Current state of the internet/regarding the future of my online presence

Hello everyone.

"Huh, what's that Lerun? A blog post that actually isn't the end of month one for once?" Yes. Unfortunately it's not a good one though.

This year hasn't been really kind to us so far, especially those last couple of months.

If you read my August's end of the month blog post, you probably know I've been questioning about how long my online presence would last. The current state of the internet has been... really bad with the events that has been happening lately so I'm gonna be going through everything that is occurring right now. Get ready, it's gonna be a wild ride :)

Let's start with the first topic: age verification.

What is age verification? Basically it means that all of DMs, NSFW stuff isn't gonna be available to you unless you verify your age by submitting your photo/ID.

First it became a thing in UK, then it started slowly spreading across the world: Australia, EU, United States (some parts of it, it's so bad that it caused Bluesky to block access for people in Mississippi... yup)... and today it has been revealed that Discord customer sevice data breach got occurred and it leaked a lot of users' infos and scanned photos/IDs... this is why it's bad and you need to keep calling your reps. Otherwise it'll get worse and cause a disappearance of a lot of people.

And speaking about censorship again... another topic: Bluesky's TOS changes.

A while ago Bluesky was asking for feedback on their Community Guidelines. Unfortunately as expected they didn't listen and proceeded to roll them out anyways. So now a certain type of stuff isn't allowed here anymore. Despite that, I kept staying here and hoping for better changes...

And now, what happened very recently: Bluesky CEO's meltdown.

3 days ago Jay, Bluesky CEO quoted a post and someone asked her if they were still gonna ban a known transphobe, but her answer was... "WAFFLES". I wish I was joking. Yesterday she doubled down and had a meltdown... and she just keeps digging this hole. This isn't looking good for Bluesky... or even the internet in general. And I already can see it's gonna get even more ugly from here.

So where does this leads us? Will I still stay? Will I leave Bluesky? Or just erase my online presence in general? Or will I do something else?

Right now I'm gonna stay and keep doing my thing as usual as Bluesky is our home and this is the place where I can express my obsessions with art, my upcoming project... everything I love. A fresh breath of air after leaving that Dumpsterfire Bird Site. However, I'm heavily considering migrating to Northsky once it opens. It seems to be more chill and it's based in Canada. I haven't signed up to waitlist yet but I'm planning to. I just gotta see how everything goes but as I said, I can see it'll get only more uglier from here.

I'll be also making my Nekoweb page in case if I do actually leave for good but I hope not... I just gotta learn how to code first, this is gonna be hard :') But this is something I gotta do as I plan to move away from carrd entirely.

I'm planning to keep on using Mastodon/Sheezy/Pillowfort (I started posting there again) but... for some reason I just don't get the same feeling as Bluesky. Maybe it's just me, but I don't know. It's the truth, and if that makes you sad then I'm sorry.

At the moment I'm gonna be taking the weekend off from social media and just quietly working on art, because due to all of the stuff happening I've been feeling really sad and stressed out and recent news just added up to it. If I stay here more I'll crack so I need to step back for a couple of days.

Think I'm gonna be ending this blog post here, but before that...

TL;DR: I'm not leaving, gonna keep doing my thing but I'm heavily considering migrating to Northsky once it opens, will be taking a social media break for the weekend.

Thank you so much for reading, please make sure to eat/drink/sleep well and take care of yourself, the times are really hard right now.

I'm gonna keep doing my best until the end so please do the same and don't give up okay?

See you later.

Lerun