Like the conflicted cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, journalists, pundits and people who eschew MAGA merch have looked at the service formerly known as Twitter and lamented, “I don’t know how to quit you.” Even before Elon Musk took over, toxicity was running rampant, and Musk’s selectively implemented “free speech” principles made things worse. The ubiquitous ads—often low-quality ones promoting clickbait or a candidate you’d never vote for—further torched the experience. Yet X, as Musk so brutally renamed it, still appeared to be the only place with real scale and existing communities. For many of us, the switching costs seemed too high.
Until November 5. Once Donald Trump won the election, suddenly a lot of people decided that they should hang out on a network that didn’t boost the posts of the president-elect’s billionaire buddy and other gloating triumphalists. Those people discovered there was an alternative: a two-year old open-source service literally spun off from Twitter called Bluesky. In little more than a week, its numbers soared from 14 million to 20 million and were growing at a pace of a million a day.
Bluesky immediately became the most alluring landing place for X-patriates. Even more so than Meta’s Threads, which, because it draws from the Instagram rolls, has 275 million users and claims to have picked up 15 million of them this month alone. One problem with Threads, though, is that it has consciously minimized politics and real-time events, two pillars of short-form social media. Also, in keeping with the feed philosophy of Meta, Threads uses an algorithm that rewards clickbaity posts. At least that’s my experience—my own feed is weirdly populated with posts about strange personal encounters that lure me in to click on the follow-ups and leave me feeling like I’ve frittered my time away. My solution is to spend less time on Threads.
With Bluesky, however, I found myself able to ramp up pretty quickly. (I’d joined early but gone dormant.) My feed is happily dominated by people or selected groups I choose to follow. I often find them in user-generated “starter packs” that help X refugees boost their followers, now that they’re rebuilding from scratch. Bluesky also gives users superpowers to block trolls and malfeasants. But my experience has been so pleasant that I haven’t had to block a single one.
When I spoke this week to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, she was gratified by the new users. “It’s been a wild week,” she says. But she noted that this spike was one of several over the past few months. Bluesky, she says, is in it for the long haul. The idea is not to recreate classic Twitter, she says, but to reshape social media on the principle of openness and user control. Remember the cool way that the internet worked before those fluffy companies got all proprietary and evil? That’s the Bluesky vision, a digital version of the hippie dream. Graber’s word cloud is full of stuff like radical transparency, and she gushes about the AT Protocol, the open-source framework that Bluesky is built on. Without getting into the weeds on this, the bottom line is that by opening everything up, communities—instead of corporate control freaks—can shape Bluesky to allow for delightful customized experiences.
Take content moderation. To purge the service of illegalities and harassers, Bluesky has brought on contractors to assist the mere 20 or so people currently employed. But the bulk of the feed-policing is expected to be crowdsourced—because of Bluesky’s open design, committed outsiders can build systems to implement their own standards. Once this system flowers, users will be able to pick the regimen that suits their comfort level.
Another interesting idea is Bluesky’s version of verification. Instead of company employees doing the vetting, users can embed their web domain in their user name, to signal they’re trustworthy. If a handle has a .gov tag, for instance, you can be assured it’s not an imposter pretending to be Nancy Pelosi. Graber says about a quarter of the US Senate is now on Bluesky.
Graber also understands that most people use products as they find them, with little patience for tweaking the system. “Our goal is to give everyone a good default experience, because we know users don’t want to come in and be faced with a control panel of toggles,” she says.
One big Bluesky fan is Michael Masnick, the journalist founder of Techdirt. That’s not surprising because it was his 2019 paper—“Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech”—that led then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to start Bluesky as an internal project. After Musk’s takeover, Bluesky became independent, and Dorsey has nothing to do with it. Masnick recently joined Bluesky’s board but emphasized when we spoke that he speaks for himself and not for the company. He’s impressed by how the Bluesky team has been implementing the conceptual framework he originally sketched out. “Jay has really thought through the challenging decisions that you have to make if you’re going to do this right,” he says.”Most users don’t care about [the underlying philosophy]—they just want something that works,” he says. But the philosophy, he argues, is important for its long-term viability—keeping it as a place that is good for the community, and not another opportunity for greedy overlords to milk their users.
