Just a few weeks ago, it seemed like Bluesky had done the impossible. With a bizarre update to Twitter’s terms of service and the presidential election’s surprising landslide serving as a wakeup call, hundreds of thousands of social media users had decided that they were done with Elon Musk and his diminished version of the platform. This horde of journalists, posters, influencers, and lurkers poured over in droves, signing up at a rate that Bluesky itself could barely keep up with. Despite my own vocal skepticism about any platform being able to replace Twitter, it seemed like it had finally happened. As it turned out, Elon’s ability to annoy his own customers could in fact overcome their addiction to the platform he’d ruined. The number of new users on Bluesky would eventually reach one million.
The sudden allegiance to BlueSky went beyond the sheer volume of new users. People were excited about the platform in a way that they hadn’t been about social media in years. There were exultations about the platform’s positive vibes and the absence of an all-manipulating algorithm or AI chatbot. As questions about its eventual path to profitability were raised, large numbers of users were quick to say that they’d pay a monthly fee to keep this new life raft afloat.
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Everyone was sure that the golden age of the internet had returned but as the user base swelled, no one could agree when exactly that was. Was Bluesky the new headquarters of the post-2016 Hashtag Resistance, posting AI memes of Trump kissing Putin and Elon as a woman? Was it the scold’s paradise of 2010 Tumblr, where users could pounce on unsuspecting new prey who don’t know The Bluesky Rules? Or was it the return of the irony poisoned shitposter’s vision of Twitter’s early 2010s golden age?
The site’s small beta had been mostly made up of social media ultra-users whose consumption of content or professional need for the platform was great enough to make hunting down an invite feel worth it. Now, those early users were outnumbered to the point of obscurity. The place became overrun with fans, people who come to these platforms not to talk to friends, find cool content, or promote what they make, but to align themselves with a liege lord and post gifs in their name. Fandom on its own isn’t so bad. Most of us don’t mind sharing digital space with Swifties or K-Pop stans, but not all fandoms are just looking to talk about music.
As it became clear that the people they harass were migrating to a new platform, grifters like Jesse Singal and Libs of TikTok set up shop as well. Libs of TikTok was quickly banned (to little fanfare from its usually outspoken author, which called the account’s authenticity into question) which gave users hope that that Bluesky might continue being a different kind of platform, one that doesn’t let serial harassers hide behind “just asking questions” while skirting right up to the line of what the terms of service will allow them to pull off. Singal, however, remains on the site despite a brief suspension and has sworn to mobilize his following to join the platform and even out the conversation*. He has since become the most blocked account on the platform.
The message from BlueSky, however, is clear. Singal and those like him will be allowed to exist in this space. BlueSky will not be a platform free of grifters and right-wing figures. It will be a platform much like the one we left behind. This one notably lacks the oppressive algorithm or openly fascist ownership of its predecessors, an improvement that hasn’t gone unnoticed, but for many users the honeymoon has ended. BlueSky will be an imperfect place, like every platform before it.
This was inevitable. Conflict is baked into the design of social media, whether or not a platform’s algorithm is built to highlight it. It’s catnip for the human id and a core aspect of social media from its birth. Anyone old enough to have been on early Facebook remembers the birth of the Facebook fight, the low-stakes coliseum where you could watch your uncle windmill slam a stranger’s face into the dirt over their comment on a decades-old sports clip. For all our high-minded claims that what we want is a place for the exchange of ideas, user trends consistently say otherwise. Algorithms, oppressive as they are, didn’t invent our love for conflict. They just amplified it and found more effective ways of serving it back to us. But addicted as we are to conflict in our social media, most users can’t rationalize paying for it.
The old saying goes that if you’re not the customer, you’re the product. If Bluesky is unable to successfully implement a subscription model at scale, that means ads and brands aren’t far behind and the result will be a place that feels like Twitter in the early 2010s. Recreating that environment isn’t nothing! The platform revolutionized journalism, comedy, and political organizing in those days but for those who came to BlueSky looking for a utopian reimagining of social media, disappointment is inevitable. But wasn’t it always? Is there such a thing as utopian social media?
Social media users have long maintained that its problems lie at the feet of the platforms themselves. Were it not for Zuckerberg’s elevation of video content, Dorsey’s ruthless algorithm, or Musk’s right-wing favoritism, we might finally be able to have a little peace and quiet around here! But there are so many more of us than we can conceive, and social media puts us all in each other’s pockets. But I don’t think we were supposed to experience the world (or each other!) this way. What if the problem isn’t the platform? What if the problem What if we just weren’t meant to remain in each other’s lives like this?
Teenagers are supposed to be able to say dumb things to each other without forty-year-olds quote-tweeting them. Adults are supposed to be able to talk about their lives without having to deal with confused children in their replies. I should not know that one of my favorite teachers from high school is a big RFK guy now. We now carry the threat of an audience in us at all times. There are no more private moments because we are never alone and yet somehow always lonely.
I don’t believe that social media is a thing we can fix, and I think we’ve had enough runs at the concept to understand that. The social experience isn’t supposed to be gamified so brutally, and it’s certainly not meant to turn a profit. Of course there were better times, but even those can’t be resurrected by something as simple as the removal of an algorithm. The original sin of social media was hope, the idea that talking to people online might be fun, and you can’t recreate that with what we know now.
At this point, I think the thing that keeps us coming back looks less like hope and more like addiction. We logged on because chemically simulated fun on demand sounded too good to pass up and we stayed because we were right. We were high school kids sharing cigarettes behind the bleachers and now we’ve become middle aged smokers cursing the cold. We’re no longer in a position to easily divorce ourselves from our habit despite the fact that the deal became one sided long ago.
I’m not a luddite, but I think we may benefit from making our worlds smaller. The idea of an open-ended message board with no directive beyond “talk amongst yourselves” only ever ends one way, and we may find ourselves happier and more functional without them playing as large a role in our lives.
I’m not suggesting we all put our hands up and leave socials behind. For certain industries, they’re still a necessary evil and when looking for a place to share my work, I certainly prefer Bluesky to the alternatives. But I am suggesting that if you’ve found yourself looking at it and feeling that same bland despair you feel while looking at other socials, the problem might not be the platform but the practice itself.
*The only conversation Singal is interested in furthering is one that furthers the suffering and stigmatization of trans identity, particularly that of trans children.
Wow! Two Brain Worms in one week, what is this, Christmas? Actually yeah, we’re pretty close. Let’s say that.
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