It Might Be Time for Me to Collect Some Being Right Points for My 2023 Bluesky Prediction

Tuesday, 25 March 2025

Yours truly back in May 2023, in a thread on Mastodon (at the time, you needed an invitation code to get into Bluesky, and it was just a few months after Musk’s takeover and remaking of what was once Twitter):

Bluesky is going to skyrocket to mainstream popularity and actually replace Twitter, and Mastodon cannot, because Bluesky is being designed to be simple, fun, and — most importantly — easy to understand.

I’m not trying to provoke. I like Mastodon, especially using Ivory, and I love the community I’m in here. And maybe our community will stay here. What makes Mastodon good for us nerds is that all the non-nerds aren’t here.

But it’s obvious already: regular people instantly grok Bluesky. They’ve had months to sign up for Mastodon and haven’t — because they don’t understand it, and what they see of it doesn’t look like fun.

As soon as they see Bluesky they start trying to score an invite code.

Bluesky, in both word (stated intentions) and deed (the nascent service as it stands today), aspires to be a better Twitter. An idealized Twitter, perhaps. It even looks just like Twitter — without all the crap.

Mastodon was created by and for people who wanted something different from Twitter. So when Twitter refugees show up, it doesn’t feel familiar. Because it’s not supposed to. [...] Hundreds of millions of people liked what Twitter once was, and what it aspired to be. Bluesky might be that.

As recently as last September, that prediction wasn’t looking so good. But Bluesky finally got some traction around (and especially after) the election, and the juice it picked up wasn’t fleeting.

This isn’t a diss on Mastodon. If I could only use one of these platforms, Mastodon would be it. By far the highest signal-to-noise ratio amongst my timelines, and by far the best engagement with my readers and listeners. It’s a nerdy platform for nerdy users, but with its commitment to true openness, including APIs, it’s also the platform with by far the best and most varied client apps.

In the old world, there was one Twitter-like network that mattered: Twitter itself. In the new world, there exists a diaspora of refugees across these Twitter-like platforms, which have each carved out their own vibes. There are pros and cons to the old world and new. I found it much easier, mentally, to have just one place to check, and that place was available through truly excellent native apps for both Mac and iOS. Now that my attention is spread across multiple such networks — (in order of attention) Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and, last and definitely least, but still there, X — I feel more scattered mentally, but I’m also pretty sure I spend less time overall using all of them combined today than I did for Twitter’s peak decade-or-so, and that I’m better off for that.

It helps, too, that the first-party apps for Bluesky and Threads are mediocre on iOS (and Threads, oddly, is quite slow everywhere) and can only be used via the web on the Mac — they don’t even have bad Mac client apps, they have no Mac client apps. Helps that is, insofar as I therefore spend less time using them. I’m greatly looking forward to Tapbots’s upcoming Bluesky client, Phoenix, but in the back of my mind I’m vaguely worried that Phoenix might ultimately make me less productive because the additional joy and efficiency it will add to my Bluesky experience will lead me to spend more time there than I should. A good problem to have.

What I didn’t see coming in May 2023 was Meta’s successful launch of Threads that summer. The core problem with Threads is that I don’t think there’s a true vision behind it, other than serving to fuck with Elon Musk and X. It’s always been kind of interesting and kind of fun, and has never been toxic. (Meta’s much-ballyhooed “there’s a new sheriff in town and we aim to please him” content-moderation policy changes in January have seemingly had no effect whatsoever on the tenor or activity on Threads.) But it’s never been really interesting or really fun. It’s a platform without a soul. It aspires to be anodyne, which is very different than empowering users not to feel like they’ve got to dodge a never-ending barrage of turds being thrown by the angry chaos monkeys who’ve overrun X. If Threads does have a vibe, that vibe is blandness.

But so while Threads bursting onto the scene in summer 2023 maybe delayed Bluesky’s blossoming, I suspect Threads might have ultimately helped Bluesky by opening the minds of many Twitter refugees into just trying some new alternatives. One size doesn’t fit all. Nor one social network.

The bottom line is that I think my May 2023 prediction is proving out. Bluesky is what Twitter of yore aspired to be. Users are in control of what they see in their timelines. Sub-communities are vibrant. Shitbirds get blocked and added to blocklists, not elevated to the top of reply threads because they paid for a blue-check power-up. The centralized nature of the Bluesky platform gives the hardcore federation zealots the heebie-jeebies, but that’s what makes Bluesky understandable and approachable, and I think clearly more performant than Mastodon can ever hope to be. It’s a really cool concept for a Twitter-like platform that, after a slow build-up, has turned into an actual really cool platform, whose focus, first and foremost, is putting users first.