YOU may have heard some buzz about a new social network called , which is the latest app trying to seize the throne once occupied by . Here in the States, journalists are going wild for Bluesky – publications from to have covered its hip culture, analysing whether it is a sign of what’s to come in the world of social media. I have been on Bluesky for about a month now, and so far it feels like a fast-motion replay of everything that went wrong on Twitter. It has only taken months, rather than years, for goofy memes and friendly posts about lunch to descend into bloody, ideological battles.
Bluesky was founded by Jack Dorsey, who is a co-founder of Twitter, and its initial funding came from Twitter as well. So it is no surprise that the app looks almost exactly like Twitter, with slightly different functionality. You have your feed of pithy, 300-character “skeets” (a tongue-in-cheek portmanteau of sky and tweets). You can follow the people you like and mute or block the ones you don’t. But you can’t send direct messages, which is a little annoying. There are pictures, but no video. Sometimes, everything breaks. The app is brand new, after all, and it is still in an invite-only, beta-testing phase.
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At first, it was kind of fun when Bluesky broke. People made jokes and filed helpful bug reports for its software developers. It felt like we were building a barn together and everybody was pitching in to make sure the roof didn’t collapse. When threading broke – causing people to receive tonnes of notifications if they replied to a long enough chain of skeets – users created the “hellthread”, an infinitely long, chaotic conversation, full of posts about getting intoxicated and hooking up. Yes, it was completely silly, but it was also a legitimate way to figure out what was causing the problem with threading.
For people working at Bluesky, like CEO Jay Graber, the appeal of the app lies in its code. Unlike Twitter, Bluesky’s code is open source – anyone can download it and build apps that work with it. Bluesky is also designed to be decentralised, like its rival Mastodon. Graber has written several essays about turning Bluesky into an app ecosystem, where many companies can develop products that work with Bluesky’s burgeoning community. She is especially interested in something she calls “composable moderation”, which is basically a way for users to build systems that control what they see on Bluesky, muting Twitter-style harassment and abuse.
Still, a social media app isn’t really about code – it is about talking to people. That’s why we should pay attention to the way Bluesky is building its user base, which was at about 60,000 people in early May and is growing fast. Early on, users celebrated that Bluesky seemed to be full of Black and transgender people who had fled harassment on Twitter. One user, a Black software engineer called Aveta, that she got 500 invites from Bluesky, which she gave to other Black people. When I emailed a rep from Bluesky, they said that the company hadn’t intentionally reached out to any minority groups. Instead, wrote the rep, they had simply given “more invites” to “engaged new users”.
The only community that Bluesky targeted with invites was “writers with a Substack”, wrote the rep. Substack is a newsletter platform with limited content moderation that has got into controversies over platforming hate speech and libel. Alex Stamos, who heads Stanford University’s internet observatory in California, recently referred to Substack as “paying folks to defame people”. So, the only group that Bluesky intentionally reached out to were from a platform with a lot of social problems. To be clear, the Bluesky rep told me that the firm is happy to have a diverse range of people on its app. But that isn’t its goal.
Meanwhile, Bluesky’s community went through a mini meltdown in late May, with people screaming about how to interpret a meme that struck some people as sexist. I opened the app after a long weekend to find my feed full of people hurling recriminations at each other, “quote skeeting” in a heated exchange that reminded me of the bad old doomscrolling days on Twitter. I am sure that the Bluesky team would tell me to deal with it by building some composable moderation software, muting the doomscroll and replacing it with cat pictures.
But muting isn’t a good way to build a community, and covering your ears won’t make these core problems go away. Bluesky needs to be transparent with its nascent community about what its ethics and values really are. I don’t believe you can build a new public sphere entirely out of systems that help us ignore each other – maybe we should try to come up with new ways to take responsibility for our words instead.
Annalee’s week
What I’m reading
by Ruthanna Emrys, which imagines a better form of social media (with aliens).
What I’m watching
, based on a comic book of the same name, about the Monkey King’s son going to high school.
What I’m working on
A fellowship at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where I’m studying coastal eutrophication.
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest novel is The Terraformers and they are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com
