly normalized; I was still able to keep up (or catch up).
When Apartheid Clyde announced that bans would mean fuck all on the site formerly known as Twitter, more folks started showing up on the skyline. And the election must’ve been something so chaotic over there, because the wave of new folks on every feed was overwhelming. These waves of new users brought a lot of Black folks to the site, and the BlackSky feed quickly went from a feed I could “catch up” on in a late night scroll, to one where if I miss it live, it’s gone forever—unless it’s become a meme (Katfish Kia?)
In the earlier days of BlueSky, you had to follow people to populate your home feed and to actually see… stuff. You could follow feeds as well, but outside of a few of them, most still were too broad or too niche to really allow the same kind of casual scroll that you were probably used to if you came from the bird. When I first got there, BlueSky was “dead.” By which I mean, I had not followed enough folks to actually see new posts regularly, and the feeds I followed did not have enough people/posts being pulled in to give me something to do. I followed users I saw and liked from feeds, and my skyline became a cozy, casual scroll.
Needless to say—well, maybe not needless since we’re here—the need to follow folks has shifted wildly since this influx of new, and newly active, users. Now, all my feeds are a lot noisier. I don’t have to follow folks individually to see a lot of new posts daily—shit, hourly—in each. I follow folks as we interact, or as I come across them in feeds. If their vibes match my vibes, if they’re talking about shit I’m interested in, if they make me laugh… I follow them. I follow folks because I want to see and hear from them. Whether they want to see or hear from me is their choice.
Before the past week or so, I never really encountered any conversations about following etiquette on BlueSky. I think earlier adopters necessarily had a better grasp of feeds and lists as tools to curate their experience on the platform. If there was discourse around following, I wasn’t privy to it. But with all the new users fleeing formerly-Twitter, there’s been a lot of conversation about following back. I’ve seen at least a dozen flutters on BlackSky about it being “weird” to not follow back, or unfollowing folks who do not follow back, or just following everyone back then doing the extra work of muting people you don’t want to see and/or making lists for folks you actually want to see. And that’s wild as fuck to me, because…?
For what reason?
BlueSky is built on feeds, and feeds can be extremely broad or extremely niche. BlackSky is my main non-following feed. It is made by, populated by, and crucially, for Black folks. It’s specific, but broad. I follow that feed because it lets me engage with my people on Bluesky. But Black is not a monolith and I do not want to follow all you niggas! All of y’all don’t want to follow me. We do not all like, care about, talk about, relate to all the same things. Some of us only have Blackness in common.
The beauty of the feed is I still get to be in community with you, and can engage with you on our shared interests and experience whether we are personally connected or not. Interactions can exist independent of relationships, and do not have to create deeper connections between folks. I do not have to be your mutual to acknowledge your post as funny or informative. The quality or value of a thought, a joke, a video, whatever doesn’t change or depend on whether the person engaging with it is a follower.
What is the point?
Many folks on BlackSky have remarked on leaving “verification” on the Other Site but expect follows to be automatically reciprocal. It’s just trading one status symbol for another. At least verification, in its simplest form, is about safety—protecting individuals and organizations from impersonation, and protecting audiences from disinformation. What purpose is served by following folks you do not like or want to see? What is gained? And then to say “I’ll just use lists to see the people I actually want to see.” Why work harder? Especially when you can add folks to lists without following them.
What is the point of following? I guess if you see following as a way to gain followers, and being followed by a lot of people is the goal, it makes sense. But the folks who follow for this reason are all being followed by people who follow for this reason—are y’all engaging with one another? Are you getting more interaction from followers than you get on any random feed? I am genuinely curious.
Free yourself.
One of the things I’ve enjoyed on BlueSky is that even with only a tenth of the amount of followers I had on Twitter (for most of my time on Bsky, I’m now at over half) , I get the same or more engagement on my posts. 10 likes/replies on a post when you have 90 followers is a lot more meaningful than that amount on a post when you have 900. Bigger numbers look good, and feel good too, but when they are not accompanied by more interaction, they’re meaningless to me.
I say this with the utmost sincerity: if you do not want to follow me, please unfollow me. If you don’t care about me, if you’re not interested in the things I post about, if you only view me as a number, I promise you can free yourself from my annoying ass by clicking “unfollow.” I will not take it personally. I want you to enjoy your time on the platform the same way I want to enjoy my time there. I feel no obligation to follow you back simply for following me first, and I will feel even less desire to follow back if you move in a way that suggests you expect it. Talk your shit, be yourself, if I fuck with you, I’ll follow. It’s that simple.
If I don’t follow you back, it’s not a personal slight, or a judgment against you. I don’t like sports. If most or all your posts are about games, we have nothing to discuss. I am not particularly religious. If you speak in bible quotes and post gospel songs, I genuinely love that for you, but it’s not for me. If you’re invested in diet or fitness culture, power to you on your journey, but I don’t want to see that. Catch you in BlackSkyGamers or something tho. Cause again, feeds let us connect where we connect, and leave each other be otherwise.
