We’ve all been watching the Internet in the last few years. The disappointing trend has been accelerating away from the fun, promising Internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s, toward an almost Vaudevillian collection of ads, misleading and untrue facts and ideas, and grotesque incivility.

For a little while after Twitter became X, I toyed with the idea of using Threads, an app/site literally aimed at replacing Twitter, which I never liked, so I lost interest.

At one point I kind of liked Facebook, and I still enjoy some aspects of it, but in just the past few months, Facebook has gotten burdened with more and more “Sponsored” content, which Facebook has been deliberately making less obvious, mostly by making the word “Sponsored” smaller, or placing Facebook accounts that are actually ads in our feeds, asking us to follow that page.

Meanwhile, I am just about done with YouTube, due to both the longer and longer pre-roll video ads that are never of any interest to me, combined with in-video ads read by the content creator him/herself, also never of any interest to me.

Many of us have been using Facebook for 10 or 15 years, and it has grown to feel comfortable to most of us. We understand how to add friends, find events, post fun stuff, post news, and on and on, so it might be a hard choice to move away from the familiar.

I also made several attempts to get into Instagram, which has devolved into the home for obnoxious know-it-alls under the umbrella term “influencers,” mostly photographers and videographers who wanted to tell us who we should be, whether we should be that or not.

It’s all very frustrating and disingenuous.

Along comes BlueSky, “a microblogging social networking service modeled after Twitter (now X). Users can share text messages, images, and videos in short posts. The service is primarily operated by Bluesky Social, an American benefit corporation.”

The one thing that BlueSky does better than Instagram is that you can post from your web browser.

It is very difficult to predict what’s going to be popular and successful. Look at Tumblr, Friendster, Vine, MySpace, Google+, Xanga, and more.

And, of course, I have said many times, the ultimate log, blog, or journal is the simplest: pen to paper.