Like the conflict ones cowboy in Brokeback MountainJournalists, pundits, and people who shun MAGA merchandise looked at the service formerly known as Twitter and lamented, “I don’t know how to leave you.” Even before Elon Musk took over, the toxicity was rampant and Musk’s selectively applied principles for “freedom of speech” they made things worse. Ubiquitous ads—often low-quality, promoting clickbait or a candidate you’d never vote for—further fueled the experience. Yet X, as Musk so brutally renamed it, still seemed the only place with real scale and existing communities. For many of us, the switching costs seemed too high.
Until November 5. After Donald Trump won the election, suddenly a lot of people decided they needed to hang out on a network that didn’t promote the president-elect’s billionaire friend and other gloating triumphalists. Those folks discovered there was an alternative: a two-year-old open source service literally spun off from Twitter called Bluesky. In just over a week, his number jumped from 14 million to 20 million and was growing at a rate of a million a day.
Bluesky instantly became the most attractive place for the X-patriots to land. Even more than Meta’s Threads, which, as it draws from Instagram’s roster, has 275 million users and claims to have amassed 15 million of them this month alone. One problem with Threads, however, is that it deliberately minimizes politics and real-time events, two pillars of short social media. Additionally, in keeping with Meta’s powering philosophy, Threads uses an algorithm that rewards clickbait posts. At least that’s my experience – my own feed is strangely overrun with posts about weird in-person encounters that lure me into clicking follow-ups and leave me feeling like I’ve wasted my time. My solution is to spend less time on Threads.
With Bluesky, however, I found that I was able to develop quite quickly. (I had joined early but was dormant.) My feed is happily dominated by people or select groups that I choose to follow. I often find them in user-generated “starter packs” that help X refugees grow their following now that they’re rebuilding from scratch. Bluesky also gives users superpowers to block trolls and abuse. But my experience was so pleasant that I didn’t have to block any.
When I spoke this week with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, she was happy with the new users. “It’s been a wild week,” she says. But she noted that this spike was one of several in the past few months. Bluesky, she says, is in it for the long haul. The idea isn’t to recreate classic Twitter, she says, but to reshape social media around openness and user control. Remember the great way the internet used to work before those fluffy companies got private and evil? This is Bluesky’s vision, a digital version of the hippie dream. Graber’s word cloud is full of things like radical transparency, and she gushes about the AT protocol, the open source framework on which Bluesky is built. Without getting into the weeds on this, the bottom line is that by opening everything up, communities—rather than corporate control freaks—can shape Bluesky to enable delightfully personalized experiences.
Get content moderated. To clean up the service from illegal activities and abusers, Bluesky has hired contractors to help the roughly 20 people currently working. But most of the power control is expected to be crowdsourced – because of Bluesky’s open design, committed outsiders can build systems to enforce their own standards. Once this system blossoms, users will be able to choose the mode that suits their comfort level.
