In the war over disgruntled users of the platform once known as Twitter, Bluesky has had a banner week. The decentralized social network has added at least 1 million users in the past seven days. That growth is the latest point on a trend line: when Elon Musk degrades the usability of X or breaks news of some right-wing political maneuver, people look for a way out of his platform. In October, Bluesky added 500,000 users in a day after Musk toned down X’s ‘block’ feature. Bluesky also boomed when Musk said in September 2023 (without follow-up so far) that his site would put up a paywall. It also got a big influx when Musk battled Brazil’s Supreme Court in August.

Bluesky hasn’t exactly won the Twitter Wars. According to conventional statistics, this hasn’t come close yet. The platform reports a total of approximately 14.5 million users. This is reported by Meta’s Threads, which built it on the scaffolding of Instagram 275 million in a given month. But the Twitter Wars are really a series of small border skirmishes, and Bluesky has momentum in a big battle: the one over news and live events.

Threads, like Musk’s X, is hostile to both news organizations and news as a concept. Instagram boss Adam Mosseri made it clear from the moment Threads launched in the fall of 2023 that the platform would not be friendly to news and politics. Meta has taken care of that over the past year. It seems impossible for the Threads app to remain in an environment where a user only sees posts from accounts they want to follow. External links do not appear well in the site’s algorithmic feeds. To the extent that Threads is a home for “news,” it’s because it’s a hub for the weirdest liberal election conspiracy theories out there. Threads plays well with politically obtuse influencers and people who understandably just want to try out an app linked to their Instagram account. It’s a black hole for news exchange.

So what is Bluesky? Until this week, you might think of it as a small, clean lifeboat, moored on the side of a sinking cruise ship, where most of the passengers also have norovirus.

For more than a year, Bluesky has been the boat for left-wing Twitter refugees who were so fed up with Musk that they beat the masses by deciding not to stick around on his platform. That could have some echo chamber effects, not that such an outcome would be worse than being surrounded by the most annoying people on the Internet on X. (For example, a critical mass of Bluesky users were a good step behind the rest of the Internet). the internet last summer by recognizing that Joe Biden had no chance of political survival after his last debate performance.) live . The discourse there has steadily deteriorated, but the users of power have not fled en masse.

But while The site’s early adopters built substantial communities there. They have tried to imbue the app with social norms, such as encouraging users to post alt text with their images so that blind users can interact with it. They even gave Bluesky its own lore, a foundational piece for any social media site that wants to be anything. (If you arrive on Bluesky this month, you’ll see posts about a sensual pig named Alf. It’s just par for the course.)

The small team that runs Bluesky has loaded it with features that are not only good, but a direct rejection of the things the competitors are bad at. Musk allows blocked users to see the messages of the person who blocked them? Here’s Bluesky with a feature colloquially known as ‘the nuclear block’, which disables any interaction with anyone who has declared they don’t want to talk to you. Threads forces an algorithmic scroll down your throat? Here’s Bluesky with no algorithmic feeds, just customizable timelines that people can sign up for or manage themselves. Musk’s posts are inescapable on X, but I don’t know the name of Bluesky’s CEO, let alone see their posts all the time.

Bluesky seems to remember something important from what once made Twitter successful: news and sports. Twitter knew full well that these areas were its bread and butter. It introduced verification badges after a baseball manager sued the platform for helping someone impersonate him, and the result was a system that allowed users to easily check the authenticity of accounts. It became the public square for live sports, because it was the only place where people could exchange ooohs and aaahs and complaints about an offensive coordinator’s play-calling in real time on a Sunday afternoon. Twitter’s growth got a boost when enough people realized that Twitter was the place for everything from updates about a hurricane making landfall to talk about a late-night Portland Trail Blazers game.

Now we return. Bluesky does not trap users in non-chronological feeds. It only gives people what they ask for, in real time. It turns out that when lots of people join the fray, it creates a sense of controlled but beneficial chaos similar to what Twitter felt like for some of its earlier addicts around, say, 2014 or 2015. I’ve been using Bluesky for over a year, but I can’t claim to have seriously dived into it last weekend, when I noticed that the college football crowd was much more energetic and fun than what I’d seen on X this fall.

Ultimately, more power users should migrate, in part because Bluesky doesn’t restrict access to their work as X, Meta, and Google have so often done. There are no bought and paid for blue checks flooding the zone. Bluesky makes no effort to give messages with links a lower priority. It encourages members of the news and sports media to spend time there and bring their audiences along. As journalist Matt Pearce put it: “It’s hard to describe as a journalist how grateful I am to have a text-based app that doesn’t suppress hyperlinks. I don’t know if people realize exactly how hostile the corporate Internet is to news.” In building a social media site that doesn’t go out of its way to be useless to people spreading or trying to consume news, Bluesky has been an innovator.

The platform already works as a place where people enjoy spending time on the internet, with a more customized experience and less online waste than they find on X. That will have to be the value proposition to win over more people at times when Musk is not Help Donald Trump return to power or take away more of the features that once made Twitter popular. “Fight cryptofascism by abandoning

Bluesky is winning a segment of the Internet not because it is ideological, but because it is customizable, allowing people to take more control over their online experience. It hasn’t supplanted For now, it’s a nice place to hang out with friends on the Internet, get news without getting confused, and take a break from thinking about Elon Musk.

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