Like the conflicted cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, journalists, pundits and people who eschew MAGA merch have looked at the service formerly known as Twitter and lamented, “I don’t know how to quit you.” Even before Elon Musk took over, toxicity was running rampant, and Musk’s selectively implemented “free speech” principles made things worse. The ubiquitous ads—often low-quality ones promoting clickbait or a candidate you’d never vote for—further torched the experience. Yet X, as Musk so brutally renamed it, still appeared to be the only place with real scale and existing communities. For many of us, the switching costs seemed too high.
Until November 5. Once Donald Trump won the election, suddenly a lot of people decided that they should hang out on a network that didn’t boost the posts of the president-elect’s billionaire buddy and other gloating triumphalists. Those people discovered there was an alternative: a two-year old open-source service literally spun off from Twitter called Bluesky. In little more than a week, its numbers soared from 14 million to 20 million and were growing at a pace of a million a day.
Bluesky immediately became the most alluring landing place for X-patriates. Even more so than Meta’s Threads, which, because it draws from the Instagram rolls, has 275 million users and claims to have picked up 15 million of them this month alone. One problem with Threads, though, is that it has consciously minimized politics and real-time events, two pillars of short-form social media. Also, in keeping with the feed philosophy of Meta, Threads uses an algorithm that rewards clickbaity posts. At least that’s my experience—my own feed is weirdly populated with posts about strange personal encounters that lure me in to click on the follow-ups and leave me feeling like I’ve frittered my time away. My solution is to spend less time on Threads.
With Bluesky, however, I found myself able to ramp up pretty quickly. (I’d joined early but gone dormant.) My feed is happily dominated by people or selected groups I choose to follow. I often find them in user-generated “starter packs” that help X refugees boost their followers, now that they’re rebuilding from scratch. Bluesky also gives users superpowers to block trolls and malfeasants. But my experience has been so pleasant that I haven’t had to block a single one.
When I spoke this week to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, she was gratified by the new users. “It’s been a wild week,” she says. But she noted that this spike was one of several over the past few months. Bluesky, she says, is in it for the long haul. The idea is not to recreate classic Twitter, she says, but to reshape social media on the principle of openness and user control. Remember the cool way that the internet worked before those fluffy companies got all proprietary and evil? That’s the Bluesky vision, a digital version of the hippie dream. Graber’s word cloud is full of stuff like radical transparency, and she gushes about the AT Protocol, the open-source framework that Bluesky is built on. Without getting into the weeds on this, the bottom line is that by opening everything up, communities—instead of corporate control freaks—can shape Bluesky to allow for delightful customized experiences.
Take content moderation. To purge the service of illegalities and harassers, Bluesky has brought on contractors to assist the mere 20 or so people currently employed. But the bulk of the feed-policing is expected to be crowdsourced—because of Bluesky’s open design, committed outsiders can build systems to implement their own standards. Once this system flowers, users will be able to pick the regimen that suits their comfort level.