Bluesky is a Flop and So is Everything Else

We're at the end of an era of social media, and I don't know what happens next.

Flickr.com/Joey Zanotti

For years of my life, an enormous amount of my job consisted of sitting in front of a computer looking at Twitter. This was embarrassing at the time, of course, but it was also basically a necessity for any writer or journalist responsible for covering daily news, which made it feel a little bit better. Or at least that’s what I told myself then.

I still spend a bunch of my day looking at Twitter. But by now it’s more out of habit than because it’s a legitimate use of time. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, social media — and Twitter in particular — isn’t what it used to be. The newsfeeds are scrambled, the content is increasingly reactionary, scammy, or just plain boring, and the routine function of the site is frequently disrupted by technical difficulties or stupid user policies. Other social networks have been subsumed completely by an influx of short-form, steadily more formulaic video and sponsored content, or they’re Facebook, where you can always find 5,000 of the dumbest baby boomers imaginable arguing about something that never happened in real life.

For a lot of us, this is a jarring transition. Millennials and every generation afterward essentially grew up with the social web, learning the trends and norms of various online communication platforms as they came and went. Over time, a lot of these disparate trends — the baffling oversharing of Tumblr and Livejournal, the caustic shock humor of 4Chan and SomethingAwful, the popularity-vote hivemind of Reddit — coalesced into something of a monoculture that spread across the userbases of all these sites, becoming most visible on Twitter. I can’t argue that Twitter was the biggest or the most popular or the best social media network, but for years it was unequivocally the fastest-paced: the most essential for breaking news and up-to-date trends, a constant aggregation machine that surfaced and recycled content in an unending feed while simultaneously facilitating direct interactions between its users. It was just as easy to find actual friends on Twitter as it was to gain an audience, an intoxicating combination that made it really hard to log off.

It’s understandable, then, that with Twitter’s demise comes a lot of people who feel lonely and adrift. We want our fix — of both immediate news and information and immediate connection with other people — and unfortunately, there really isn’t a place to get that anymore. Twitter clones have come and gone — I don’t think anyone is still on “Post,” for instance, and Mastodon is exclusively populated by 12 attendees of a leftist microbiology webinar — but by far the most notable newcomer is Bluesky, a Twitter-like app started by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

But here’s the rub: Bluesky sucks.