Bluesky, a Twitter-style 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 feeds, or shadowbanning, or impersonation, or engagement farming, or pornography. Can Bluesky be the solution to all this woes, and a lasting replacement for the site that was once Twitter? I really doubt it.

Woe that people, myself included, are even inspired to ask the question. While white supremacy, scams and porn are real and are exacerbating the problems on X and other social media, I have previously written in The Atlantic Ocean about a problem that I consider superior to all the others: people are just not supposed to talk to each other so much. The demise of X is a sign that we will soon be free of social media, and the compulsive, constant attention-seeking that it has normalized. Counterintuitive is the rise of Bluesky Also a good sign, because so many people are still trying to hold on to the past. Giving up social media will take time, and it will lead to relapse.

Despite all its growth, Bluesky is still far behind Meta’s Threads. Mark Zuckerberg recently told investors that his Twitter-like app is adding 1 million users each day. But numbers alone don’t tell the full story. Meta added buttons to access Threads from Instagram, so any of its 2 billion users can scroll straight to it, even if they never post there. Bluesky, meanwhile, seems to be attracting real users, especially in the United States want to 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 scope of its connections. Twenty years ago, when social networking was new, it was easier to develop a rich, broad network because no one had one anymore. MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn helped people build databases of the connections they already had: friends, family, classmates, colleagues. Twitter was one of the first social networks to encourage people to connect with anyone – building a following of strangers. That, like its signature short text format, made Twitter what it was. It became, among other things, a distinctive location to follow global events live and to share and connect with journalism. It was also a place where brands could communicate with their customers and where companies could provide customer service.

Bluesky has not yet found its distinctive identity or purpose. But for me, one of the many users who started using the service in earnest this week, it feels more like the early days of social networking than anything else in recent history. The messages I’ve seen and posted are stupid and awkward instead of smart and online. For now, Bluesky evokes the sense of carefree seriousness that once – truly and truly – blanketed the Internet as a whole. Gen Now that strange pleasure itself can be rediscovered: I felt something similar when I watched 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 this decade than it was 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 continue to grow after this week? Whatever happens, I still hope that social media itself will disappear. But in the meantime, hundreds of millions of people have grown accustomed to this way of interacting with friends and strangers, browsing the news, asserting identities, picking fights, and building or desiring cultural capital. These unhealthy habits will be difficult to break. And so we have no choice but to try to keep them going for however long we can.