Is Bluesky the new Twitter?

Blue skya Twitter-style, short-post social media site, has exploded in popularity since last week, adding 1 million users in that time. A lot of people hate X – especially if they hate Elon Musk, or Donald Trump, or Nazis, or algorithmic feedsor shadow banor imitation, or commitment agricultureor porn hustling. Could Bluesky be the solution to all these problems and a lasting replacement for the site that was once Twitter? I really doubt it.

Alas, people, myself included, have been inspired to ask the question themselves. Although white supremacy, scams, and porn are real and worsening problems on X and other social media, I’ve written before in Atlantic Ocean about a problem that I see as overriding all of these others: People just aren’t supposed to talk to each other that much. The decline of X is a sign that we may soon be free of social media and the compulsive, constant attention seeking that it normalized. Counterintuitive is the rise of Bluesky also a good sign as so many people are still trying to hold on to the past. Giving up on social media will take time and will inspire relapse.

For all its growth, Bluesky still trails Meta’s Threads – Mark Zuckerberg recently told the investors that his Twitter-like app adds 1 million users each day. But numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. Meta has added buttons to access Threads from Instagram, so any of its 2 billion users can slide right over, even if they never end up posting there. Bluesky, meanwhile, seems to be pulling in actual users, especially in the US, which lack to post and follow.

Read: The age of social media is coming to an end

A network of any kind – social, communicative, epidemiological – is only as effective as the extent of its connections. Two decades ago, when social networks were new, it was easier to develop a rich, wide network because no one had one yet. MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn helped people build databases of the connections they already had – friends, family, schoolmates, work colleagues. Twitter was among the first social networks to encourage people to connect with anyone—to build a following of strangers. That, as much as its distinctive, short text format, made Twitter what it was. Among other things, it became a distinctive meeting place to follow global events live and to share and engage in journalism. It was also a place for brands to interact with their customers, and for companies to provide customer service.

Bluesky has yet to find its distinctive identity or purpose. But for me, one user among many who started using the service in earnest this week, it feels more like the early days of social networking than anything else in recent memory. The posts I’ve seen and made are stupid and awkward instead of savvy and too online. For now, Bluesky invokes the sense of carefree seriousness that once—really and truly—covered the Internet at large. Gen Xers and Oldlennials who had already graduated college when Facebook started will remember the weird and wonderful experience of rediscovering lost friends on the service—people you hadn’t seen or heard from in years. Now the strange joy itself can be rediscovered: I’ve felt something similar when I saw my Bluesky migration plugin locate and automatically follow thousands of users I hadn’t seen on X or Twitter in years.

But the Internet’s media ecosystem is more fragmented in this decade than it was in the last. Uncertainty about the future of social media raises existential questions about the major platforms: Will TikTok be banned? Will X become state media? Will the Bluesky bubble grow beyond this week? Whatever happens, I still hope that social media itself goes away. Meanwhile, however, hundreds of millions of people have become accustomed to this way of interacting with friends and strangers, enjoying news, performing identities, picking matches, and amassing cultural capital, or yearning to do so. These unhealthy habits will be hard to shake. So we can’t help but try to keep them going as long as we can.