Like the conflicted cowboy in secret mountainJournalists, pundits, and people who avoid MAGA merchandise looked at the service formerly known as Twitter and lamented, “I don’t know how to leave you.” Even before Elon Musk came to power, toxicity was rampant and Musk’s selectively implemented “free speech” principles made things worse. The ubiquitous, often low-quality ads promoting clickbait or a candidate you would never vote for further inflamed the experience. Yet X, as Musk so brutally renamed it, still seemed to be the only place with real scale and existing communities. For many of us, the switching costs seemed too high.
Until November 5th. Once Donald Trump won the election, a lot of people suddenly decided they should hang out on a network that didn’t promote the posts of the president-elect’s billionaire friend and other gloating triumphalists. Those people discovered there was an alternative: a two-year-old open source service, literally derived from Twitter, called blue sky. In just over a week, their number skyrocketed from 14 million to 20 million and was growing at a rate of one million a day.
Bluesky immediately became the most attractive landing site for the X-patriates. Even more than Meta’s Threads, which, because it relies on Instagram rolls, has 275 million users and claims to have acquired 15 million of them this month alone. However, one problem with Threads is that it consciously downplayed politics and real-time events, two pillars of short-form social networks. Additionally, in keeping with Meta’s feeding philosophy, Threads uses an algorithm that rewards clickbaity posts. At least that’s my experience: my own feed is strangely full of posts about strange personal encounters that entice me to click on the follows and make me feel like I’ve wasted my time. My solution is to spend less time on Threads.
With Bluesky, however, I was able to move forward quite quickly. (I joined early but remained inactive.) My feed is happily dominated by select people or groups I choose to follow. I often find them in user-generated “starter packs” that help X refugees grow their followers, now that they are rebuilding from the ground up. Bluesky also gives users superpowers to block trolls and bad actors. But my experience has been so pleasant that I haven’t had to block a single one.
When I spoke to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber this week, she was pleased with the new users. “It’s been a wild week,” he says. But he noted that this increase was one of several that have occurred in recent months. Bluesky, he says, is in this for the long haul. The idea is not to recreate classic Twitter, he says, but to remodel social networks according to the principle of openness and user control. Remember the cool way the Internet worked before those hairy companies became proprietary and evil? That’s Bluesky’s vision, a digital version of the hippie dream. Graber’s word cloud is full of things like radical transparency, and he gushes about AT protocolthe open source framework on which Bluesky is based. Without going into details on this, the bottom line is that by opening everything up, communities, rather than corporate control freaks, can shape Bluesky to enable delightful personalized experiences.
Take content moderation. To purge the service of illegalities and harassers, Bluesky has hired contractors to help the barely 20 people currently employed. But most food surveillance is expected to be crowdsourced: Because of Bluesky’s open design, committed outsiders can build systems to implement their own standards. Once this system flourishes, users will be able to choose the regimen that suits their comfort level.