Our ancestors dressed up and took part in public executions, and now you can do the same by logging onto Bluesky, the struggling social media platform that was meant to embarrass Twitter.
The app’s elevator pitch is reminiscent of a recurring plotline in Mike Judge’s HBO series “Silicon Valley,” in which tech-obsessed nerds can’t understand why the rest of the world can’t get it.
Bluesky began as a personal project for a senior executive at Twitter.
What would you expect from a social media platform designed by bubble-boy Big Tech geniuses, largely made up of disenchanted Twitter exiles who left the camp to start their own digital civilizations?
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey first mentioned this publicly in 2019. From the beginning, his vision was CorrectiveIt was as if he had given up on Twitter’s highly opaque tactics.
Dorsey’s goal was laudable enough: he wanted to create a decentralized microblogging social media platform that would allow the user base to shape and tweak the algorithm. Mastodon has used this model for nearly a decade, though it sadly fell short of Bluesky’s hype.
Dorsey was joined by Parag Agrawal, then Twitter’s CTO, who played a key role in installing Rantian “Jay” Glover as CEO of Blue Sky.
Graeber, 32, was called to action while working at a platform called Happening, a decentralized social network similar to Blue Sky. “Blue Sky” is actually named after her, Lantian, the Chinese word for “blue sky,” a name Graeber’s mother chose to propel her to greatness.
Founded in 2021, Bluesky has grown from a Jack Dorsey fantasy into a platform of its own, which was invite-only until six months ago.
For this reason, estimates of the size of the initial user base are usually unreliable or inadequate. Estimates currently range from 500,000 to 6 million, with the upper end figures seeming cartoonishly high.
Shortly after founding Blue Sky, Trump launched Truth Social in February 2022. Since then, the platform has gained between 600,000 and 2 million users, with an estimated “12% of all U.S. social media users have used or visited a Truth Social platform.”
Then, in October 2022, Elon Musk finally acquired Twitter, which now boasts an estimated 650 million users as X.
Claims that Bluesky would rival Twitter were initially exaggerated, but Bluesky’s subsequent failures have outweighed its membership numbers.
Mastodon, the original safe haven for whiny journalists fleeing Elon, has a smaller user base but a much bigger reputation. Like Bluesky, Mastodon offers a decentralized approach to social media networking. But Mastodon came first and did better by a long way.
SOPA Images/Getty
And yet its bombastic slogan hints at its weakness: “Social media used to be fun: be yourself, create with your friends, and keep up with what’s happening on a global scale.”
Sure, it can’t function on a global scale, but can it even “monitor what’s going on on a global scale”?
Many Bluesky users see surveillance as moderating “misinformation.” The app combines the ban-loving liberal hysteria of Reddit with the pretense of an uncensored social media platform, Gab, whose reputation was marred by the way many of its users behaved in ways that fit unflattering caricatures of right-wing internet denizens.
Despite the political leanings of most of its journalists, Blue Sky failed to get the endorsement of any major news site, including the tech media it assumed were on its side.
Wired has harshly criticized Bluesky, saying, “Bluesky’s future is social media’s past.” The Wired article criticizes Bluesky for what it lacks: “harmony of differences.” This is actually a kind way of putting it.
What would you expect from a social media platform designed by bubble-boy Big Tech brains, made up mostly of disillusioned Twitter exiles who left the camp to build their own digital civilizations, thinking that Twitter would wither and their new home would thrive?
Instead, these expatriates are stuck playing puppets themselves.
Don’t tell that to Bluesky users, though; they’re raging like the old Twitter days when tantrums could be posted the same day. Spectacle-lovers will be pleased to see the archetypal progressive nerds being as loud and brazen as they were pre-Elon Twitter. For most everyone else, X.com is the social media hotspot.
