Roundup: Blue skies and bad cars
Read to the end for a good skeet from an unexpected source
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the last few days on Bluesky, the latest social network to challenge Twitter, so this week I decided to share some thoughts on it and whether it might really be a threat for Elon Musk’s plaything. Plus, there have been a string of stories over the past week or so that I feel show the better future of cars we’re being sold — where they’re electric and have more digital tech in them — isn’t going to play out as promised.
There are also a bunch of reading recommendations from the past week, along with some labor and news updates. I’d say to pay special attention to the story on Musk’s lawyers saying his past comments could be deepfakes so he shouldn’t have to account for them — major red flags there.
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Thanks, and have a great week!
— Paris
A Twitter challenger emerges?
Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, people have been looking for a good ship to jump to — but none have proven worthy. There was an initial exodus to Mastodon, but its decentralized nature make it confusing and it didn’t exactly welcome some of the posting styles that made Twitter fun. Then there was Post, an attempt to attract journalists most of all with a means of paying for written work, but it’s kind of a flop. Substack Notes launched just weeks ago, and while it pissed Musk off so much he started blocking Substack links on Twitter, its approach to content moderation has come under fire and its inability to let users follow people without subscribing to their newsletters has turned people off.
There’s also Cohost, Spoutible, T2, and I’m sure others I haven’t tried. But of those I have, I could immediately tell they weren’t the replacement people were looking for. Even Mastodon, which I have an active presence on and has certainly found its niche of users, doesn’t have what attracted so many people to Twitter. But a new platform called Bluesky is slowly opening up to new users, and this one feels different — and like it could take away some of the constituencies that are most important to Twitter, leaving behind the right-wing dipshits and their billionaire overlord that have sent it plummeting in recent months.
