So it’s late at night and I’m at the desktop computer bopping around the interwebs looking for entertaining but brief stories…nothing too dense, you know, I really ought to just go on to bed.  I was checking out Slate and hit this headline: “Sick of X and Elon Musk? This App Might Be for You.”  Since I am that, I read on and learned that there is a thing called Bluesky, which is currently making news for its growing popularity as an alternative to Twitter.  (I still call it Twitter, can’t help it.)

What, then, is Bluesky? Until this week, one could think of it as a small, clean lifeboat, sitting off to the side of a sinking cruise ship where most of the passengers also have norovirus.

For more than a year, Bluesky has been the boat for left-leaning Twitter refugees who were so fed up with Musk that they beat the masses in deciding not to stick around on his platform. That could have some echo-chamber effects, not that such an outcome was any worse than being surrounded by the most obnoxious people on the internet over on X. (For example, a critical mass of Bluesky users were a good ways behind the rest of the internet last summer in recognizing that Joe Biden had no chance of political survival after his last debate performance.) X has remained where most of the action happens, because it is where politicians, companies, the biggest media outlets, and their reporters still live. The discourse has steadily degraded there, but the power users have not fled en masse.

But while X has spiraled deeper into a racist fever dream and Threads has kept building its sunshine-pumping text app for influencers, Bluesky has been building.

So OK, I signed up to check it out, the same way I did with Twitter in 2008, when I initially resisted because I bought the criticism that Twitter was just a bunch of people telling other people what they had for lunch today.  You’d have thought I’d just fallen into The Time Tunnel: it all looked and felt like Twitter did back in the early days, but without the overtly annoying stuff including the incessant interruptions from Musk with some new misleading or downright false information.  The Washington Post says Bluesky is where liberals who are fleeing Twitter are going:

With Musk taking on a central advisory role to Trump’s administration after leveraging X and his personal fortune to boost Trump’s campaign, U.S. liberals and others disenchanted with the site are once again scurrying to friendlier pastures. This time, though, the primary beneficiary may not be Meta’s Threads, which is controlled by Musk’s fellow billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and has acquired 275 million users in just over a year, many of them X refugees.

Instead, the upstart social network Bluesky is surging. It has more than doubled in size in the past three months. And in the eight days since the election, it has added more than 1.25 million users, bringing its total to more than 15 million as it topped Apple’s App Store rankings on Wednesday. Of those, some 8.5 million have logged in within the past month, spokesperson Emily Liu said Wednesday.

That’s nowhere near the number of users on Twitter or Threads, not even close.  But I found that a lot of the people who I enjoyed following on Twitter are already on Bluesky, and a visit there doesn’t have the feel of the slog I get whenever I check out Twitter.  Which, I will say, has become less frequent in the last few months since I realized I shouldn’t subject myself to getting bogged down in the negativity I kept finding.  Alex Kirshner on Slate characterizes the vibe this way:

Bluesky does not trap users in nonchronological feeds. It gives people only what they ask for, and it does so in real time. It turns out that when a lot of people join the fray, that creates a feeling of controlled but wholesome chaos that resembles what Twitter felt like to some of its earlier addicts around, say, 2014 or 2015. I have been on Bluesky for more than a year but cannot claim to have dived into it in earnest until this past weekend, when I found its college football–watching crowd to be much more energetic and fun than what I had seen this fall on X.

Eventually, more power users should migrate, in part because Bluesky does not throttle access to their work in the way that X, Meta, and Google have so frequently done. There are no bought-and-paid-for blue check marks that flood the zone. Bluesky doesn’t go out of its way to deprioritize posts with links. It encourages members of the news and sports media to spend time there and bring along their audiences. As the journalist Matt Pearce put it: “​​Hard to describe as a journalist how grateful I am to have a text-based app that does not suppress hyperlinks. I don’t know if people realize exactly how hostile the corporate internet has gotten toward news.” In building a social media site that does not go out of its way to be unusable for people distributing news or trying to consume it, Bluesky has been an innovator.

The platform already works as a place where people enjoy spending time on the internet, with a more bespoke experience and less online sewage than they find on X. That will need to be its value proposition to win over more people in moments when Musk isn’t helping Donald Trump return to power or peeling away more features that once made Twitter popular.

(snip)

Bluesky is winning a segment of the internet not because it is ideological but because it is customizable, allowing people to take more control of their experience online. It has not displaced X as a hub for the formation of elite public opinion, but it could dent Musk’s monopoly on that kind of discussion if enough power users, politicians, and companies eventually move. For now, it is a nice place to hang out with pals on the internet, get news without being confused, and take a quick break from thinking about Elon Musk.

I recommend checking it out.  That light blue butterfly icon in the sidebar of this blog is a link to my feed on Bluesky; use it as a way in the door.