As Bluesky grows, the challenges get harder. How does Graber intend not to screw things up? Her answer is that, in effect, the best way to keep users is to allow them to leave and take their network with them. If they’re fed up with Bluesky, they can pick up and go elsewhere, taking their contacts and network activity with them. (Assuming, of course, there are sufficient alternatives that also subscribe to the precepts of openness. Which is not a sure thing.) That’s an existential incentive for Bluesky to satisfy its community.
This all sounds lovely. But it also is a thumb in the eyeball of recent history. The big social networks never set out to be so toxic—it just sort of happened, as an outgrowth of following the money. (OK, Elon is an exception who intentionally ramped up the toxicity.) Graber says that Bluesky, which is a public benefit company, is built to resist such temptations even though it’s funded by venture capitalists, who by definition are in it for the money. “The VCs that we brought on are superexcited about the open dev ecosystem we’re building and are philosophically committed to creating a new paradigm for social,” she says. “We’re going to find ways to monetize within that paradigm.” Still, I wonder whether the current business plan—which involves selling enhanced tools and services while eschewing the traditional avenues of advertising and monetizing data—can support a future with hundreds of millions of users. Also, the lead investor in the recent series A round is … a crypto company. Just sayin’.
I haven’t deleted X, though I’m not posting as much or checking it every few hours. I guess I still don’t know how to totally quit it. But I have shifted much of my short-form activity to Bluesky. I am getting as much engagement with my four-digit following there as with my six-figure follower community on X. (Readers can mitigate that by following me at stevenlevy.bsky.social. Thanks!) I also think it would be great if Jay Graber’s vision can be fulfilled. That would mean a thriving ecosystem of equally open social platforms, with the competition driving standards ever higher. But that’s a movie that’s very far from being greenlit.
Time Travel
In 2009 I wrote a WIRED feature about how users of the then-nascent Twitter were shaping it and even defining its purpose. While the company’s executives had ambitious goals for the service, even back then some were arguing for an open system for short-form posts—much like the federated vision that Bluesky is pursuing.
It’s not that Twitter lacks ambition. The scale of its vision was revealed last summer when a hacker stole hundreds of the company’s confidential documents and leaked them to TechCrunch. The key bullet point, straight from a February 2009 strategy meeting: “If we had a billion users, that will be the pulse of the planet.”
Considering how far Twitter has come, that audacious boast is a plausible goal. (Another bullet point from the leaked memo, “Are we building a new Internet?” is a stretch.) Twitter envisions building its international audience by making deals with carriers to sell phones with Twitter connectivity built straight into the browser or texting functions. (This will help boost Twitter use in developing nations, where SMS still rules.) The company also envisions delivering content from Twitter to and from every connected device in your life, like radios and game consoles. Pulse of the planet indeed.
That’s why competing Internet giants are deeply interested in, if not outright obsessed by, Twitter … Google has made suspiciously Twitter-oriented adjustments as well. One is something called PubSubHubbub, a server protocol that could instantly push new content to users, whether it’s from a blog, Facebook, instant messaging, or Twitter. This has the potential to blunt Twitter’s uniqueness by commoditizing short bursts of information: Instead of a Twitterverse, we’d have a Statusphere distributed across dozens, even hundreds, of companies.
Ask Me One Thing
Glyn asks, “According to the Senate hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena, nonhuman intelligences are among human populations. Who do you think are the aliens among us?”
Thanks for the question Glyn. I have personally attended congressional hearings and can confidently say that some of our elected legislators are indeed nonhuman intelligences.
You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
End Times Chronicle
Brooklyn is on fire. So is the Berkshires. Happy Thanksgiving!
Last but Not Least
My deep dive into how Satya Nadella “refounded” Microsoft.
Follow that robot! WIRED puts a tail on a Waymo taxi.
Data brokers are selling geolocation info that could compromise national security.
Question one: Will Donald Trump keep his campaign promise to pardon Dread Pirate Roberts? Question two: Will he appoint him to a cabinet post?
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