Posted on 06/23/2025 10:52:07 AM PDT by Red Badger
Well, here’s a shocker, indeed: A thought bubble can get thought-bubbly.
Could you have pictured this? I couldn’t, especially after the very-successful, not-at-all-astroturfed hubbub around X alternative Bluesky after Elon Musk bought Twitter and made it free-speech friendly.
We were all told that Bluesky — a decentralized microblogging platform that launched in 2023 — was going to overtake X because of Elon’s toxicity, since all of the legacy media was headed there. The American left, in particular, wanted to get off of the legacy platform and build something of their own.
Well, why not? After all, as they told conservatives back in the days when we were shut up and shut out of most of the social media algorithms, if we had a problem with it, we could just build our own. I mean, those platforms would be deplatformed themselves if they got popular enough — but that wouldn’t be a problem with Bluesky, not with its leftist cant or its start as a research project within Twitter itself. Surely this growth was all sustainable, correct?
Now, just months after the platform saw its biggest surge of users in the wake of the 2024 election, engagement is down by half and shows no sign of stopping. Moreover, lefty, anti-Trump, billionaire business mogul Mark Cuban — once an enthusiastic and active user of the platform — thinks he knows why: the hateful, “toxic” rhetoric coming out of Bluesky on a daily basis.
Again, a shocker indeed.
“Engagement went from great convos on many topics, to agree with me or you are a nazi fascist,” Cuban wrote in a post earlier this month, according to Fortune. “We are forcing posts to X.”
“Even if you agree with 95 percent of what a person is saying on a topic, if there is one point that you might call out as being more of a grey area, they will call you a fascist etc.,” he added.
In another Bluesky post, Cuban shared how “[t]he lack of diversity of thought here is really hurting usage,” linking a Washington Post article on the topic by Megan McArdle.
McArdle noted the environment that birthed the Bluesky exodus, particularly the fact that Twitter — while having a numerically smaller user base than Meta platforms like Instagram or Facebook — “had a big group of influential users,” particularly progressives “who wielded outsize influence on the platform because they were early adopters who outnumbered the conservatives.”
Things were working out in their favor, until they weren’t and Elon Musk took over, which is when they took their ball and went home, or at least to Bluesky:
Moderation suppressed conservative users and stories that hurt the left — most notoriously, the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which Twitter throttled as “disinformation” in the run-up to the 2020 election. Of course, progressive Twitter mobs also policed the discourse themselves, securing high-profile firings that made many people afraid to cross them.
Thus, that national conversation ended up skewed toward liberal views, creating the illusion that their ideas were more popular than they actually were. That’s a major reason that institutions went all-in on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and why the 2020 Democratic primary field moved so far to the left that Kamala Harris was still struggling to backtrack four years later. All that changed when Musk bought Twitter.
It’s not surprising that progressives want to return to the good old days. But it’s not working, and I’m skeptical it ever will.
And, as the Times of India noted, it’s not as if the responses to Cuban’s post made things any better.
*** MORE AT LINK *** CAUTION - NSFW...................
Well, Mark, your ideological compatriots are raving loons. And you’re surprised when they act like it?
Who’s Mark Cuban?
Bluesky in hell ,LOL
Mark Cuban wants the left to be tolerant. Does he believe in unicorns too?
A guy with more dough than know.................
“Engagement went from great convos on many topics, to agree with me or you are a nazi fascist,” Cuban wrote in a post earlier this month, according to Fortune. “We are forcing posts to X.”
“Even if you agree with 95 percent of what a person is saying on a topic, if there is one point that you might call out as being more of a grey area, they will call you a fascist etc.,” he added.
No different than right here...
After all, DU was such a huge success.
Their problem is Leftism is unreasonable. It’s all based on an anti-human dictatorship and forced compliance. The exact opposites of freedom and liberty.
A guy with more dollars than cents ...
Sounds like Mad Ivan’s Wideawakes after the exodus from here
Self immolation
Same posse at work lol
Anyone remember the klown posse alt site to here made up of some truly nasty mostly liberal on culture war freepers
Set up to ridicule posters here while they hid behind fake monikers
Man they were cruel
Especially towards the women posters here
And they told all the dirty on free republic get together and the sex stuff
Salacious
Then they picked on Nolu Chan which was a mistake
He was deft at net espionage and doxed them before we called it that
They closed shop and purged their cache
There were some gem threads there
Loaded with kali freepers and a lawyer from one state north of me
They really were nasty and mean to Jim Thompson
I went on there and challenged them
They didn’t like that
Some here funny though to be honest
Post 2005 posters know nothing about FR and our at times sordid past
We were mostly 40s median age then
Far different environment and 10X the traffic
Threads reloads rolled like a slot machine wheel
It was hard to keep up and new threads every few seconds posted
More concise posters
You couldn’t be too stupid then and not get vegomatic response
My wife was scared of the place lol
Another social media site ruled by Godwin’s Law.
Flame Wars....................
All I hear in my head is Forrest Gump intoning - “Mark Cuban is not a smaaart maaan...”
BOTH platforms have big problems!
Oh. Wait. It already is. Fugly.
Nick: I might work with you but you need to sign my NDA.
Cuban: Sorry, I won’t do that.
Nick: F off.
Cuban is kind of bit full of himself mixed with a bit of creepy.
A Yankee carpetbagger who moved to Dallas and became a billionaire. He's also Jewish, but in the socialist rather than the orthodox sense.
Perfect! You’re getting better with old age.
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