A week ago hardly anybody had heard of social media app Bluesky, but then seemingly overnight it exploded to more than 50,000 users. As with the likes of Mastodon and Hive before it, Bluesky was being heralded as the new Twitter; a place people could go to escape the smothering blanket of blue tick sagas, hate speech, politics and Elon Musk’s algorithmically recommended posts.
But before you go leaping for your phone to download this social saviour of an app, the most important thing to know right now is that it’s not going to let you in. In an attempt to keep growth organic, Bluesky is invite-only; users get one invite to give out every two weeks.
Bluesky is available on app stores, but you need an invitation to get in.
This may sound like a huge hurdle, but it’s also a major part of Bluesky’s current appeal. There’s a grass-is-always-greener effect combined with the lure of exclusivity and good old-fashioned FOMO that just makes the service seem cool.
Not to mention the fact that many of the screenshots making their way from Bluesky to Twitter carry the promise of some of that early web culture energy, where people are being weird and funny for the sake of it rather than for clout, and few users are being mean or incendiary. The problem for Bluesky will be nurturing and cementing that culture in such a way that it persists, even when the floodgates open and millions of users pile in.
Indeed, some of the most interesting things that appear to have happened on Bluesky thus far have happened in part because the platform is so new. A proposed AI solution for blocking nudity is apparently not working as yet, so unclothed people are still common. Controversial pundit Matt Yglesias was subjected to a mass pile-on of harassment, including someone (jokingly?) threatening to beat him with hammers, but the ability to block people had not yet been implemented. And some cheeky makers of bot accounts created a thread so immense it would break the site for anyone who interacted with it.
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Bluesky chief executive Jay Graber has endeared herself to the app’s community by being transparent (and occasionally playful) in dealing with these issues and others. In a post warning of the dangerously long string of replies, she said the team had dubbed this issue “the hellthread”, and that users should try to ignore it until a fix was devised. She also (unsuccessfully) begged users to stop referring to posts as “skeets”, which is a portmanteau of “sky” and “tweets” but also sounds unfortunately vulgar.
Major Twitter personalities including Dril have appeared at Bluesky, as have politicians, journalists and assorted celebrities. But in general it seems like Twitter; largely anonymous people enjoying spontaneous conversations.
Bluesky’s similarities to Twitter should not be surprising, since the company was actually spun out from Twitter. In 2019, Twitter founder (and then CEO) Jack Dorsey funded a team of five to research a decentralised standard that would eventually replace Twitter. At the time — as expressed in a surprisingly prophetic thread — Dorsey was worried about centralisation driving a culture of outrage, and the propsect that Twitter could become privately owned and abused.