i am hesitating to try to market myself and my newsletter on Bluesky. i know **how** to do it, i've done microblogging since 2008. but my experience is that the people who are good at that kind of thing mostly turn out to have some kind of untreated mental illness, and i'm not confident of the direction of the causality.
Apr 22, 2026, 12:45 PM@peter Just think of us here as your jesters whispering "memento mori".
@adriano it genuinely feels like an overly-large group chat, and i'm not that excited to "do battle," as it were, on Bluesky. i thought i would be up for it, but thinking about it just makes me tired.
@peter Nah you're good man, go for it! It's the same thing as running pub roll ("hey check out this thing if you want to, or not") and that didn't give you an untreated mental illenss*
*binge drinking with friends not included
@wvistheduck unfortunately, self-promotion on Bluesky involves a lot more posting, replying, and QTing than just throwing up a link once in awhile.
@peter Oh if you mean you need to be an active user and build up a following then yeah, and that will take some time and effort you may not want to commit to, but it doesn't mean you need to be always promoting or "branding" yourself or whatever.
A few folks off the top of my head I think are good at this (i.e. active users just being themselves, throwing up links to their work once in a while, NOT developing a mental illness) are Michael Hobbes, Peter Shamshiri, Marisa Kabas
@wvistheduck no, I know how to make parasocial friends, I'm saying that's the crazy party. the people like Marisa Kabas who post all day long.
@peter Fine whatever, I think your newsletter is good and that it should be successful and I will unhesitatingly give you shit if you start turning into will stancil lol
@wvistheduck thank you, I promise not to stancilmaxxx
@peter years and years ago, I watched the dude who runs Popville go from random blogger to making a living from his blog and I was super jealous. Honestly, though, I think untreated mental illness tracks for that guy
