Bluesky is corporate and sucks but your experience doesn't have to
Bluesky seemed like a haven for many people. I was never a Twitter guy but I've been hearing a lot of shit about it and now they're finally pulling things that are making a lot of people leave, so buckle up!
Bluesky is actually the proof of concept for the AT (Atmosphere) protocol, shortened to ATProto from this point on. This means the things that power Bluesky are built in a way so that if other websites used them, they could interact. It's like how if you have gmail account, you can still send emails to somebody with a proton account, but for social media.
Why is this important?
Bluesky is not the only website that runs ATProto! You can move to another website that supports it. The only snag there is that there aren't many websites out there yet! But the number is non-zero.
Blacksky (https://blacksky.community/) is an ATProto based website focused on providing a safe space for black users, especially those coming from Bluesky.
Northsky (https://northskysocial.com/) is an upcoming ATProto based website focused on providing a safe space for queer users.
Wafrn (https://wafrn.net/) is a website that uses both ATProto and ActivityPub (the protocol that powers Mastodon, among many other services) and is aimed at Tumblr users. Since Wafrn uses both ATProto and ActivityPub, you can follow users from websites that use either!
If you're willing to do some clunky setup and don't want to be on an ATProto based platform anymore but still want to talk to your Bluesky (or Northsky, or Blacksky) friends, you can join an ActivityPub-based website and use Bridgy Fed (https://fed.brid.gy/) to bridge your account!
However, Bridgy Fed is a fully optional bridge. In order for you to interact with users on websites that use a protocol your website doesn't use, both you and that user have to be bridged. But setup is very simple! You just find your protocol's version of the bot and follow it, and you can unbridge at any time.
Unfortunately, since ActivityPub and ATProto are different protocols, direct migrations aren't possible. But migrations between websites based on the same protocols are. The people behind Bridgy Fed are working on a migration tool called Bounce (https://blog.anew.social/bounce-a-cross-protocol-migration-tool/) for ATProto to ActivityPub migrations but AFAIK it isn't out yet.
Many Fediverse instances allow a wide range of art! Plenty more of them are queer friendly or at least aren't gonna ban you for not liking particular political figures. There are plenty of lists out there, but here's one I reccomend if you're interested in diving into ActivityPub based websites: https://wiki.scumsuck.com/socialmedia:fediverse
If you're not interested in federated platforms, but still want somewhere to post (aside from Tumblr, anyway), I'd reccomend Pillowfort (https://pillowfort.social/). They've been around for several years, so they're not gonna go down at any moment, and they're entirely user funded—which means no advertisers breathing down their neck! Plenty of users on there claim that despite the small community, they get lots of interaction (though it does take a while to learn the ropes!).
Regardless of where you go, there are always better places. You just need to look. The web can only improve if we make an effort to stop giving shitty corporations our time, attention, and money.
