mattyblog

Thinking About Bluesky

I joined Bluesky when it was still an invite-only network. I was one of the first one million users on the site! I was wildly apprehensive about the platform when I joined. The only concrete thing I knew about it was that it was supposed to be a "Twitter clone". I was a Twitter user for a few years and really came to intensely dislike time spent on it. Twitter was constantly showing me things I didn't want to see: advertisements, engagement bait from turbo trolls, people quote posting the engagement bait with "funny" responses - I barely ever saw posts from the people I followed on purpose. It was a test of patience every time I scrolled down. I eventually got fed up enough to not only stop using it, but to delete my account entirely. I didn't miss it, either. So, signing up for social network touted as a "twitter clone" knowing how much I came to hate Twitter is something I did a little reluctantly. I signed up because the core idea behind a platform like Twitter was really alluring: writing and reading microblogs with all your internet pals. It was astounding how much friction Twitter added to the core principle of the whole network.

Bluesky is supposedly doing things differently and differentiated itself pretty quickly to me. I'm honestly pretty impressed with it so far. The core idea of Bluesky is still virtually the same as Twitter but the key difference is that your timeline in Bluesky isn't algorithmic. I see posts from people I follow in chronological order. The very simple design of the timeline is combined with very robust moderation features like super effective blocking/muting, being able to detach quote posts if someone is being rude responding to one of your posts, and user run moderation lists that let you block hundreds of accounts with a single click. If you see things you don't want to see, you're empowered at every step to remove them from your view. It's so wildly different in its intent than a whatever Twitter became.

While it is fun to use right now I still remain a bit apprehensive about the platform. Bluesky still has to somehow make money, and it isn't clear how they plan to do that. It is important to remember that Bluesky is still a venture capital funded tech company, capable of doing all the venture capital funded tech company bullshit that we've all seen before. I've read they are planning on monetizing by providing subscription tiers offering things like "better quality video uploads" and etc, but it seems like the whole platform's userbase are expecting to be bombarded with advertisements now that the platform is taking off. Hopefully the idea of ads injected into your purposefully non-algorithmic feed being totally antithetical to the whole principle of the site keeps them from going down that path.

Things I like about the platform so far

I've outlined a few things that I am really enjoying about the platform so far in the list below. This list is pretty off-the-proverbial-cuff, and isn't exhaustive - but these are some real highlights.

You can find me on bluesky here if you like. I'll see you out there!