I've had to look at bluesky a lot recently
When the Skin Deep demo came out, I had to look at Bluesky to see how people were reacting to it. It's been fun to see people enjoying it, but the experience reminded me very sharply of why I quit using microblogging services in the first place.
I won't rant about the specifics here, because I am so sure you have seen the same critiques on other blogs and possibly even on Bluesky or twitter itself. But the experience was enough to reaffirm my decision to cease regularly using these services or posting on them.
Current crises, both national and global, are completely emotionally draining. It is immensely terrifying to have so much exposure to news about harm, and so little agency to do anything to protect myself or my friends. But it's even more difficult to stick your head into the soulscream funnel and also suck down an absolutely endless, on-demand torrent of stress and despair that other people are experiencing about these same things. I do not find that it teaches me anything about these events or even about my own emotional reaction to them. I and my friends already share quite a lot of news and despair about these things with one another. I am not sure that chugging the whole glass of misery here is really teaching me anything that I didn't already learn when I experienced these emotions myself, or saw my closer friends experiencing them.
I think that after Skin Deep ships I will find it easy to stop looking at these services. It's the format that's the problem. If we were sharing these things with one another through a forum, the experience would be very different. The required active engagement with threads in a forum UI, the reverse-chronological thread list, the search features, and the pagination and so on are all very important parts of the formula. They give you more opportunities to disengage, or to read some contextualizing information, or to think.
Fundamentally, however, people don't have time to think. I've begun to wonder recently whether people would still use social media services in the way they do if they just had more leisure time. I've been thinking back to what it was like when I used twitter a lot, and I was filling interstitial moments with that behavior. My leisure time was shredded up into loads of tiny scraps, and that's how I was filling it.
But it goes both ways: since I stopped using those services, it feels like I have MORE leisure time. I don't, really, but I'm spending more time doing things that it's easier for me to disengage from. And being able to disengage from something is really quite relaxing. It's lovely to just be able to stop.