My favourite fact about Bluesky is that chief executive Jay Graber’s Chinese mother named her Lantian, which means blue sky in Mandarin, but this is not why Bluesky is called Bluesky. It’s a coincidence, or nominative determinism, or both. Either way, she seems cool.
I don’t really want to bang on too much about Graber, a software engineer from Oklahoma who was appointed by then Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey to lead his new Bluesky project in 2021 and is now reported to be its primary owner.
But as a woman, she’s bound to pick up much less of a cult-like following than certain male app proprietors — Dorsey himself once attracted an intense mix of worship and derision — so it seems safe enough to say that she’s refreshing, without this tempting fate.
So far, at least, her approach to online public conversation, supported by “anti-toxicity” features, feels like a blessed relief, and given the motivation for the great “Xodus” that’s not unimportant.
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Bluesky is having a glow-up and the question now, as ever with social media, is how long it can hang on to it and where it goes next.
I’ve been on it, sporadically, since September 2023, hoping that others would see its potential as the app most likely to replicate the useful interaction and fun knowledge exchange of early-days Twitter.
Engagement was low to non-existent, but the void was a pleasant one. My first post was “I was looking for a creperie but I accidentally ended up in an ancient fortress”, which was not a crossword clue or a metaphor for anything, just an accurate description of my morning, liked by three strangers.
[ Tech giant X challenges Ireland’s new online safety rulesOpens in new window ]
As an alternative to the fast-deteriorating environment offered by Elon Musk’s Twitter/X, I preferred Bluesky to Meta’s Threads, which was all white space and algorithms, and Mastodon’s Mastodon, which was insular by design and heavy on localised etiquette.
Crucially, as much as Bluesky’s interface resembled the Twitter one, and as close as its white-and-blue logo was to Twitter’s – with a butterfly in lieu of a bird – Bluesky no longer had anything to do with Musk’s poisonous soapbox. Dorsey also stepped down from its board in May this year, urging people to stay on X as he went.
By this point, Bluesky’s numbers were already tipping up with each unfavourable change inflicted upon X. Now the re-election of Donald Trump, achieved with the assistance of “first buddy” Musk, has proven the catalyst for an astonishing influx of disaffected X users and former X users.
Bluesky added one million users in the week after the election result. Now it is adding one million of them a day and the small team that runs and owns the app is busy ironing out creaks, eliminating bugs and dealing with outages as its user count surges up to 20 million.
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The contrasts drawn can feel over-simplistic. Bluesky isn’t an “echo chamber”, just as pre-Musk Twitter was never really one — not unless echo chambers often host massively bitter arguments.
And while X’s “cesspit” tag is fully deserved, it has remained possible, with considerable and increasing effort, to stay off the radar of fascists, bots and fascist bots. Exposure to abject nonsense and hostility can be limited, for some people anyway, by avoiding the “for you” tab, consuming only self-curated feeds, sticking a padlock on your account and never letting your eye drift down to replies. It can be done. But why try?
The slow death of X does not guarantee that any single app will take its place as a quasi-public square
Like Silicon Republic, the Irish tech news site that followed the Guardian out the X door last Wednesday, many have “stayed in the hope it might one day be saved”, only to conclude that hope was no longer tenable.
The more people leave, the easier it becomes for others to go. This doesn’t necessarily come down to a dilemma between fleeing toxicity versus “staying and fighting”, which is a rather grandiose way of describing having a social media account. The migration to Bluesky is now just logical. Start again, move on.
Some context on its scale: Bluesky is still a minnow compared to Threads, which has more than 275 million users and was adding them at a rate of more than one million a day even before the presidential election.
But Threads is annoying. It’s annoying from the second you open the app and it defaults to the algorithmic “for you” feed. True, active moderation means it isn’t hate-filled like X. But idiocy on Threads inevitably garners the attention of people who feel compelled to correct it, then the sprawling Meta machine shovels the original idiocy into Instagram feeds, giving Threads the power to irritate across platforms.
The result is that Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, last seen covering rap hit Get Low under the name Z-Pain, is worth almost $200 billion.
I don’t know if Graber has any plans to record rap covers or if Bluesky is really as “billionaire-proof” as it claims. I’ll also have to leave it to either time or tech experts to assess whether its belief in a “marketplace of algorithms” and mission to let independent developers build their own social networks using its open protocol will succeed in ushering in a glorious new age of transparency and user-control.
But two concrete statements appeal. The first is that it has no plans to introduce advertising, signalling that it will instead explore making some features subscription-only. The second is that it does not use content on the platform to train generative artificial intelligence and has “no intention of doing so”.
The slow death of X does not guarantee that any single app will take its place as a quasi-public square. Social media Stockholm syndrome is over. And yet isn’t it nice to have the option of one that isn’t rotting from the head down?
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