What is Bluesky? It’s Twitter, don’t overthink it. Terminally online people like myself have been in the wilderness since Twitter was taken over and turned into a right-wing propaganda machine. While Bluesky has been available for the past year, it just hadn’t hit an influx of users quite yet. That all changed after the election, as it’s growing at over 1 million users a day.
Meta introduced Threads last year as a Twitter alternative. It has the Meta special sauce to gin up engagement and a built-in user base already. It just feels like it’s missing so many things that made Twitter special to so many. It’s fine, but don’t try posting about an exciting moment in a sports game because by the time anybody sees it, it will be so late that you might as well put it in the print edition of the newspaper.
Bluesky has quickly emerged as the real-time zeitgeist replacement. It gets all the important things right, and thankfully it’s just nerdy enough that you probably won’t have to talk about it at Thanksgiving if all goes well.
We don’t know for sure quite yet where Bluesky is headed, but it feels nice to be on there now. It’s currently full of many of the same early adopters that made early Twitter so much fun.
It’s made me think of a couple of things about these text-only platforms…
- It’s refreshing to use after being forced to use algorithms across every other social app these days. Let me see content from the people I follow, rather than a perfectly curated algorithm engineered to know everything about me. It makes it harder to get your feed curated, but the upside is I trust my feed so much more because I know who I’m following. The amount of thirsty content on Threads and TikTok can get pretty exhausting. I just want a simple feed of the people I follow. I want to see it in real time. I want to read smart, funny, or interesting posts. I don’t want constant engagement bait.
- This straightforward community full of early adopters feels nostalgic. As an elder millennial, almost Gen Xer, I’d be fine if we just closed sign-ups now. There was this narrative that Twitter used to push that it was the world’s town square. I’m not interested in hearing from everyone anymore. I actually just want my bubble.
- Most people aren’t Twitter, Threads, or Bluesky users and that’s very much okay. I spent a lot of time at my day job in the late 2000s building the social media program at Starbucks, evangelizing that everyone should be engaging on Twitter. I now realize that’s just not correct—short-form text platforms probably aren’t useful for most. I happen to get a lot of value out of it, but I think my brain has been rewired. A question you should ask yourself: Did you like using Twitter when everyone told you to in the early 2010s? If the answer is no, then don’t. Save yourself some screen time.
If you do end up using it, I’ll see you there.