I filter both, plus any other political talk. I want to look at retro games, some tech and art and that's it. For some people everything has to be political, and anyone who doesn't want to read the angry rants is an an echo chamber, but so be it. Personally, I find my cake to be very tasty.
It's possible to block both. If bsky would let you use starter packs as block lists, it would be a lot easier than it is.
I block any account that is primarily politics-based (Hillary Clinton's social media team joined a month ago and has 5k blocks already so I'm not alone), and other accounts as and when they become tiresome (ie when they go on a political rant). My feeling is that academics broke mostly to bluesky while techies broke mostly to mastodon. I follow some academic accounts that occasionally post interesting things - nothing earth-shattering, but worth checking in once every couple of days.
My main problem with bsky is that a lot of academics seem to approach it as a write-only medium. No engagement.
I mean yea you can call anything hate if you squint hard enough. Reasonable terms of service are never going to satisfy everyone. You can definitely have your cake and eat it too so long as you don't try and please everyone.
the problem is both sides are so caught up in their own identity politics that they can't see the other's perspective. the same goes for right-wing and left-wing in America.
The bigger problem is that people from societies with FPTP voting systems often tend to think binary. The world is more multi-faceted than that, it's not always two sides to a coin, good vs bad, left vs. right, etc.
There are certain keywords people use that are instant red flags. They usually mean I can immediately ignore everything they've written. "Common sense" has become a big one. It's code for "my feelings trump your facts" (pun intended).
But another one is "both sides". There are a number of reasons people fall back to this. Usually it's intellectual laziness, not wanting to know any of the details, usually because it's an issue that the person saying it doesn't actually care about the issue. Some people derive validation from somehow being "above the fray" on some partisan issue.
Another reason is simply not caring about the issue and trying to create a moral equivalence is intentionally or unintentionally used to silence a particular topic.
Not everything is some disagreement between equivalent positions. Sometimes, a given position is just plain wrong. Slavery, genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing. These are issues historically that have a right side and a wrong side.
On Gaza, there is the side that wants to live, not be bombed and not exist in an apartheid state and there's the side that wants to ethnically cleanse millions of people to create lebensraum. Merely going to Israel has been a radicalizing experience for a lot of people because they instantly recognize what's going on. There are countless examples of this now. I'll choose just one as an example: Sde Temain [1].
danielbln|10 months ago
flir|10 months ago
I block any account that is primarily politics-based (Hillary Clinton's social media team joined a month ago and has 5k blocks already so I'm not alone), and other accounts as and when they become tiresome (ie when they go on a political rant). My feeling is that academics broke mostly to bluesky while techies broke mostly to mastodon. I follow some academic accounts that occasionally post interesting things - nothing earth-shattering, but worth checking in once every couple of days.
My main problem with bsky is that a lot of academics seem to approach it as a write-only medium. No engagement.
NoTeslaThrow|10 months ago
the_real_cher|10 months ago
danielbln|10 months ago
NoTeslaThrow|10 months ago
jmyeet|10 months ago
But another one is "both sides". There are a number of reasons people fall back to this. Usually it's intellectual laziness, not wanting to know any of the details, usually because it's an issue that the person saying it doesn't actually care about the issue. Some people derive validation from somehow being "above the fray" on some partisan issue.
Another reason is simply not caring about the issue and trying to create a moral equivalence is intentionally or unintentionally used to silence a particular topic.
Not everything is some disagreement between equivalent positions. Sometimes, a given position is just plain wrong. Slavery, genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing. These are issues historically that have a right side and a wrong side.
On Gaza, there is the side that wants to live, not be bombed and not exist in an apartheid state and there's the side that wants to ethnically cleanse millions of people to create lebensraum. Merely going to Israel has been a radicalizing experience for a lot of people because they instantly recognize what's going on. There are countless examples of this now. I'll choose just one as an example: Sde Temain [1].
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/8/13/israeli...
hp6|10 months ago