What Bluesky Gets Right (and What It Doesn't)

When X started falling apart, people went looking for somewhere else to go. Mastodon was confusing. Threads was Facebook with the serial numbers filed off. Then Bluesky picked up, and it felt different in a way that took me a while to put my finger on.

The difference is that Bluesky isn’t really an app. It’s a protocol, closer to email than to Instagram. No single company owns it, it can’t be bought, and you don’t have to use the official app to be on it.

The part I keep coming back to is that your audience is portable. A journalist can set their handle to a domain they control (@name.apnews.com, say). Leave the AP, change the handle, keep the followers. The platform can’t hold your audience hostage, which is exactly what made Twitter so hard to leave.

Other things it gets right: no ads, chronological feeds by default, good tools for muting words and building your own feeds. It feels like 2011 in a good way.

Now the problems. Moderation on Bluesky is mostly user-driven. That sounds empowering until you notice who ends up doing the work. New users and people who already get harassed shouldn’t have to assemble block lists before they can feel safe. Decentralization doesn’t make harmful content go away. It decides who has to deal with it, and right now the answer is “you.”

And then there’s the obvious one. There aren’t enough people on it. For most users it still isn’t a replacement for anything.

Interesting architecture and a working platform are different things. Bluesky has the first one.