The Four Kinds of Bluesky Users (and Which One I Turned Out to Be)
Scarf report: the mustard one. It doesn’t match anything I own, and I find that comforting.
You’ve probably seen it by now. Someone on Bluesky posted that there are four kinds of users on the site, and a day later the replies had turned into a casting call. People started illustrating the four types with every foursome they could think of. Which Golden Girl is your timeline? Which Power Ranger? Which witch? My feed turned into a long scroll of cartoon turtles, sitcom roommates, and a coven in matching black, each one lined up and labeled like a family photo.
I laughed at a lot of them. I also felt a tiny pinch I couldn’t name, like a sweater tag at the back of my neck.
This morning at the café, a girl at the next table turned her phone toward her friend. “Okay, which one are you?” Her friend didn’t even look. “The bossy one. Next question.” They both seemed so pleased, like someone who just found their coat in the pile at a party.
So I sat with my latte and my pinch and tried to work out what it was.
Is it the sorting that bothers me?
That was my first guess. I’m not sure it holds up, though, because I sort things constantly. My scarves are sorted by season. My mugs are sorted by mood. I make lists on the backs of receipts. If sorting were the problem, I’d be the problem.
Then is it sorting people?
Maybe. But people have been doing it for a very long time. Around 400 BC, Greek physicians divided human nature into four temperaments: sanguine for the cheerful, social one, choleric for the fiery one in charge, melancholic for the deep thinker, and phlegmatic for the calm, steady one. Hold that up to any four-person cast on your feed and it fits almost too well. We’ve been drawing the same four-square chart for a couple thousand years and swapping in new faces.
I have a guess about why. For a long stretch of history, people lived in small bands where you knew each face for life. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar put the number of stable relationships a person can keep up at around 150, and the group you shared a fire with was smaller than that. A little crew like that runs better when someone steers, someone figures things out, someone takes the chances, and someone keeps the peace. Maybe a cast of four is a pocket-sized model of the village, and the stories keep handing it back to us so we can find our seat.
So sorting people isn’t new, and it may even be what helped us get through the winter. That can’t be what’s pinching.
Is it that the labels are so thin?
That one scratched a little closer. In the early 1970s, the psychologist Henri Tajfel told a group of teenage boys they’d been split up by which of two painters they preferred. The split was really random. The boys still favored their own side when handing out rewards, and some even chose to widen the gap over the other group when it cost their own side something. A label that thin was enough to make a team.
But the four-kinds memes aren’t thin. When someone answers your old sitcom with the exact right character name, the two of you just recognized each other. That’s a secret handshake. A long time ago, people marked belonging with a way of talking or a pattern woven into cloth. Now it’s a show you both stayed up too late watching. It’s pretty sweet, actually.
Then what’s the pinch?
I kept asking, and the answer I got was smaller than I expected. Four seats is a lovely number for a story and a tight fit for a person. I know people who are the wild one at a wedding and the steady one at a funeral, and the leader at work and the sweetheart at home. When I watch someone pick their one square, I worry a little about the parts of them that are still standing out in the hallway.
And I worry about the folks who looked at all four and didn’t see themselves anywhere. I want there to be a chair for them too.
Which one does that make me?
That’s where my questions turned back around on me.
Who frets over whether the whole group feels included? Who wants everyone to have a seat? Who worries about the one standing out in the hallway, and then writes a long, gentle post about it with a latte at her elbow?
I scrolled back through the grids. She’s there in nearly each one: the soft one, the sweetheart, the one who keeps the peace and gets a little teary about it. My complaint about the boxes turned out to be the most in-character thing about me. The sorting found me while I was busy worrying about everyone else getting sorted.
The grid won, and I can live with that. It put me in the warm seat.
So claim your square if it feels good, and wear it like a scarf: something you pick because it’s warm and suits the day, and take off when you come inside. Leave room at the table. Somebody’s always a little late.
Small joys are big deals. So is having a seat saved for you.
— Heather
