After an hour or so of scrolling through Bluesky the other night, I felt something I haven’t felt on social media in a long time: free.
Free from Elon Musk, and his tedious quest to turn X into a right-wing echo chamber where he and his friends are the permanent, inescapable main characters.
Free from Threads and its suffocating algorithm, which suppresses news and real-time discussions in favor of bland engagement bait.
Free from my own bad habit, honed through years of obsessive Twitter use, of packaging my thoughts for consumption by an audience of opinionated strangers.
You may be wondering why Bluesky — an experimental social media app that was started in 2019 under Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former chief executive, before becoming an independent company in 2021 — is attracting so much attention these days.
In the past several weeks, the app has swelled to more than 20 million users, and is adding more than a million users a day. It’s been the top-ranked free app on both Apple’s and Google’s app stores. Celebrities, politicians and artists are flocking to it. A.O.C.! Lizzo! Mark Cuban! Its 20-person team can barely keep up with all the growth.
I’ll admit that I was surprised by Bluesky’s sudden jolt of popularity. I joined the app last year, when it was an invitation-only beta product. I found some of what happened there interesting, but ultimately, I wasn’t persuaded it would ever fill the Twitter-shaped hole in my information diet. It seemed buggy and complicated, and it lacked some of the features (such as direct messages) that made Twitter useful.
It was also, frankly, kind of annoying. The most active posters on my feed were all left-wing Twitter discontents, united in their hatred of Mr. Musk yet unable to stop talking about him. My account went dormant, and I moved on to other platforms.
But Bluesky’s post-election growth spurt persuaded me to give it a second look. It’s much better now. And while I still don’t think Bluesky — or any social media app — will ever fully replace the old Twitter, I get what the excitement is about.
For burned-out social media users like me, joining Bluesky can be a reset — a chance to start over on a platform that isn’t engineered to maximize engagement, that isn’t owned by a capricious billionaire or an amoral advertising conglomerate, and that doesn’t treat its users as lab rats. It’s a throwback to a rawer, lower-stakes era of social media, before elections and economies hinged on what happened there.
And while Bluesky is still small compared with X and Threads — Mr. Musk claimed in May that X had 600 million monthly active users, and Threads recently reported having roughly 275 million users — it has a vitality right now that other Twitter replacements lack.
I’ve been wrong about social apps before. I thought Clubhouse, the pandemic-era hit that convened socially starved techies for glorified conference calls, would have staying power. But I suspect Bluesky’s growth is a sign that text-based social media is less dead than I thought, and that there is still plenty of demand for the kind of social networking experience that Twitter offered before Mr. Musk took it over. (Threads appears to be coming to the same realization. This week, the platform announced several seemingly Bluesky-inspired changes, including custom feeds and a new algorithm that emphasizes content from people you follow.)
For the uninitiated, some Bluesky basics: On the surface, the app resembles a stripped-down version of Twitter. Users post short messages with text, photos or videos. There are followers, likes and reshares. Many new users build out their lists by adding groups of accounts known as “starter packs.” There are starter packs for journalists, soccer fans, legal experts, nephrologists, database engineers, Pokémon fans and more. The platform has added features like direct messages and an anti-harassment “nuclear block” option that allows users to sever all connections with accounts they don’t want to see.
It gets more interesting under the hood, because Bluesky is built on top of something called the “AT Protocol,” a decentralized, open-source technology that is designed to let users control how they experience social media. Eventually, that could allow users to pick their own feed-ranking algorithms, choose their own moderation rules or even move their accounts to a different app while preserving their followers and post histories.
It’s still early days on most of that stuff, though, and to be honest, I’m not sure any of it will matter much to the average user. Most people don’t want to roll their own algorithm — they just want an app that works, where a bunch of people they like post interesting things at a regular clip. Social media apps live and die on their vibes, and right now, Bluesky’s vibes are better than the alternatives.
Some of that may be temporary. (It’s normal for new, buzzy social apps to go through a euphoric growth phase before stalling out later on.) Some of it may be related to Bluesky’s decentralized design, which gives users a sense that they’re building something together, rather than just signing up for yet another Twitter clone. It may also be a post-election bump that will taper off if liberals’ anger at Mr. Musk subsides.
Whatever the reason, I think people who are nostalgic for the old Twitter should give Bluesky a shot, with a few caveats.
First: 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.)
Second, if what you’re looking for is a one-for-one substitute for the old Twitter — a global watering hole where celebrities, politicians, journalists, scientists and sports fans all gathered to discuss the news of the day — you won’t find it on Bluesky. (Or anywhere else, for that matter.)
We’re in an era of fractured social media now, where communities gather in different spaces for different purposes, and I suspect that Bluesky, no matter how popular it gets, will be only one part of a much larger ecosystem that includes X, Threads, group chats and more.
Third, 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’m still working on that part. But if you want to watch me figure it out, you can find me over at @kevinroose.com. I’ll be the guy posting about tech news, and maybe the occasional ALF joke.
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