Nothing But BlueSky From Now On (?)

 

By Don Curren

                                                        

A year ago in early December I posted a blog piece about the long, excruciating death of Twitter and my intention to focus primarily on Blue Sky in the coming months. 

That post was more personal than my usual offerings. It provided a brief chronicle of my mostly positive experiences with Twitter in the mid-2010s, when I really got active on it, through late 2023, when I got inactive as a result of Elon Musk acquiring and degrading it.

One of the many friends I’ve made on BlueSky, ‪@paulaflucas.bsky.social, suggested recently I do a follow up, and it seemed like a good idea.

So here it is.

Firstly: to say I feel vindicated in my decision to give up Twitter would be an understatement.

Twitter’s deterioration under Musk has proven more radical and complete than I expected.

Musk was already accommodating and fostering noxious content from the far right a year ago. But his flagrant disregard for the truth and enthusiasm for mobilizing Twitter in support of Trump’s campaign took him into new dimensions of mendacity, in my view.

Twitter was a flawed but valuable realm of uninhibited discussion encompassing a broad range of views. Musk transformed it into a poisoned landscape defined by relentless animosity and a pervasive disregard for truth and accuracy.

BlueSky seemed very different.

I began participating in BlueSky in the summer of 2023, when it was still an invite-only forum; I joined when there were about 263,000 members. Since then, BlueSky has expanded to about 25 million.

Qualitatively, my experience with BlueSky has been markedly favourable.

After an initial period of frustration when I all seemed to see were posts by the prolifically and creatively online science fiction writer John Scalzi, I bit the bullet and started seeking out more people to follow, both those I knew from Twitter and the “real world,” and those I didn’t but who looked promising.

I also started engaging more actively, liking, “reskeeting,” and posting my own content in various media.

My experience on BlueSky quickly blossomed into something that rivalled, and then exceeded, my best experiences on Twitter.

I found myself interacting in positive, creative ways with quite a few people. A few times, I got involved in spontaneous, self-organizing, creative exchanges with people I hadn’t known before Bluesky, which was deeply rewarding.

And there was remarkably little downside. I had only a handful of the kind of acrimonious encounters that one associates with the Twitter of the 2020s.

Yes, the range of perspectives was arguably narrow, at least compared to more established social media. But if a higher level of calm, courtesy and overall positivity was the product of being in a “lib-left echo chamber” …. well, “bring it on” was my reaction.

It seemed like the majority of accounts on BlueSky, or at least a healthy plurality, were there to share – their ideas, opinions, photography, writing, whatever – rather than antagonize, bloviate, or monetize.

It might not have been an electronic town square, but it was like a cyberspace salon, where people were free to talk, engage, collaborate, or just linger and listen, without being bullied.

That was my experience of BlueSky for about my first year or so on the platform.

To be honest, I’d have to say it’s changed in the last several weeks as the platform saw a huge influx of people driven away from Twitter/X as Elon Musk corrupted it into a propaganda machine for odious people and perspectives.

The sheer volume of new users has tended to overwhelm the feeling of community in earlier days.

There’s also, in my experience at least, a tilt toward more stridency. There seem to be more accounts that identify themselves primarily by ideological leaning rather than by interests or type of content.

More concerningly, there are also more accounts that are motivated primarily by the desire to make money: accounts that tout cryptocurrencies, or NFTs, or trading tips for more conventional markets, and even the phishing fembots that became such a nuisance on Twitter.

 I suppose that’s an inevitable product of the platform’s rapid growth. Once it was seen as harboring a critical mass of potential marks, the advent of strictly commercial accounts – and outright scammers - was inevitable.

As reported recently by the MIT Technology Review, there has been a surge in the number of accounts that impersonate journalists or other high-profile personalities in order to perpetrate scams.

Still a small company, Bluesky has struggled to keep up with the influx of impersonation accounts and other repercussions of rapid growth. It told the MIT publication it has “updated its impersonation policy to be more aggressive and would remove impersonation and handle-squatting accounts.”

But Bluesky’s response to the issues surrounding “trust and safety” have disappointed and alienated some users, particularly in the last few days.

