[Certhas]

I wonder how much this translates to places outside the US... Bluesky being the place for everything Center-left and left of it by US standards would just make it the place for mainstream opinion in much of the EU.

Personally I found it much easier to avoid politics on Bluesky than on other platforms. Which is why it's been more sticky for me than Twitter was. And I put that down to having good feed control, and not being beholden to an algorithm that tries to keep me engaged.

[Karrot_Kream]

It doesn't. I don't really believe this meme of the center-left and left in the US being the mainstream in the EU. It's true that certain attitudes around labor and economics are shared between the American left and more center left and center EU parties, but our stances on social issues are completely different. There's an entire fabric of multiculturalism that's present in the US that just isn't in the EU that has a very different lens. For example, the US just doesn't have anything resembling an EU-style Christian Democratic party from a social values perspective at all.

Bluesky is mostly about day-to-day American politics, which means talking about how a court ruling is bad, how Trump did something stupid, or how the current admin is corrupt. The complaint I've read from most EU folks is how American day-to-day politics takes up way too much of the site.

I was unable to turn off politics without pretty much completely nuking my feed. I tried using mute words but that ended up just turning off most of my timeline. I build a US Politics labeler that worked pretty well, but ended up in a similar effect. Content outside of the politics on the network just isn't very interesting. Pretty much none of my hobbies are well represented there except some photography, and the photography is mostly about sharing pictures (which is definitely cool) rather than talking about shooting weddings or events or street the way it tends to shake up in other photography communities.

[Certhas]

I mostly agree with you that the political landscapes are mostly extremely different, rather than just shifted. Incidentally, when I tried Twitter (pre take over) it was more the US centric activist left that drove me away.

(Edit: That said, in the previous comment I was primarily thinking about the fact that the Republican party now explicitly supports far right and populist parties in Europe that are firmly outside the mainstream.)

That said, it sounds like your problem is more that other stuff isn't there? I am an academic, I followed interesting people in my field, and I am mostly on the feed that just shows me stuff from people I follow (plus a few curated feeds). So I didn't try to actively block stuff, and I have enough content to spend ten minutes every other day on the site and find new and interesting things. So maybe it's the combination of the niche I am after and the fact that I don't want to spend too much time on social media anyway that makes bsky a good experience for me...

[Karrot_Kream]

Ah yeah if you're an academic it makes sense presuming your niche is there. I'm looking for a more general hobby site and sadly Twitter and Reddit are still that to me.