“Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity? Insanity is doing the exact same fucking thing, over and over again, expecting shit to change.”

These words from Vaas Montenegro from Far Cry 3, originally paraphrasing Albert Einstein, resounds within me in these dark times like an explosion that never ends. Human beings are under some sort of confirmation bias of sorts, unable to learn from their mistakes most of the time, because their insistence and thick-headedness will make them think “this time, it will be different”. An insistence in doing the exact same thing over and over again thinking shit will change that has become a plague in the innermost of the collective hivemind of the human psyche.

Let me ask you something then: have we learnt anything from migrating from Twitter/X to Bluesky? I can certainly tell you one thing about it: no. A fat, resounding and loud “no”. We certainly migrated to Bluesky with the intent that “this time, it will be different”, yet the new butterfly site is plagued recently with Palestinians getting restricted and assblasted by the site’s moderation for no apparent reason, with Jesse Singal and co. openly being on the loose, unpunished by the Bluesky moderation team, because somehow nepotism got to the site, with bots, impersonators and scammers beginning to rear their heads despite user moderation efforts, and worst of all: with the same ever-crushing reality of the finite attention economy, punishing artists, creators and so on with not only the oversaturation of the platform (or what’s close to it), but also by a platform about to punish said artists and creators and whatnot for attempting to drive away the attention from Bluesky itself into their little corners of the Internet.

If it does sound familiar, yes, it is close to being the same as X, formerly known as Twitter, and their algorithms. And yet, despite the fact that the Bluesky algorithm is not as draconian as Twitter (yet), it is still subject to the oversaturation of the same voices yelling in a cacophony of noise trying to gather attention and support for themselves. And even then, with Jay, the CEO of Bluesky, considering she’s looking at the option of advertising, we might soon see the face of a draconian algorithm, capable of just hurting creators by trying to get people addicted to the app without leading them out of the site, looming over Bluesky, the Twitter alternative. This was a glaring red flag that came after another, which was the fact that Bluesky was looking for an investment shareholder deal with a crypto-related investment firm.

Make no mistake: the same story will repeat itself over and over again while the people migrating to one site or another will think “this time, it will be different”. Meanwhile, we already see “alternative” (between very heavy quotations there) social media platforms rearing their heads like opportunistic vultures. It’s so tiresome. When will this end? What will guarantee at least one of these platforms not falling for the same pitfalls than the other social media giants like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube and so on? And what comes after Bluesky falls from grace? Will we migrate to another site, doing the exact same fucking thing expecting things to change?

Lessons are not learnt; the social media debacle heavily relies on the same techno-feudalism of yore, of a few, handful of tech-lords controlling where we host our little spaces or where we go. Even this site, jmaa.tv, has to be hosted within the claws of Squarespace. Someone had to ditch the idea of knowing HTML and coding a website for the conformity and comfort of a platform. And in exchange, these platforms will make us their slaves for algorithmic ad revenue Skinner Box machines capable of creating addictions on regular people, just so what? So a graph on the stock market goes up. So another tech billionaire can afford a private yet or a yacht.

Will we learn our lesson already? I’ll conclude this article leaving you to think, then: would you be able to prove these tech oligarchs wrong?