Escaping the outrage machine – Is Bluesky becoming a thing?

As my Thought Sparks guest Steven Brill points out, absence of accountability for content posted on social media sites, plus algorithms that favor content likely to attract eyeballs have led to an often-toxic mix of misinformation, negative speech and feelings of anger or disgust beating out more wholesome content in many corners of the Internet. Can social media site Bluesky offer an alternative?

“We’re out of here” – Austrian Airlines’ cheeky announcement that it was closing its account on X.

Social media’s issues – where do we even start?

By now, social media as we know it is a far cry from what we expected in the early, innocent days of the web.  The platforms are a hotbed of disinformation. There is no longer one source of truth. Most people get their “news” from sources that don’t adhere to standards of journalism and may be pushing an agenda. Social comparisons on sites like Instagram make teenagers, especially, feel anxious and depressed. We’re spending time on screens and not with each other, sparking an acceleration in a trend that was already underway, of social isolation.  For more, see Steven’s excellent book “The Death of Truth,” in which he lays out all the details.  See also Jonathan Haidt’s fascinating book “The Anxious Generation” about the issues that phones, more specifically social media on modern smartphones, have created for a whole generation of youth.

Lately, of course, social media platforms have become enmeshed in debates about the values held by their owners, the people permitted to post on them, the ideas being forwarded and even the alignment between the advertisers who support the platforms and their users.  To read about my take on the coming advertising bubble bursting, check this out.    

But what, really are our alternatives?  Once a site has accumulated users, and creators have committed substantial resources to building up a following, it makes for very sticky engagement and it’s hard to leave (a point that Cory Doctorow makes in explaining why platforms can very easily get abusive over time).  That gives platforms an incredible amount of power and without some constraints, every incentive to pursue their own interests at the expense of their users.

Protocols vs. Platforms

I was intrigued, therefore, to learn about the social media site Bluesky, originally funded from within Twitter by one of its co-founders Jack Dorsey (who has since stepped back from his involvement with the platform).  As one observer notes, “Bluesky’s Jay Graber (the CEO) recognized, smartly, that having Bluesky set up as a public benefit corporation separate from Twitter enabled it to do some important things. This included pivoting to building out a service that could take people fleeing Twitter, while also setting it up to be (hopefully) more sustainable long term. It allowed Bluesky to neatly detach from Twitter right after Elon took over and canceled the contract that Twitter previously had with the Bluesky team.”

The idea behind Bluesky was that it would separate out the provision of the protocol layer of a social media site from the service level of the site.  By building on Bluesky, platforms such as Twitter could provide the front end that users interact with from the nuts and bolts of the underlying functionality.  As Mike Masnick, an observer of the Internet scene suggests, the cure for much of what ails social media sites is to build protocols, not platforms.  As he says,

Build protocols, not platforms.

To be clear, this is an approach that would bring us back to the way the internet used to be. The early internet involved many different protocols—instructions and standards that anyone could then use to build a compatible interface. Email used SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). Chat was done over IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Usenet served as a distributed discussion system using NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol). The World Wide Web itself was its own protocol: HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP.

In the past few decades, however, rather than building new protocols, the internet has grown up around controlled platforms that are privately owned. These can function in ways that appear similar to the earlier protocols, but they are controlled by a single entity. This has happened for a variety of reasons. Obviously, a single entity controlling a platform can then profit off of it. In addition, having a single entity can often mean that new features, upgrades, bug fixes, and the like can be rolled out much more quickly, in ways that would increase the user base.”

As he concludes, more open protocols “would push the power and decision-making out to the ends of the network, rather than keeping it centralized among a small group of very powerful companies.”  And that was the vision on which Bluesky was originally created.

Twitter’s meltdown with a great many users sort of forced the hand of the Bluesky people to build the services layer as well – creating a familiar-looking and feeling app that people could use the way they used to use Twitter.  So while it offers what it calls a distributed protocol, it’s also in the business of offering an app.

So is Bluesky the next Twitter?

In the wake of the US election, sign-ups at Bluesky have (no pun intended) skyrocketed.  Traffic was up 500% in the wake of the recent election alone.  More than 115,000 users deleted their accounts on X (Twitter).  According to Bluesky CEO Jay Graver in an interview with NPR, the site has been growing by a million users a day, day after day.

Bluesky’s secret sauce appears to be that it gives users more control over how they receive posts than other sites that use a monster master algorithm.  As Bobbie Allyn from NPR explains it, “By default, there are three main feeds: One shows accounts you follow, another shows what your friends follow and a "discover" feed surfaces posts linked to your interests.

Bluesky allows users to reach beyond these three by developing their own customized algorithm for, say, just content about cats, or only posts about a sports team or type of music. Because of this customization, Graber says there are more than 50,000 different Bluesky feeds available.

And Bluesky, she argues, is "billionaire-proof," since the company is not one centralized feed of content, but rather a "protocol" from which endless feeds can be created. Think of a protocol like email, or the internet itself, Graber says. It would be difficult for a single person or company to control it, since the underlying technology is open-sourced and maintained by many contributors, like Wikipedia.”

Unlike Twitter, in which users have little control over what the algorithm pushes to them, users on Bluesky give you a lot of choice in how you want to filter content.  Even as Twitter removed popular safety features (such as blocking people you block from seeing your profile and reading what you’ve written), Bluesky offers genuine blocking and a number of “anti-toxicity” features such as the ability to detach your posts from someone else’s quote posts, making it harder for the trolls to pile on.

Bluesky also does not run advertisements, nor does it harvest user data to train generative AI models – unlike X, which does both.  This has led to a public mass exodus of many users segments from X and many are discovering Bluesky.

Of course, for now, Bluesky is relatively tiny, and like early-stage Twitter or Facebook or any other the other social platforms the early adopters tend to be innocently enthusiastic.  When a platform gets really huge, the temptation to let the worst of human nature let loose is often considerable.

We’re giving it a try

So, my social media team and I couldn’t help but explore Bluesky a bit and see what it’s like.  You’ll find my profile here.   There’s not too much there yet, but hey, when I first joined Twitter (at SXSW in 2009, no less) it was also small, charming and fresh.   I can’t believe that was 15 full years ago.

So hop on and give me / us a follow   We’d love to hear what you think!
In the meantime, for those of you celebrating Thanksgiving, we wish you a pleasant celebration with family and friends (and no trolls).