Blue skies for microblogging?

BitDepth#1487

Mark Lyndersay

ALL THE buzz in social media has been about the “x-odus” from the platform formerly known as Twitter in the wake of the US presidential election and the role that its owner, Elon Musk, visibly played during the campaign.

Musk didn’t even bother trying to hide his gaming of the X algorithms to favour whatever he posted.

Weeks after the election, arbitrary Musk posts still jump to the top of the X feed. Given the defection of moderate voices from the platform, it’s hard to even gauge whether the increase in hard right conservative posts, offensive declarations and trolling are even attributable to the algorithm anymore, it just seems to be what’s left.

The chief beneficiary of the movement seems to be Bluesky, where posts almost doubled between August and September, then came close to doubling again by mid-November.

Prior to this, it was a ghost town, not too different from the earliest days of Twitter.

Microblogging, the unique mix of chat, posts, link exposure and conversations that Twitter brought to social media, didn’t immediately find an audience after the service launched in 2006.

I joined just over a year after it went live, in September 2007, and it was…quiet.

This was the early days of social media, when Hi5 and MySpace were a thing and nobody had any idea how all-consuming and influential online “friendships” would become.

But there was something intriguing about Twitter. The 256-character limit demanded clarity and brevity and minimal punctuation.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey began Bluesky as an experimental protocol within the company. In 2022, after Musk acquired Twitter, the ties between the companies were severed.

Development on the project, which uses a new domain name-based handle system managed by the open communication AT Protocol, began in earnest with the goal of creating a minimum viable system.

Dorsey left the Bluesky board in May.

Bluesky hit its current high of 23 million users faster than expected, but it’s way behind X, which has 318 million users and Threads, with 275 million.

The vibrancy of the recent surge in stats is captured admirably online in charts mapping Bluesky’s post count and author statistics (bsky.jazco.dev/stats).

The vibe on Bluesky, once you begin to explore its customisable filters and unique starter packs, is more user focused as a social experience than either X or Threads.

The problems with X are likely to be endemic, but so are the issues with Threads, which finds Meta again unable to let go of the lure of a controlling algorithm.

A Threads feed quickly begins to feel like a Facebook feed, with dissociative irrelevance and the powerful feel of machine oversight. Meta’s efforts to guide Threads only serves to unravel the potential of its tailoring.

Meta continues its dominance on sheer numbers, each of its products creating an ecosystem that binds users into the others. If you’re on Facebook, it’s pointless trying to ignore Messenger and, eventually, exploring Instagram. Getting to Threads and WhatsApp is almost inevitable after that.

Without that kind of purchased synergy (Meta bought two of those five apps) Twitter had a slow growth curve and it seems Bluesky will too.

Bluesky is also evolving in a fundamentally different online environment, with vigorous competition for attention on all sides.

But competition hasn’t stopped ambitious developers from trying to grab the photographers who made Instagram great. The developers of Foto want to create an alternative to Meta’s former image oasis for photographers uninterested in making Reels.

Foto, still in limited public beta, is fun to view and the images on the platform are striking, but the software landscape is littered with attempts to create a robust image gallery platform to rival IG.

Flickr limps along after being acquired and apparently forgotten by Yahoo, frozen in time. Has anyone ever signed up for 500px? Beme came and went, Lapse and Dispo are trying to meet today’s hip youth on their self-involved terms.

In this rapidly changing environment, Bluesky feels like an old idea revisited. But it might be better to describe it as an old idea refined. Social media apps often go astray either because of greed, poor execution of competitive strategy, or simply forgetting to deliver an engaging experience for the user.

Bluesky has the basics down, but it’s the users and their participation with the platform that will define its future.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there