like a controversial cowboy human errorJournalists, pundits and people who shun MAGA merch have looked at the service formerly known as Twitter and lamented, “I don't know how to leave you.” even before Elon Musk Took over, toxicity was running rampant, and Musk's selectively enforced “free speech” principles made things worse. Ubiquitous advertising—often low-quality ads that promote clickbait or a candidate you would never vote for—made the experience worse. Yet X, as Musk so ruthlessly renamed it, still appears to be the only place with real scale and existing communities. For many of us, the switching costs seemed too high.
till 5th novemberOnce Donald Trump won the election, suddenly a lot of people decided that they Must roam on a network This did not lead to any increase in the ranks of the newly elected President's billionaire friends and other proud victorious candidates. Those people discovered there was an alternative: a two-year-old open-source service that was literally spun off from Twitter. blue skyIn a little more than a week, its numbers jumped from 14 million to 20 million and were growing at a rate of one million per day.
BlueSky immediately became the most attractive landing spot for the ex-Patriots. Even more than Metaz Threads, because it comes from Instagram rolls, it has 275 million users and claims to have added 15 million of them this month alone. However, one problem with threads is that it is intentional minimalist politics and real-time events, two pillars of short-form social media. Additionally, in keeping with Meta's feed philosophy, Threads uses an algorithm that rewards clickbait posts. At least that's my experience – my own feed is filled with posts about strange personal encounters that tempt me to click follow-up and make me feel like I've wasted my time. Has given. My solution is to spend less time on threads.
However, with Bluesky, I found myself able to move much faster. (I joined early but became inactive.) My feed is happily dominated by people or select groups of people I choose to follow. I often find them in user-generated “starter packs” that help X refugees grow their followers, now that they're rebuilding from scratch. BlueSky also gives users superpowers to stop trolls and malicious people. But my experience was so pleasant that I did not have to do even a single block.
When I spoke to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber this week, she was satisfied with the new users. “It's been a weird week,” she says, but she notes that this spike was one of many over the past few months. Bluesky is in it for the long term, she says. She says the idea is not to recreate classic Twitter, but to reshape social media on the principles of openness and user control. Do you remember how the Internet worked before those fabulous companies owned it and were evil? That's BlueSky Vision, a digital version of the hippie dream. Graber's word cloud is full of things like radical transparency, and she raves about it AT protocolOpen-source framework on which Bluesky is built. Without discussing it further, the bottom line is that by opening everything up, the community—rather than a corporate control freak—can shape Bluesky to allow for enjoyable customized experiences.
Be patient with your content. To root out illegalities and harassing services, Bluesky has hired contractors to assist the approximately 20 people it currently employs. But the bulk of feed-policing is expected to be crowdsourced – due to Bluesky's open design, committed outsiders can create systems to enforce their own standards. Once this system is developed, users will be able to choose a diet to suit their comfort level.