Why is everyone talking about Bluesky right now?
😎 Weekend plans? LMK in the responses. I am taking Slack off my phone.
Issue #213: there’s no such thing as a “vaccine skeptic” + how whimsy got expensive
A coworker told me their mom texted them on Tuesday to ask “What’s Bluesky??” That’s how you know an app is breaking through.
It’s been Bluesky Week in my life (I also got a text from a not-super-online friend: “Are you on Bluesky?”). I finally gave in and created an account — I have :: checks notes :: four followers. The vibe, as Ryan Broderick puts it in Garbage Day, is “millennial roommate board game night”: nostalgic yet slightly unhinged. Sam Biddle calls it “LARPing using Twitter.”
Bluesky is now the #1 free app in the app store, ahead of ChatGPT and Threads. It surpassed 21 million users yesterday. Bluesky engineer Jaz built a live growth tracker. You can see clearly that it truly blew up over the last two weeks:
The platform is still tiny, comparatively. It’s 8% the size of Threads (275M monthly active users) and ~7% the size of X (300M monthly active users). But it has the most momentum, partially because it’s got cultural wind at its back. It’s owned by a public benefit corporation, a for-profit entity whose ostensible goal is to make a positive impact on society (though there’s no way to legally hold them to that). Its codebase is open source. It has 20 employees. Its mission? To drive “open and decentralized public conversation,” pretty much the polar opposite of what tech giants aimed to do in the 2010s.
In 2024, we’re tired of watching tech execs grandstand and profit on attention and expression (see: Anil Dash’s “Don’t call it a Substack”). It’s refreshing to be part of something that doesn’t feel slickly designed to sell your time to the highest bidder.
One more thing: Bluesky’s network is smaller than Threads’, but it feels larger because, as Aaron Ross Powell explains, the app is less personalized by default. On Threads, you may never see what’s trending globally because you’re given a narrow algorithmic feed based on what it thinks you like. (I got assigned to a “New York City” feed somehow, so 80% of my recs are stuff about walkability and Jane Jacobs.) Bluesky, on the other hand, gives you a straight-up reverse-chron feed from people you follow, plus a global “Discover” page with viral hits. As a result, it feels more like one big party.
Personally, I think Bluesky is fine for millennials who want to Marty McFly back to 2014. It’s a good Twitter clone. But long-term, I wonder if the new Twitter is… no Twitter at all? Maybe humanity is evolving past posting 280-to-300-character blurbs? Technology is so much better than it was in 2006. Maybe we don’t need to talk in soundbites anymore?
💬 Good quotes
- From an interview with a 57-year-old Mike Tyson that I surreptitiously linked in yesterday’s newsletter: “The most successful people have the biggest ego, but the lowest self-esteem.”
- Marketing and branding consultant Michelle Wiles on how whimsy became expensive: “Unlike stereotypical luxury — stoic, serious, refined — [today’s most popular] brands put forth fun, personality, and a sense of surrealism that aligns to what’s aspirational today.” Time to purchase my $2,000 shearling hamster bag, I guess!
- People are throwing around the words “vaccine skeptic” so much we barely know what they mean. Isn’t a skeptic — from the Greek skepsis, to inquire — someone who questions, who doesn’t blindly accept overused language as fact? Albert Burneko in Defector: “A person who merely refuses to learn what can be known is not a skeptic, but rather an ignoramus; a person who raises questions but does not seek their answers is not a skeptic, but a bullshitter.”
A writing… tip?
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