It may be that my quest for a microblogging engine will be as frustrating as the image server was to get working. Unfortunately, while Bluesky (bsky.app) is prettymuch everything I could want, in its current state of development there’s no way to self host a top level domain, only option is to masquerade as one on the bsky network. So, it’s not currently federated and uploaded media wouldn’t be stored on my server. I require this. I was able to get a subdomain working, but the handle gets invalidated since there are apparently new security requirements in place.

If you’re unfamiliar with Bluesky (bsky.app), it’s like the original Twitter with a big userbase having migrated from X. I have spent some time seeing what’s on the network and I still think the service has promise. It’s fairly well moderated, filtering out spam and other abuses, but there are way, way too many political posts and definitely not enough sex. The photography and art community is young but strong. Obviously, number of followers makes a difference in terms of number of views when media is posted, but tags are sufficient to get things into circulation. Downside; There does not seem to be a way to view posts chronologically and even after scrolling for a long time, most posts are less than a day old… so, an inactive account is likely to fall out of circulation very quickly and new posts get quickly lost in the shuffle. Most nature photos average 10 views an hour for up to a day, with a few hundred views at the top end.

All things considered, I think bluesky will be a good outlet for a picture of the day and server side announcements but I don’t foresee using it to microblog my daily life. I may use the subdomain account for day to day personal posts if I ever get it working, but regardless I am now available on Bluesky as @skysurfer.media – this will stay the same, even if I am able to migrate my account at a later time.

Indigo
@skysurfer.media
indigo@skysurfer.media