Like a conflicted cowboy Broker Mountainjournalists, pundits and people who eschew MAGA merchandise took to the site formerly known as Twitter and lamented, “I don’t know how to give up on you.” Even before Elon Musk took power, toxicity was rampant, and Musk’s selective implementation of “free speech” policies made the situation worse. The ubiquitous ads – often of low quality, promoting clickbait or a candidate you never voted for – added to the confusion. But X, as Musk brutally renamed it, still felt like the only place with real scale and existing communities. For many of us, the costs of switching seemed too high.
Until November 5. When Donald Trump won the election, suddenly many people decided they should spend their time on a network that didn’t promote the posts of the president-elect’s fellow billionaire and other triumphant winners. These people discovered that there was an alternative: a two-year-old open source service, literally spun off from Twitter, called Blue. In just over a week, its number increased from 14 million to 20 million and was growing at a rate of one million per day.
Bluesky immediately became the most appealing landing spot for the X-Patriots. Even more so than Meta’s Threads, which draws from Instagram reels, has 275 million users and claims to have acquired 15 million of them this month alone. The problem with Threads, however, is that it does so consciously minimized politics and real-time events, two pillars of short-form social media. Moreover, in line with the Meta philosophy, Threads uses an algorithm that rewards posts that encourage clicks. At least that’s been my experience – my feed is strangely filled with posts about strange personal encounters that encourage me to click through to more posts and make me feel like I’ve wasted my time. My solution is to spend less time on threads.
However, with Bluesky I managed to pick up the pace quite quickly. (I joined earlier, but went 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 facilitate Refugees X grow their following now that they’re building from scratch. Bluesky also gives users superpowers to block trolls and thieves. But my experience was so pleasant that I didn’t have to block a single one.
When I spoke to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber this week, she was pleased with the up-to-date users. “It was a crazy week,” he says. However, she noted that this spike was one of several that have occurred over the past few months. Bluesky, he says, is in this for the long haul. He says the idea is not to recreate classic Twitter, but to transform social media based on the principle of openness and user control. Remember the chilly way the Internet worked before these fluffy companies became proprietary 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 revels in it AT protocolthe open source platform on which Bluesky is built. Without going into too much detail, the bottom line is that by opening everything up, communities – not corporate control freaks – can shape Bluesky to deliver great, personalized experiences.
Take content moderation. To rid its services of illegalities and harassers, Bluesky has hired contractors who will assist only about 20 people currently employed. However, most feed control activities are expected to be crowdsourced – thanks to Bluesky’s open project, external stakeholders can build systems to implement their own standards. Once the system is operational, users will be able to select a program that suits their comfort level.