Look, don’t get me wrong: Bluesky is interesting and a great alternative to Twitter/X. It’s a pleasure to use and it’s not toxic. And Elon Musk is nowhere to be seen. All big pluses.

But it’s still social media. I’ve been on it for about a week, and the one thing I’ve realised is that my screen-time has gone way up. The explanation is simple: every time I’ve opened the app I spent up to 20 minutes scrolling through the updates, posts and re-posts that had come in since the last time I’d been on.

And I thought: I’ve been here before, when I first signed up for Instagram because I’m a photographer and I thought it would be good for that. It is, but even when I was selective about whom I followed I found myself scrolling endlessly like a zombie. So I quit (though I still get several messages from Meta every week saying they’re so sorry I’ve gone and offering me an easy way to come back to the fold.

Which made me think that joining Bluesky is a bit like buying an EV.

EVs are wonderful in some ways (e.g. environmental). But they’re not a solution to a much bigger problem — our addiction to cars. In fact, they may in the end make us use our vehicles more, with consequent deterioration of urban and other environments.

Similarly, Bluesky is great and much more enjoyable than ‘X’. But it’s still an attention-sponge and is therefore not a solution to the real problem: our addiction to a technology that leaves us endlessly communicating via privately-owned channels which have the cognitive bandwidth of smoke signals.

Life is too short to spend so much time time on those channels.

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