Bluesky is ushering in a pick-your-own algorithm era of social media

Decades later, those people who spent hours on their USENET killfiles (despite the name, killfiles weren't just blocklists - fancier clients supported quite sophisticated scoring - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file) are finally getting their day in the sun.

(I don't necessarily disagree that this is the future, but it is quite funny that the "bring your own algorithm" approach was basically forgotten about for about 25 years, and then revived...)

I don't think it was forgotten, it was considered irrelevant by FB/Meta and TwX because they were more interested in collecting information about social graphs and demographics so they could sell ads and influence.

So they invented (copied) following/friending individuals, which was the opposite of USENET's newsgroup (topic) system and also (sadly...) a proxy for social status.

In reality there's always been huge interest in topic media. Reddit sort-of owned the space for non-real-time posting, and Twitter got some way there with lists for news and the breaking hashtags.

BlueSky feels somewhere between those - still short posts (bad...), more topic than social graph, but not so obsessed with clout chasing and status.