2025-10-22

I've been daily driving a clamshell Razr smartphone for about six months now. My takeaway is I'd like Apple to throw the small form factor a bone when they inevitably do a foldable. While Android's granularity in theory should be better for sifting out the crap, in practice I can't seem to figure out why some notifications only pop in when I pick up my phone despite combing every battery setting. Still, it's cool to slam your phone shut after taking one phone call every 1-2 months and to peck at 2FA notifications from an external screen. Recently I discovered slamming your laptop closed during a Teams meeting accomplishes the same thing, so I won't have reason to miss it too much.

Jockeying user statistics is not something that should preoccupy most people, nor do I suggest that it is a useful reason to throw yourself overboard. Cohost's failures extended far beyond the troubling user statistics in its monthly reports. The reason Bluesky becomes interesting to examine is that these stats are public in a way that has never been available for large platforms or other platforms targeting mass. There is an ongoing macro trend of DAUs and each component stat decaying about 5% every four weeks. Those measures have held in the post-election bump. One Financial Times analysis suggests we've crested over peak social media altogether, with the majority of its degrowth being led by those 16-24. There are two distortions to notice in this trend: there is still growth left to be squeezed from those 55+, and total hours scrolling are still going up in North America compared to elsewhere. Major events that do return some growth to Bluesky, such as Toilet Paper USA and the No Kings protests, don't appear to counteract its long tail. Bluesky, already observably older and even more anglo than other platforms, should find trouble in being against this staistical grain now that it is closing in on another year of struggling to monetize as a PBC. Xitter has enough money to ride out its intertia forever. Bluesky is, fortunately, not afforded such torture.

Harry Schwartz, Bluesky's partnerships lead, recently suggested equivalent sports posts made to Bluesky and Xitter achieve 10x more engagement on Bluesky. Besides my trouble with the claim, which may be true even to my understanding in the serendipity of socials, can this measure capture the obvious absence of non-American sports, such as cricket and footie football? Even the glut of baseball and gridiron football is hardly enough to consider them fully shored up either. Harry's claim that "real people" are driving this engagement feels specious to me, when Bluesky is equally swarming with bots and KiwiFarms users that still think raids of a 2008 vintage are amusing.

On Xitter you can get twelve kajillion likes by posting an old promo flyer for HSP Miku, with quote posts asking if that's a green Takopi. I think this actually rules, in a "one man's junk found digging in a trash heap" sort of way.

There's some grumbling about the new Cinderella Gray OP being ass. My exception isn't so much the dad rock, which is admittedly already growing on me three episodes in, but that it seems to barely feature the international racers at all. It's also the least pressing Uma Mususme music concern because we're all still wondering where the Kenji Kawai soundtrack is. Getting to hear that every week is reason enough to make it appointment viewing.

LiveJournal was never my haunt, but as long as I'm writing a diary here (more of a public thought dump, isn't it), it makes sense to include a few mood rings. I've added a few sections now for things I'm skimming over mindlessly, listening to as background music, or watching over lunch. It was worth doing for the pretty colors.