Like the conflicted cowboy in Brakback MountainJournalists, pundits and those who avoid MAGA merchandise have looked to the service formerly known as Twitter and lamented, “I don't know how to leave you.” Even before Elon Musk took over, toxicity was rampant, and Musk's selectively implemented principles of “free speech” only made matters worse. The ubiquitous ads—often low-quality ads promoting clickbait or a candidate you would never vote for—further inflamed the experience. Yet X, as Musk so boldly put 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 5. Once Donald Trump won the election, many people suddenly decided that they needed to join a network that did not promote the posts of the president-elect's billionaire friend and other triumphalists. Those people discovered there was an alternative: a two-year-old open source service, literally derived from Twitter, called Bluesky. In just over a week the number rose from 14 million to 20 million and was growing at a rate of a million per day.
Bluesky immediately became the most attractive landing spot for X-patriates. Even more than Meta's Threads, which, because it draws from Instagram's files, has 275 million users and claims to have picked up 15 million of them this month alone. One problem with Threads, however, is that it has deliberately minimized politics and real-time events, two pillars of short-form social media. In keeping with Meta's feed philosophy, Threads also uses an algorithm that rewards clickbaity posts. At least that's been my experience: my own feed is strangely filled with posts about strange personal encounters that entice me to click the follow-ups and make me feel like I've wasted my time. My solution is to spend less time on Threads.
However, with Bluesky I found that I was able to move up quite quickly. (I joined early, but was inactive.) My feed is thankfully dominated by people or select groups I follow. I often find them in user-generated “starter packs” that allow X refugees to boost their following as they rebuild from scratch. Bluesky also gives users superpowers to block trolls and evildoers. But my experience was so pleasant that I didn't have to block any.
When I spoke with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber this week, she was happy with the new users. “It was a wild week,” she says. But she noted that this spike was one of many in recent months. Bluesky, she says, is in it for the long haul. The idea is not to recreate classic Twitter, she says, but to reimagine social media based on the principle of openness and user control. Remember how cool the internet used to be before those fluffy companies got all proprietary and evil? That is the Bluesky vision, a digital version of the hippie dream. Graber's word cloud is full of things like radical transparency, and she's excited about the AT Protocol, the open source framework on which Bluesky is built. Without going into detail here, the bottom line is that by opening everything up, communities (rather than corporate control freaks) can shape Bluesky to enable delightful, customized experiences.
Take content moderation. To purge the service of illegalities and intimidation, Bluesky has hired contractors to help the approximately twenty people currently employed. But most of the monitoring of food supplies is expected to be crowdsourced. Bluesky's open design allows dedicated outsiders to build systems to implement their own standards. Once this system comes to fruition, users can choose the regimen that suits their comfort level.
