How Bluesky, Alternative to X and Facebook, Is Handling Explosive Growth

<blockquote><br /><strong><em>The fledgling social media site has been flooded with new users since the election. It hasn’t all been easy.</em></strong></b...

A faux "Eternal September" turns into flatness

Part 3 of Mastodon, two years later

Weekly Scroll: Eternal September

Plus: A little TPOT and a very good Christmas song

Remember Remember Eternal September

This has nothing to do with the weather

Was their any substantial backlash to the internet when it first started becoming popular? I can imagine that going from a comparatively disconnected world to one where instantaneous global connection 24/7 were commonplace was a rather massive (and not always positive) shift in many ways.

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It's September, Forever

The 'Eternal September' was a 1993 backlash against unwanted internet users. It never ended.

Eternal September | Know Your Meme

Eternal September is a slang term that refers to the time period of the Internet since September 1993, when Usenet saw its heaviest influx of newbies into

How Bluesky, Alternative to X and Facebook, Is Handling Explosive Growth (Published 2024)

The fledgling social media site has been flooded with new users since the election. It hasn’t all been easy.

Bluesky Can’t Take a Joke

Bluesky has been a safe haven for users fleeing X and Threads. But while there’s less hate, there’s also fewer lolz.

Mastodon's Eternal September

Figure 1: A ‘joke’ t-shirt made in 1994 commemorating Eternal September, taken from The Eternal September Wikipedia page The latest round of Twitter nonsense (changing the way “blocking” works) has caused another wave of people to abandon that site for pastures new. Nearly every one of them went to Bluesky instead of Mastodon. 1.2 Million people joined Bluesky in 48 hours. I wonder why that is? I bet there’s something about where people draw the line on Twitter’s behaviour and where they choose to go next. But I bet there’s something else to it too.

Two Takes on the Eternal September

September, and with it the start of classes at most educational institutions in the United States, is almost upon us. In honor of this, I’d like to look back this week on the September that started twenty-eight years ago in 1993 and is still continuing: Usenet’s Eternal September. Twenty-eight years in, I still don’t think we understand exactly what the implications of this change were, nor have we decided what direction Internet communities should turn in response. I don’t have all the answers either, but I’d like to suggest two useful ways of thinking about it.

The Eternal September Calendar

The September that never ended

Eternal September

Eternal September or the September that never ended was a cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users.&#91;1&#93;&#91;2&#93; Before this, the only sudden changes in the volume of new users of Usenet occurred each September, when cohorts of university students would gain access to it for the first time, in sync with the academic calendar.