Like a controversial cowboy Brokeback MountainJournalists, pundits and people who shun MAGA merchandise looked at the service formerly known as Twitter and cried, “I don’t know how to stop.” Even before Elon Musk took over, toxicity was rampant, and Musk’s “free speech” policies made things worse. Ubiquitous ads—often low-quality ones promoting clickbait or a candidate you won’t vote for—have fueled this practice. Yet X, as Musk has brutally renamed it, still seems to be the only place with real scale and existing communities. For many of us, the cost of switching seemed too high.
Until November 5. When Donald Trump won the election, suddenly many people decided that they should stay on the network that did not increase the posts of the friend of the president-elect and others who won. Those people discovered there was an alternative: a two-year-old open source service spun out of Twitter called Bluesky. In just over a week, its numbers increased from 14 million to 20 million and were growing at the rate of a million a day.
Bluesky soon became a very attractive destination for the X-patriots. Even more than Meta’s Threads, which, because it originates from Instagram rolls, has 275 million users and claims to have taken 15 million of them this month alone. One problem with Threads, however, is that it has limited politics and real-time events, two mainstays of short-lived social media. Also, in keeping with the Meta feed philosophy, Threads uses an algorithm that rewards posts for clicks. At least that’s my experience—my personal feed is ridiculously full of posts about rare personal encounters that entice me to click next and leave me feeling like I’ve wasted my time. My solution is to spend less time on Threads.
However, with Bluesky, I found myself able to climb quickly. (I joined early but fell asleep.) My feed is happily dominated by the people or groups I choose to follow. I often find them in user-generated “packs” that help X refugees grow their followers, as they begin to rebuild. Bluesky also gives users great power to block trolls and malfeasants. But my experience has been so good that I haven’t had to block a single one.
When I spoke this week to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, he was satisfied with the new users. He says: “It’s been a wild week. But he noted that this spike is one of several in the past few months. Bluesky, he says, is in it for the long haul. The idea isn’t to recreate the old Twitter, he says, but to reshape the social network with the goal of openness and user control. Remember how cool the internet used to be before those soft companies got all proprietary and evil? That’s the idea of Bluesky, the digital version of the hippie dream. Graber’s word cloud is full of things like high resolution, and he talks about the AT Protocol, the open source framework that Bluesky is built on. Without getting into the weeds on this, the important thing is that by opening everything up, communities—instead of corporate control freaks—can shape Bluesky to allow for a fun, customized experience.
Take a measure of content. To rid the service of illegals and abusers, Bluesky brought in contractors to help the 20 or so people it currently employs. But many of the feed polices are expected to be discovered by the masses—thanks to Bluesky’s open design, dedicated outsiders can build systems to implement their standards. Once this system is developed, users will be able to choose the type of medication that suits their comfort level.
