You’ll have to imagine for yourself the voluminous hair flip cascading in slow motion that accompanies the announcement that I too have finally received an invite code to Bluesky. Yes, reader, upon witnessing the media-tweeple chatter around the new Twitter-like, Jack Dorsey–backed social network crescendo into an envious roar last week, I fell victim once again to the sorcerous effects of the word exclusive and managed to jam myself through the closing jaws of the safe room sliding door, with roughly the same amount of elegance (but greater degree of success) than that billionaire lady in Beef and the enduring hope that this might be the place.

Just last month, I was waving frantically toward the direction of Substack Notes; this time next week, we might be back here discussing BeReal’s new RealPeople timeline. Not since the decline of the Romans, probably, has there been such a fin de siècle vibe to the discourse now that the reigning empires of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are falling, leaving the diaspora of the Heavily Online stranded and in search of the next central feed to be colonized. The contenders—Notes, Mastodon, Post.News, Discord—have yet to impress; who truly knows if Dorsey has retained any lessons from his Twitter era to make “skeets” actually happen. But one of these has gotta stick, right?

In the meantime, as we’re roaming among this burgeoning crop of demi-platforms, trying to figure out where the party is, and who’s already there, and whether the owner of the house will really let us play Five Finger Fillet on the table linens, I have since abandoned any personal conviction I once had about responding to this upheaval by simply logging off. One day, maybe. But in the meantime, while we find ourselves standing in line to test each new rickety carnival ride that probably won’t kill us this time, I invite all of us to treat each new shiny platform that comes along as a chance to reimagine the self. 

What I’m saying is this: When you too get on Bluesky (cue hair)—or wherever the new place to be amid the incoming years (months?) of strangeness to be had online before ChatGPT burns it all down for us—and you feel the urge to port over your old habits and shticks and links and general energy, resist. 

This is my proposal for us as a group: that we use the rare opportunity of digital tabula rasa that is having a new account on a new platform to simply post weird. Release your grip on your precious online brand. Savor this moment of communion with all the other locals in this oddly small New England town hall. Give us pet pics if you’ve never done so. Give us thirst traps if you’ve always hated them. Live-skeet your favorite bad rom-com. Offer annotated bullet points from your embarrassing dream journal. Adopt the persona of an old-timey British innkeeper. Or Jessica Chastain. Reach into the depths of your gorgeous, infinitely faceted interior world and give us a surprise; the place is already overrun with nudes, anyway. Think of it as the equivalent of your first day at a new school: Give yourself a new nickname, try on the goth boots. The whole point of enjoying a platform is figuring out what works and who gets you; here, on Bluesky, no one’s figured it out well enough to convert these interactions into fungible clout just yet. You could be anyone, as long as you’re not a total dick (figuratively speaking, apparently). 

My inner pessimist will remind you that everything on the web gets ruined eventually, but the optimist would also like to posit that the only interesting things that have ever happened online came out of people trying silly things. (It’s at least a unifying theory of TikTok.) I would also like to think of the splitting of ourselves into micro-personas, each adapted to the distinct biome of the various platforms, as a form of defiance to an inevitable future designed to harvest our human consistency. One day, an Everything App will sand down our personhood into a discrete knot of data that collates all of our social connections and shopping habits and content consumption and demographic markers and employment records and search queries and geolocations and thoughts and tastes and secrets and desires and personal history forever—and we’ll let it do so, in exchange for a frictionless dream life where we can, like, order sneakers and watch a personalized A24 trailer on the same app. How spooky, but also how totally boring that day will be. 

In the interim, a place like Bluesky is a chance to get weird and banal and off-brand, and it’s the only way we’re going to have any fun until X app takes over. AOC is here posting makeup tips. Jake Tapper is weighing in on bagel flavors. The newspaper that broke Watergate is literally honking like a goose. Be brave. Be cringe. Be free. Online, as in real life, we might as well enjoy the moment.