On December 11, 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced a bold new effort to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. It would be incubated within Twitter, but the ultimate goal of the project would be to “allow [Twitter] to access and contribute to a much larger corpus of public conversation, focus our efforts on building open recommendation algorithms which promote healthy conversation, and [force Twitter] to be far more innovative than in the past.” He named it Bluesky.
After Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, Bluesky was spun off and eventually launched an app of the same name. Early growth was healthy but manageable, driven largely by invitations. Friends invited friends; nerdy techies made up a large percentage of the early commentariat. Many were Twitter expatriots fed up with Musk’s management of their beloved social media platform—an echo of earlier decampments on the right, when those unhappy with the Dorsey regime fled to Parler and Gab. The sharp politicization of X during the 2024 election, however, led to a tipping point: whereas the right-wing networks had peaked around 2 to 4 million active users, Bluesky exploded to over 42 million. Suddenly, social media had balkanized: X was for right-wingers, and Bluesky had become Lib Twitter.
Now, many are starting to ask questions about Bluesky. Is the platform really an idealized version of X for the liberal intelligentsia, where science and facts get their due? Is the balkanization of social media actually a good thing for democracy? With Trump Derangement Syndrome running rampant, is Bluesky trapped in a doom loop of its own making?
