Here’s a few notes about my on-going journey with social networks.

The benefits of social media serives never outweighed the costs for me, so I’ve never had a Insta, Snap, or whatever the site-of-the-day is. I signed up for a Facebook account back in the early, early days, but within a few days I knew it just a harvesting tool and deleted my account.

I also never had an account on Twitter, even before the takeover and name change. I’d occassionally get sent to a Twitter post after a generic search, but never saw the value of having an account. It drove home that old saying: “If a corporation provides a free service, you are the product”. And the shift to X was a crap-show from the beginning, and only gets worse day-to-day.

When Mastodon became a thing, I signed up to see if it was going to be useful. I popped in and out over a few months, but never became what you’d call “active”.

When Bluesky followed, I signed up there too. The user base seemed more to my liking, so I’ve stuck around since. Again, rare posts, occassional comments, but mostly just lurking a few times a week to see what’s what.

When Bluesky was updated to allow domain-based user names for authentication, I moved my bsky.app account over to my primary personal domain, and have been using that for a while now.

With the recent turmoil in the U.S. there’s been increased interest in setting up an AT server outside the U.S.’s control. Since I’m now based in Ireland, I registered my interest in Eurosky, an EU-based AT/Bluesky server that was in in alpha at the time.

Last week, I got an email saying they were almost ready and wanted confirmation of my interest, which I sent in right way. Yesterday, I got the formal invite code, and registered for a new Bsky account on their service.

As with the main Bluesky server, you can also choose a domain-based user name on Eurosky. I have a couple of EU-based domains - on .ie and one .eu - so I registered my .ie domain as my new Eurosky user name. The process of setting up domain authentication is straightforward, and notably secure.

Domain authenticated usernames give your account the non-bot legitimacy that other humans like to see.

I added Bluesky to my pinned tab group on Helium, and plan to visit most days.