‪The user @chadloder.bsky.social, who describes himself as  a “community activist, cybersecurity expert, citizen journalist based in Los Angeles,” posted this Thursday: “Taking an indefinite break from Bluesky. The lack of transparency from Bluesky's leadership team on their trust & safety policies, their process for evolving those policies, where they draw the line on harmful conduct, it's not worth me investing more time here until the policies OR tools catch up.”

It’s important to note individual Bluesky users retain the right to fully block accounts they deem intrusive or obnoxious, unlike on X.

In fact, a strategy of immediately blocking troublesome accounts rather than engaging in pointless “debate” with them is widely credited with helping maintain the civil atmosphere and keep tendencies toward trollery contained.

That ethos, and some judicious moderation by the platform itself, will hopefully maintain at least some of the playful, generous, and supportive climate that characterized BlueSky in the early days.

Ultimately, BlueSky users have more power to tailor the experience, to create the environment they want to be part of, than users on the larger and more well established social-media platforms.

There is no governing algorithm on BlueSky - no mechanism that determines what you’ll see based on criteria aimed at maximizing engagement on the platform.

It’s algorithms designed primarily to drive engagement, often by giving priority to provocative, unhinged content, which have contributed to the despoilation of other social-media platforms.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with algorithms. They can be very helpful in isolating content you’re actually interested in seeing from the vast torrent of content that appears even on a relatively small platform like BlueSky.

You can use them to design your own Bluesky experience, to add specialized feeds to your masthead such as “Quiet Posters,” which highlights posts from people you follow who don’t post very often.

Or you can just hit the “Following” tab and see what the people you follow are posting in real time, without any algorithmic mediation.

So, regardless of the composition of the population that uses it, Bluesky is structurally different from other social media platforms, and that structural difference tends to make it superior to them.

That’s what makes me more hopeful about BlueSky than any of its competitors.

But s it really all blue skies on BlueSky?

The answer is Yes – but with one significant reservation.

It's my concern about the high probability of enshittification.

“Enshittification” is a term first coined by the science fiction writer and cultural commentator Cory Doctorow.

It refers to the process wherein the owners of social media platforms initially create an attractive environment to bring users in, and then degrade, or “enshittify,” the platform as they seek ways to monetize it by methods such as introducing and/or prioritizing advertising.

With no advertising or other visible means of revenue and a rapidly expanding user base, it seems likely Bluesky will have to develop some ways of monetizing the platform. The investors currently funding will eventually want a return of some kind.

Bluesky has mused about creating a subscription version, “Bluesky+,” which would offer premium features like “higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames,” according to a post from the company.

Sounds harmless enough. And if such measures help Bluesky survive and prosper, while preserving the structural features that make it uniquely attractive among social media, then they seem pretty unobjectionable.

But after having watched one platform after another succumb to incremental enshittification, it’s hard not to see any tinkering with Bluesky’s current model as potentially presaging something more concerning.

How vulnerable Bluesky is to enshittification and how far enshittification proceeds on the platform might depend, to an extent, on how it sees its own mandate.

If it embraces a purely quantitative objective, say extending its current rapid expansion to the point where it rivals or even displaces X as the go-to, text-based social media platform, the resulting need for capital could push enshittification past levels that user can sustain.

If it embraces a qualitative approach, perhaps aiming to be niche player where freedom, flexibility and civility prevail, it won’t need to raise revenues through excessive enshittification.

The coming months could prove pivotal for Bluesky.

My optimistic/utopian side believes it might be able to survive intact and remain a mostly civil but nonetheless lively and interesting corner of the internet.

My realistic/cynical side thinks that enshittification is inevitable, and that in a year or two, or maybe more … or maybe less.

I ended my piece a year ago saying I would be on Bluesky “until the enshittification starts there, at least, and we have to do this whole thing all over again … "

The good news is that hasn’t happened yet, and, despite the growing pains of the last few months, Bluesky remains a decent and enjoyable social media venue.

I’m hoping against hope that it will stay that way. At least for 2025 …