Smol bean

In the time (a matter of days, not weeks) between when I filed my recent Globe and Mail column about Bluesky and when it appeared this morning, a few things happened that are pertinent to the topic. They’re interrelated—all having to do with a spike in users, in one way or another—but I will look at them separately.

1. The “echo chamber” accusation became a much-mocked meme of sorts on the platform, with a mix of clever/clever-attempting jokes about echo chambers, and self-serious remarks about it not being an echo chamber if you don’t want to be surrounded by NAZIS.

This bodes well for my mentions.

2. The platform itself became somewhat less of an echo chamber—yes, in a matter of days—as a bunch of the ‘problematics’ and normies or whatever you want to call it started trickling in. People with different views or just different interests. People who might not be American and therefore less interested in US politics.

   That said: I know people—people who are by no stretch of the definition Nazis—who aren’t going on it for fear of dealing with that which others similar to themselves have dealt with. A couple writers far more prominent than myself went on and were greeted with a sea of nastiness, which they screenshotted to refute the ‘Bluesky is the nice platform’ claim. A couple more were (and presumably, are) being passed around in a spirit of ‘Look who’s on here now, look who thinks they get to be here, block away’. I’m hesitating over whether to say who these people are, but think Harper’s letter or Atlantic. Not remotely Nazi or far-right, I cannot emphasize enough. Do you have to like or follow them? No. But the idea that they merit a warning label is a bit much. And it’s fair game to point out that they do get such a label there, and what it says about the (changing, and inherently subjective) atmosphere.

   Anyway, in my capacities as nobody, my arrival (or, re-arrival, I’d tried once previously) was not greeted any which way. Well it’s sure being made up for now!

3. The US election stopped being the current thing—not stopped mattering, of course it matters, arguably matters more the closer we get to another Trump administration (I am a US-Canadian dual citizen) but stopped being the subtext of absolutely every post. When I’d initially asked (around the time of writing the piece) on Bluesky whether Bluesky was ever funny, some of the responses I got were along the lines of, people don’t want funny at a time like this. It’s no longer a time like this.

   Which in turn gets at the broadening-horizons thing, in the headline (which is I am well aware all that many are seeing; it’s a paywalled article, which is apparently the crime of the century) but also the piece itself. When I wrote it, the mood on Bluesky was very much, We are here to fight Trump and Trumpism. So I was addressing, well, that. I was asking whether a gathering of people who think Atlantic staffers are neo-Nazis is really all that useful, at a moment when the Republicans just got a lot of votes—not all from white men!!—from people who’ve had it with purity politics and hypersensitivity. It’s a question I think I was right to ask, but whose urgency isn’t what it was when Bluesky was so fixated on that topic.

   That said, I also objected to someone in the British gender-critical/’TERF’ sphere having all her posts flagged “intolerance” and hidden. I objected not because I know/like/follow this specific person (I’d never heard of her!) but because if I’m trying to explain what it’s like on the platform, I needed to get at how views that are pretty mainstream in the population at large are blanket-hidden in this way. This is an area where reasonable people disagree.

   Or maybe I just suck! A possibility I cannot help but consider, having received a non-stop barrage of it, still ongoing.

4. Similarly, the leaving-of-Twitter, leaving-of-X, is no longer the topic du jour. This means a lot of the thing I found most ugh (inadvertently funny but ugh), the ‘I’m a Twitter refugee’ rhetoric, receded A LOT, such that it seems borderline odd that I would be mentioning it today. But this is the difference between op-eds and blog posts. An op-ed does get edited—a good thing!—and runs according to a schedule (random musings on social media are not breaking news), and so doesn’t appear the moment I have the thought.

   It has started (or for me personally, given my main-character status, had started) getting more lighthearted. More… normal. Less… smol bean.

What is smol bean? When this topic came up, the first thing I told my editor was that I was trying to find a way to convey smol bean to a newspaper audience. It’s a certain stance, a way of presenting oneself as the tender, gentle, too-delicate-for-this-world party in interactions. The other people are the meanies. So if you’re bullying someone online, it isn’t bullying because it’s you who’s doing it and you are the smol bean. They are a fascist. Didn’t you see they liked a post by someone who liked a post by that other person who we all know is Bad?

Smol beans are humorless and self-serious. They have no conception of themselves as ever possibly being in the wrong on anything.

The atmosphere when I first used Bluesky post-election felt, more than anything, smol bean. The “refugee” thing, but not only. It’s getting better (again, for people who aren’t me), but that was how it seemed. And the smol beans are coming for me.