You know what’s great? Bluesky’s ‘Hide Post For Me’ feature.

When you tell people you’re on Bluesky, it connotes a certain je ne sais quoi of screeching, combative, bleeding-heart leftism with a side of fingers-in-ears “wokeness“. In the site’s brief existence, there have been an outsized number of thinkpieces from major media outlets about it about how it’s an echo chamber where those mean progressives on the left will bully you if you get someone’s pronouns wrong, or whatever.

There’s a small amount of merit to any critique, but I don’t have the time, energy, or need to specifically refute or address every crackpot bad-faith argument against this particular social media platform, so let’s stipulate for the purposes of this conversation that a lot of it is, to put it mildly, overblown.

I hopped on Bluesky as the latest chapter in my neverending search for “Twitter, but good.” Believe it or not, I had been yearning for something like this long before Whatsisface bought that site and renamed it in honor of his numerous divorces and/or illicit party drugs. I liked what I saw there mostly because the userbase was largely looking for the same things I was: a place to share dumb jokes and relatively agreeable perspectives with a minimum of harassment, death threats and sexbots.

I won’t stump too hard for Bluesky, except to say that it has a few features I really like, one of which is “Hide Post For Me.”

To back out a bit, I’m of the belief that your social media experience is, or should be, yours to curate. If you’re interested in algorithmic content, an all-knowing, all-seeing computer brain that anticipates what you might like and feeds you nothing-but until you drop of exhaustion, go ahead, there are plenty of sites doing just that. Me, I choose who I follow — a small, relatively manageable number — because I want to see what they have to say. If they deem something worth putting into my timeline via retweet/repost/reskeet (as posts on Bluesky are sometimes called), I’ll give it a glance. But in the event that something gets through that I find objectionable, or perturbing, or just too much to deal with in the moment I have the option to say “I don’t like this and I don’t want it in my face.” I can’t forget I saw it, but I can lock it away so that whatever comes next can bump it off my radar and let me go on with my day.

I don’t know of a similar feature at another site that works as well. I know that you can click “I don’t want to see this” on a Facebook post over and over again and you will still be served the same trash. I know that people get trapped in some bizarre feedback loop of TikTok videos because viewing a fraction of a second of something seems to constitute interest and engagement. My wife has had periods where she has had to detox from Instagram because certain topics she is known to be interested in where too emotionally trying but she didn’t know when she would encounter them, and yet scrolling IG represents a huge proportion of her recreational screen time.

When you disappear something on Bluesky, it stays gone. This scalpel of a feature allows me to nope out of specific moments without muting or blocking entire accounts, which might otherwise have something to say you want to hear. Mind you, it’s not un-doable — why would it be? — so I exercise caution before I banish a post to the void. That said, I just did it ten seconds before writing this post, when I saw something about Generative AI that I simply did not want to think about.

Personally, I think this is healthier than openly engaging with something you find disagreeable. It’s a big world and you will experience a lot of sensory input over the course of a day, so why submit yourself to something you don’t want?

That bends us back to a topic I had said we were skipping — the criticism that Bluesky is an “echo chamber,” to which I say — 1) not any more than any other social media (perhaps less given lefties’ way of squabbling with one another) and 2) if so, so what?

I didn’t grow up dreaming of being connected to the rage machine 24/7. I want to use — or not use — social media in a responsible, healthy way, that keeps me informed and in contact with people I like. I think we’ve become too inured to constant, unfiltered discourse, and the curious insistence that you need to make room in your life for people who hate you. Why should social media be anything more than a like-minded group of people sharing dumb jokes and mundane observations in a closed circle? Where did we get this idea that everyone, every wretched, rotten, vile person on the planet, was entitled to a piece of your psyche? What ever happened to the schoolyard taunt that “This is an A-and-B conversation, so C-yourself out”?

I’m a big advocate for taking the reins of your social media experience and blocking or muting freely. Hell, I mute people I like just because they post too much and then go check out their feed later independently. I promise you won’t feel like you’re missing anything but opting to miss posts you weren’t enjoying. In 2025, people are, if anything, over-informed about the horrors of the world, things we should be concerned about from time to time but have precious little capacity to fix for the most part. Our bodies and brains actually can’t handle this overload, so it is a kindness to ingest less of it any way you can.

Yes, there are bad things going on in the world and there are perspectives we disagree with. We used to have newspapers and media outlets that had accountability, editing and filters, that we could trust to present these in a non hateful, non-damaging way. Somehow we ceded that responsibility to the worst, most id-driven folks out there, the loudest and angriest. Give them no space in your life and one day they may shrink into nothingness, and you’ll be a smidge happier.

Scotto isn’t employed! That was his choice and he fully understands if you would rather put your money elsewhere. But if you like what you see, consider leaving some money in the tip jar at Ko-Fi.