All I Am Saying Is Give Bluesky a Chance

Twitter refugees can be so crotchety these days!

Photo by Vish Vardan on Unsplash

For those readers unfamiliar with Bluesky, it was one of the Twitter alternatives that popped up over the past few years.¹ Starting out as invite only, anyone can now create an account. I have been on Bluesky for at least 18 months now; over time it has become my go-to social media place.

As it has attracted more users, a story genre has also emerged: the “I tried Bluesky and here’s why I don’t like it as much as I liked Twitter a decade ago” take. Two months ago the Financial Times’ Jemima Kelly wrote her version of this piece. In response, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World wrote about whether Bluesky was an echo chamber or not, concluding, “I agree with Kelly; compared to Twitter That Was, Bluesky is more politically homogenous and more progressive. And, of course, that is the one observation guaranteed to nettle users of the site. Getting outraged about that empirical observation, however, overlooks Kelly’s other observation. Because while Bluesky is far from perfect, it is much less toxic than many other social media sites. That ain’t nothing — especially compared to Musk’s demented version of Twitter.”

When I wrote those words Bluesky had 10 million users. It now has more than 20 million users. Since the U.S. presidential election, there has been an exodus of users away from Twitter and onto Bluesky. The surge has been so dramatic that Bluesky has now overtaken Threads in terms of active users.

But — you knew there would be “but” — the aforementioned genre of “I dunno about Bluesky takes” has also mushroomed. Ten days ago the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle tried out the site and tweeted her take:

1) I am possibly the most conservative person on the site, and I voted for Harris.

2) Group dynamics make it hard to voice dissent. (I got blocked by someone for noting that in 2019, just under 3,000 females were victims of homicide, which means the overwhelming majority of women are, thankfully, at low risk of being killed by a man in their life.)

3) Founder effects mean this dynamic will be hard to change. The libertarians I see there mostly seem to be posting on issues where they agree with progressives, not ones where they disagree. Progressives who point out that, say, it's actually really hard to denaturalize a citizen and this is probably not a big risk, even under Trump, are getting dragged.

4) I'm not sure there's Twitter-level demand for a conversation that is restricted to agreeing with the leftmost 7% of the electorate.

This week it was Phoebe Maltz-Bovy’s turn to take the wheel. In a Toronto Globe & Mail op-ed entitled, “The problem with Bluesky: It won’t broaden our horizons,” she argued, “the flight to Bluesky is a concern, not because X is the superior platform, but because at a moment when persuasion and communication are vital, Mr. Trump’s loudest and most influential critics are building an echo chamber…. what’s missing from Bluesky isn’t merely Nazis, but the center-left, the unclassifiable, and all snark unaccompanied by righteous political aims. It has no irreverent humor, no bite. Political uniformity breeds humorlessness.”

Maybe I have a different definition of snark than Maltz-Bovy, but that it where I will vigorously dissent. Bluesky has plenty of snark.

Perhaps the best recent proof of this was Matt Gaetz’s announcement that he was withdrawing from consideration as Attorney General to spend more time with his family after details emerged about multiple incidents of Gaetz committing statutory rape.

That kind of big news announcement is exactly the moment to gauge how snarky a social media site can be. And in my Bluesky feed at least, there was some primo snark:

• Randal Hendrickson: “Alarmingly, Gaetz withdraws to pursue his interests.”

• Amy Ash: “Gaetz not ready for the major league, returns to minors.”

• The Lincoln Project: “Matt Gaetz is already doing the hard work removing criminal sex offenders from Trump's cabinet.”

• Sam Stein: “The thing was, this AG nomination process wasn't particular old, even by Gaetz's standards.”

• Jacob T. Levy: “Attorney General Aileen Cannon: tan, rested, and ready.”

I mean, come on, that’s some quality snark.

As for the larger claim about an echo chamber, now would ordinarily be the moment when the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World would feel compelled to respond at length to McArdle or Maltz-Bovy. But in this case it’s unnecessary. Whatever truth-value either of their observations possessed has been overtaken by events. Folks have already voted with their feet — or their smartphones, you get the idea — and are sufficiently populating Bluesky with enough heterogeneous voices to falsify some of these claims.

Maltz-Bovy, to her credit, acknowledged this point in a follow-up post on her Substack: “The platform itself became somewhat less of an echo chamber—yes, in a matter of days—as a bunch of the ‘problematics’ and normies or whatever you want to call it started trickling in.”

Of course, the site remains imperfect. Both McArdle and Maltz-Bovy got dogpiled for their takes on Bluesky. Even if one thinks they were wrong, said dogpiling is an unpleasant reminder that all social media sites are equally shitty when enough users decide to nominate someone to be the Main Character of the Day.²

Is Bluesky now as good as Twitter was a decade ago? No, but it’s vastly superior to the ad-infested, Elon-infested site that is now X. And the site has populated itself enough to approximate the kind of vitality that Twitter’s old chronological feed, as Aaron Ross Powell explained:

Old social networks, such as Twitter in its heyday, were built around vitality. If something got popular, the algorithm made it more popular. Chronological feeds produce a similar result, because the way you see things from outside of your following network is when the people you follow repost (or retweet) it. The more a post is seen, the more likely it is to be reposted, and the more likely other people are to see it. Bluesky works in a similar way.

In practice this means that, while there are niche communities on the platform, the experience of using it feels more like being a part of one big community. This is how, for example, Twitter was able to be a driver of the broader culture, while not being huge itself in terms of active user numbers. What was happening on Twitter, everyone on Twitter was talking about. And many of the people most active there were influential outside of Twitter.

More interestingly, the New York Times’ Kevin Roose may have pioneered a new Bluesky genre that highlights the place’s new heterogeneity rather than its past homogeneity:

I think people who are nostalgic for the old Twitter should give Bluesky a shot, with a few caveats…..

I must warn you that Bluesky is weird. It’s getting less weird by the day, but it’s still full of drama, inside jokes, not-safe-for-work images and quirky subcommunities, all of which can be jarring for newcomers. (To give you a sense: One of the early trends on Bluesky was users posting lewd images of ALF, the 1980s sitcom character.)….

The people who are getting the most out of Bluesky — or, at least, the people whose posts I’m enjoying the most — aren’t the people who simply brought their existing social media presences over from other networks and continued posting. They’re the people who are using Bluesky as a chance to reinvent themselves and spurn bad habits, squash old beefs, try out a new posting style, let loose a little.

I have no plans at this point to delete my Twitter account, and there are still some accounts I follow there that remain of some use-value. Increasingly, however, Bluesky seems populated by enough interesting and informative accounts that my need to check out other social media feeds has ebbed. Hopefully that trendline will continue.

1. Ironically, back when Jack Dorsey was running Twitter, he helped midwife Bluesky. Dorsey is no longer affiliated with either social media site anymore and I’m already bored writing about that part of this story.

2. I’ve incurred some wrath on Bluesky about once a quarter — but that’s okay! It’s useful to know who the worst people are on any piece of social media, and Bluesky’s nuclear block function means I never have to care about them ever again.