A lot (most?) of them speak excellent English! I was at BitSummit last year and did not find my lack of Japanese to be much of an issue at all.

Bluesky doesn't have that, so it's mostly just filled with small accounts following big accounts and big accounts ALSO following big accounts. Small account activity is effectively squashed, and I think the big accounts like it that way.

I didn't really use Instagram much, but those personal connections are just kind of baked into the ecosystem. Yes, people follow big accounts, but there are a lot more people who were already following small accounts, so more small account activity was surfaced to those users.

Have a vote for worldbuilding. It's the best.

Ya'll, I think that might have worked. My feed is now filled with what appear to be normal people who are almost entirely not people I've ever seen in the media.

I will report back later.

Definitely a side effect of WA not having income tax. Food is very expensive here, and I moved here from CA where food was definitely not what I'd call cheap.

You might be interested in pastmaps.com

I know my posts aren't being seen because I literally never see posts from people with fewer than 1000 followers unless it's a randomly surfaced "first Bluesky post," which frankly is never going to get me to follow someone.

All of the posts in my Discover feed are either from people with 1000+ followers or random people's first post on Bluesky.

I never see anything from people with 25-999 followers just talking about the stuff I care about.

It's all "influencers" and big accounts.

That's actually really cool, and super intuitive, too.

Show tunes are just songs from musicals your grandparents liked.

People who don't like musicals will say "I saw a musical once and I didn't like it," but they've seen plenty of bad movies and that didn't stop them from watching movies.

I finally picked it up from my local bookstore! Read the first chapter this morning. I paid... more than $1.99, but I regret nothing.