Bluesky's success is a rejection of big tech's operating system [View all]

[usonian]

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/blueskys-success-is-a-rejection-of

No bad adtech, no AI, no throttling links. Bluesky is a booming because it's everything big tech is not

Hope everyone’s as well as can be out there, after The Election. Personally, I spent much of last week sleep-deprived and fried, having come off a week-long flu (during which I streamed a deluge of horror movies) right into the election week chaos. And then I immediately got another nasty cold—the joys have having small kids in school—so I remain uncertain as to what is actually real, and what is a feverish, semi-hallucinated daydream, and I’m just going to revel in that for a while.

I’m working on a longer post about what the coming Trump years might hold for the tech world—the vast majority of it concerning, from an anticipated rise in surveillance tools required to enact mass deportation, the further entrenchment of tech monopolies, Elon Musk’s incipient reign as the nation’s most powerful government tech contractor, and a frenzied boom in crypto and defense tech that has already begun—but in the meantime, I want to touch on a story that’s cause for a bit of hope, in spite of everything.

I’m talking, like so many other tech pundits, about the ascent of Bluesky. The decentralized social network hit 15 million users last week, and claimed the no. 1 spot on the App Store, above ChatGPT and TikTok. At time of writing, it still held that spot, all thanks to users fleeing Musk’s X-né-Twitter, the introduction of some good and innovative features, and the refreshing sense that someone is actually successfully building a place on the internet with users, not consumers, in mind. In 2024, that is enough to qualify it as a nearly utopian project.


Bluesky has spent the last two years or so hovering on the verge of a breakthrough, primarily because it’s the go-to home for Twitter and X refugees. Musk bought Twitter in 2022; when he started re-platforming users previously banned for hate speech and harassment, boosting his own feed, introducing pay-to-play features, and so on, many fled the platform. Bluesky, which was co-founded by Jack Dorsey, had its first big moment in spring 2023, when a group of power users set up shop. I wrote about that moment for the Times; Bluesky felt freewheeling, weird, and open to low-stakes posting in a way social media hadn’t in years.

More ...