Hello Bluesky

As the microblogging site proposing to supplant Twitter, Bluesky at first ignited pundit suspicion, with columnists denouncing echo chambers – as if the first thing you’d do to improve your online input wouldn’t simply be blocking them. Indeed, what the wild west internet of yore mostly offered was escape portals from the opinion-making complex, towards unplanned surprise. With luck you could teach yourself to understand the world in other, better ways, and swerve away towards new companions and new cultural adventures.

Old Twitter as a platform was somewhat different: a ‘public square’, as clowns still call it, where you set aside this drive to escape. Certainly there was a time when anyone on the site could talk with anyone else. But its tech confronts you with far more than you can process, so you don’t easily spot that everyone was not there. The universality is an illusion: the online term for this imagination gap is ‘being too online’. But there was a war on curiosity in predigital media too – that’s what drove our need to slip out from under it.

And what was new on Twitter (and good) was when an account with an arcane pop-cultural pun for a name was nettling its media betters into an amusing meltdown. Every day that these cheeky nobodies did battle with those seeking to structure our thoughts, and revealed them to be chumps, had the political feel of a levelled field.

But then Elon Musk took charge, futzing with the contours of his new plaything, to wrest advantage back towards the chumps, from his favoured (paid-up) users at the bottom to our insect tech overlords up top. A cry-laughtrack to his own stolen jokes, infested with bizarre scams, Twitter now helped deliver something that combined both scam and joke: Trump’s victory. And since then the inane but hotly buzzing billionaire-class hive have been prancing with impunity, the Ketamine Bladder at their head, spiteful, thin-skinned, frantic for the admiration of people he disdains, flooding the zone with his horrible simulacrum of both culture and thought.

In reaction against what had already become frog-boilingly unpleasant, a posting population of several million has now migrated to Bluesky, and alternatives are on notice, from Mark Zuckerberg’s dreary Threads to the shadowy social-media operations of the Chinese government. If anyone trusts Musk’s numbers (as they should not), Twitter remains for now by some way the market-leader, but its use-value is fast vanishing, as even the more sluggish old-school news and comment organisations recognise. Time stamps have been switched off and links to sites beyond itself are routinely throttled. As a source for updates on the South Korean pseudo-coup, for example, Bluesky was just better, soup to nuts.

Back in the late 1990s, when many still imagined that computers were less bad for the planet than paper factories, the looming end of print media was regularly celebrated. As more and more op-ed real estate was handed over to the punditry, investigative reporting became devalued, as both expense and political liability. We were told that blog-based ‘citizen journalism’ would take up the slack, until the microblogging turn rendered irrelevant all models of investigative reporting, old and new. The downside of Twitter’s pundit-mockery was that it was largely still responding to pundit-worldview, amplifying and recirculating it.

And now the worst of Musk’s trolls merely replicate the worst habits of the conventional-wisdom wormtongues: a narcissistic bully-worship combined with endless freedom-of-speech rhetoric (meaning always the suppression of free speech unless you’re palling up with transphobes and neo-Nazis as a point of principle). And so the Adults in the Room, stripped of their Twitter role, arrive to dip a sneery toe into Bluesky – where they deservedly find themselves steered and parked well out of sight. They never learned to navigate the web’s stranger lore and smaller byways.

In Bluesky’s invite-only days, early adopters favoured a high-friction maze of runs and tunnels between distinct worldlets of interest and stance, whether furries or sex workers, or whoever else was around then (this was not even a year ago). If much of Old Twitter’s juice came from the discrete multitudes it housed, it was also always algorithmed to ramp up conflict among them. For now the Bluesky gamble is twofold: that 1) the internet of connection, amplification and pitiless visibility has entered its decadent era, because 2) Big Tech’s opaque top-down manipulations are revealed at last as uncomplicatedly anti-democratic and without good trade-offs.

All the same, as veterans of messageboards know, vigorous moderation was always the route to the best online discussion, if not necessarily the funniest. On Old Twitter such moderation was never not a messy chaos of confusing decisions. Since referees ever go unloved, dissatisfaction was easily weaponised. And once Musk removed all guard rails, harassment has derailed the last traces of traditional media oversight by swamping the zone in garbage.

Despite now hosting tens of millions of users, Bluesky still only employs a tiny number of moderators. Instead it has been outsourcing the process to users, aiming, for now, to function as a community that shapes its own environment and enjoyments collectively, via ‘starter packs’ (personalised lists of accounts exploring favoured topics) and a variety of easily tailored feeds, plus an extremely potent blocking and blocklisting mechanism. Blocking is instant and total: bigots, scolds and engagement-farming bots have little chance to wreck your conversations, and users frankly love this. Clout-seeking remains widely deprecated. The verification wars (personation v. status) have not so far proliferated. Context collapse is held at bay.

Yet every day the tree of the wider internet rots. As the demands of monetisation dominate upgrades, content-scraping robots are stealing your data and your creative distinctiveness, and hallucinating both back into further cyber-slop. The CEO of Bluesky, Jay Graber, insists her site is billionaire-proof, because its coding is open-source, as if we could all just go copy-and-paste our scattered netsteads somewhere out beyond all interference, self-expelled nomads once again. And if pile-ons and flamewars are quickly quenched within our walls, anger, grief, conflict and atrocity are still spiralling outside. Can blocking and coding protect us for long? Does a respectably unspiky liberal refuge – increasingly full as it is of displaced fingerwaggers and worse – have much political valence? We will soon need to overthrow the tycoons the centrists handed power to.

Yet this renewed glimpse of an earlier internet utopia has its heartening side: a panoply of shy and varied Miyazaki-style mini-kingdoms prioritising respite, weird self-care, stubborn freedoms of association. As fragile as it’s unplanned, Bluesky’s collective embrace of friction and fog may see a reconvening of shared and mutual unknowns such as long ago generated an internet full of curiosity and surprises.