Bluesky Reminds Us Of How The Internet Used To Be (When it was Good!)
So why is Bluesky suddenly all over the news? It’s been around since early 2023, slowly, slowly, slowly growing, until over the past month or so its usage has suddenly taken off.
I can’t say if the world really needed another microblogging site, but it certainly needed an alternative to Twitter/X. Regardless of how you personally feel about Elon Musk (who ended up purchasing Twitter after a perhaps tongue-in-cheek offer that the lawyers took literally), the site has been going downhill.
Social media sites tend to follow a similar pattern. They start small. They become larger. For a lot of their audience, they become almost indispensable. Then the sites start changing, usually for the purposes of ending their reliance on burning through Venture Capitalists’ money and beginning to turn a profit.
These changes don’t need to be discussed in detail; Cory Doctorow has already coined the term Enshittification. In short, you begin to see fewer posts from people you want to see posts from and more posts that are either outright advertisements or posts designed to keep you engaged with the platform. If you’re wondering what type of content most algorithms show you to keep you engaged, it’s the posts that make you angry.
Right now, Bluesky’s base algorithm is as simple as could be. If you follow ten people, then when you log on, your feed is the posts from those ten people displayed in the order they made them. That’s it.
Remember when Facebook was like that? You’d log on and see posts from your actual friends. You’d see photos from their parties or vacations. You see stories about the adorable thing their child or pet just did.
Have you logged onto Facebook recently? My feed is perhaps ten percent actual posts from my actual friends. The other ninety percent is a terrible combination of pure advertising (usually for restaurants or stores located 1,000+ miles away), posts from groups of which I am not a member and pages posting AI slop (usually of military personnel with 17 fingers saying that money should go to veterans and not to students).
The difference on Twitter has been as terrible. The promotion of posts made by “blue checkmarks” (i.e. people who are paying to use a formerly free service) has made compelling conversations all but impossible. Look at the top replies under a post from a large account. Apart from the angry, venomous replies inviting the writer to jump in a lake, the bulk of them are pages and pages of people saying little more than “yes”, “haha”, “what” or “hehehe”. The thoughtful, funny or interesting responses have been buried under unremarkable garbage.
Which brings us back to Bluesky. Opening the app is like going back to the Internet of ten or fifteen years ago. The posts are about the things I am interested in (or potentially interested in) instead of blatant spam, crypto scams or content designed to make me angry and provoke a response (which will keep me on the site longer, giving me the opportunity to look at more terrible Temu ads).
What does the future look like for Bluesky? I would love to believe that they could remain advertising-free. I do not think this is likely. A subscription model could help them become financially self-sufficient, but that seems impossible in today’s world.
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber claims that the site is “billionaire proof” given the federated, open-source model that the platform is built on. Mastodon had claimed the same, but the barriers to entry there were a little higher for non-technical users.
Bluesky seems to have solved that problem. For the sake of the Internet, let’s hope they’re right. Indeed just today, Threads (Mark Zuckerberg / Meta) announced they were looking at creating a stripped down feed. Threads was launched in order to capitalize on Twitter’s earlier stumbles. Despite having a massive built-in user base by linking it to existing Instagram accounts, they had failed to take advantage. Looking at Bluesky’s algorithmic success, they may realize that people simply are tired of algorithms making them angry and just want to read the content they signed up to read.
Does the future of the Internet look more like something from its past? Or is this just a blip? I know which side I want to manifest.
