Bluesky is turning into a strong X alternative
After an hour or so of scrolling through Bluesky the other night, I felt something I haven’t felt on social media in a long time: free.
Free from Elon Musk, and his tedious quest to turn X into a right-wing echo chamber where he and his friends are the permanent, inescapable main characters.
Free from Threads and its suffocating algorithm, which suppresses news and real-time discussions in favor of bland engagement bait.
Free from my own bad habit, honed through years of obsessive Twitter use, of packaging my thoughts for consumption by an audience of opinionated strangers.
You may be wondering why Bluesky — an experimental social media app that was started in 2019 under Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former chief executive, before becoming an independent company in 2021 — is attracting so much attention these days.
In the past several weeks, the app has swelled to more than 20 million users, and is adding more than a million users a day. It’s been the top-ranked free app on both Apple’s and Google’s app stores. Celebrities, politicians and artists are flocking to it. A.O.C.! Lizzo! Mark Cuban! Its 20-person team can barely keep up with all the growth.
I’ll admit that I was surprised by Bluesky’s sudden jolt of popularity. I joined the app last year, when it was an invitation-only beta product. I found some of what happened there interesting, but ultimately, I wasn’t persuaded it would ever fill the Twitter-shaped hole in my information diet. It seemed buggy and complicated, and it lacked some of the features (such as direct messages) that made Twitter useful.
It was also, frankly, kind of annoying. The most active posters on my feed were all left-wing Twitter discontents, united in their hatred of Mr. Musk yet unable to stop talking about him. My account went dormant, and I moved on to other platforms.
But Bluesky’s post-election growth spurt persuaded me to give it a second look. It’s much better now. And while I still don’t think Bluesky — or any social media app — will ever fully replace the old Twitter, I get what the excitement is about. [Continue reading…]