Is Bluesky An Echo Chamber?

A few thoughts on the existence of social media thought silos.

Photo by Stephanie Klepacki on Unsplash

It has been about a year since I (mostly) left Xitter and stopped using it to promote my scribblings here at Drezner’s World and elsewhere.¹ Based on the birdsite’s continued degradation, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is feeling pretty vindicated in that decision! Of course that post also noted that I would, “mourn what Musk has done to a site that, while imperfect, generated considerable utility compared to the flaming garbage fire that it is now.”

A year later, my social media diet is more fragmented than the Twitter That Was. Despite everything, Xitter still remains useful for breaking news and for following reporters who still populate that site. As it turns out, path dependence is a powerful force. The immediate Twitter replacements of Mastodon and Post both proved to be duds for different reasons,² with Post going belly up earlier this year. Threads is marginally useful at best, since no matter how hard I try I have to rely on the site’s algorithm rather than my own feed.

As a result, my primary social media consumption is on Bluesky, which until recently was an invite-only site. Because of this it has a much smaller base than its competitors and therefore a far lower profile than Threads. It’s not quite as functional as Twitter That Was. The site has been improving itself in recent months, however, and continues to better itself.

Like social media in general, my utility from Bluesky comes from who else is there. Other academic refugees, particularly political scientists, migrated there from Twitter That Was. That make the site compelling for the likes of me. The presence of enough reporters and columnists to generate a decent conversation also generates significant value-added. The snark level certainly approaches the old birdsite.

After Twitter was banned in Brazil the number of Bluesky users surged to 10 million. This was enough to prompt the Financial Times’ Jemima Kelly to pen a column entitled, “With Bluesky, the social media echo chamber is back in vogue.” Needless to say, there has been something of a negative reaction to it on Bluesky. So let’s dive in!

The interesting thing about Kelly’s column is that it’s less about Bluesky and more about how Musk has successfully run Twitter into the ground: she opens by noting how, “repelled by the direction that both the site now called X and its owner have taken, an exodus from the platform is under way.” And then Kelly notes that Bluesky “has grown the most rapidly over the past six weeks, and that is cementing itself as the top choice for media types, policy wonks, academics and the broader chatterati.”

But — and you knew with her headline there would be a “but” — Kelly ran into a spot of trouble with her critique of the site:

That there is a new place for such people to congregate is all well and good, but the problem is that the chatterati — very nice and non-conspiracy-theorising and non-overtly-racist though they may be — tend to coalesce around some quite similar viewpoints, which makes for a rather echoey chamber. I’m not sure I have ever felt more like I’m at a Stoke Newington drinks party than when I’m browsing Bluesky (including when tucking into Perelló olives and truffle-flavoured Torres crisps in actual N16).

An even more fundamental problem is that nobody on Bluesky seems to actually mind that they are in an echo chamber. When I told a friend, who happens to be an enthusiastic Bluesky user, what I was writing about this week, she replied “oh yes, but it is an echo chamber, that’s what people like about it, it’s lovely”.

Many enthuse about how like “old Twitter” Bluesky is, which is telling in itself: in the old days of Twitter, progressives far outnumbered their conservative counterparts in terms of how much they posted about politics on the platform, but that share has fallen dramatically since Musk took it over….

So there is a lot going on in those paragraphs.³ It is worth pausing and reviewing Kelly’s various claims.

First, is Bluesky politically homogenous? Well, it is definitely more homogenous than, say, the Twitter of a decade ago.⁴ There are almost no conservatives on Bluesky, and the few that did try it out got dogpiled pretty quickly. I would like to think that I am pretty moderate in the U.S. political distribution;⁵ on Bluesky, I am barely to the left of Atilla the Hun.

But that radically understates the problem. Conservatives are not the only political group missing from the party. An awful lot of responsible centrists like Matthew Yglesias have also left the site. So have many of the media folks who used to be there, like Jake Tapper. As for Black Twitter, their migration to Bluesky has been rocky at best. I have seen way too many African-Americans treated shabbily on the site.⁶

So 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. Indeed, Kelly stresses this point, asking later in her column:

Why not have a place on the internet that you can go and have a nice, civilised chat with someone who shares your worldview without the risk of coming across a load of vile racist content?

It comes down, in the end, to whether or not you believe that the “digital town square” Musk talked about when he bought Twitter can really exist and, if it can, whether it is of any benefit to anyone.

Put me in the Kelly camp of preferring a non-toxic digital town square — if such a thing was possible. The thing is, I am not sure at this point that it is.

As I wrote a few years ago on Trump’s last day in office, “Prolonged exposure to Trump has made me meaner and dumber than I ever wanted to be.” That applies with even greater force to Trump’s most eager bootlickers, the JD Vances and Kevin Roberts of the world. In the United States, having a digital town square minus MAGA folks automatically renders the square considerably more homogenous. And frankly, that’s okay. If I need to see what the MAGA folks are bleating about I can peek at Twitter. I don’t need them polluting Bluesky.

The United States will need considerable political detox after Trump exits the stage (as he might actually do). Maybe then a single digital square would be feasible again. Until then, however, Bluesky might not be perfect but it is a damn sight better than its alternatives.

1. Full disclosure: I have been tweeting more than usual as of late, mostly because of the U.S. presidential election but also because it’s undeniably fun to make fun of Elon Musk on his loss leader of a website.

2. Mastodon was way too geeky for me; Post was quite functional but never seemed to develop the critical mass to make it useful.

3. For one thing, I needed help translating Kelly’s column from British English to American English. WTF is Stoke Newington?! This prompted me to email Kelly about what she meant, and she analogized, “like Williamsburg and Portland.” Kelly further explained about her Bluesky feed: “I guess they skew British because I have only recently really got going on Bluesky (despite being one of the first 1% of signups) and I guess I started by following colleagues and contacts back, the majority of whom are here.”

4. Contra Kelly, my Twitter feed was not dominated by progressives, but — again — perhaps American Twitter was different from British Twitter.

5. Though the word “centrism” contains so many multitude of sins; see here and here for example.

6. There was also a period when the tankies on the site were absolutely insufferable, although this is where Bluesky’s block function has proven to be a godsend.