Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “Star Wars” director Rian Johnson, NBC’s Ben Collins, and the model Chrissy Teigen. It’s no accident that the most exuberant and vocal promoters of Bluesky are famous 30-something millennials who are also famously proficient social media users: folks like Rep. This kind of jubilant, unhinged environment is what people who spend all day online live for - even if, ultimately, we’ve all been here before and we have a sense of where it’s inevitably going. For some reason, one day, everyone posted interminably about “ALF,” the 1980s sitcom about a wacky alien. Even the glitches, such as a bug that lets bots drag you into endless “ropes” - lovingly termed hellthreads - are cheered as communal events. Users love it, I think, because it feels like a homecoming. Gleeful, barely controlled chaos.īeing on Bluesky is like that, but, for a lot of users it’s paired with a heaping dose of nostalgia for that experience, for what now looks like the golden age of social media. Earnest news items ticked past inscrutable jokes that disappeared behind someone getting furious at an airline company. The best reference point, again, is early-days Twitter I’m old enough to remember logging on in the late ’00s and being lost and faintly dumbstruck by the scene there. It’s funny, thought-provoking, gross, libidinal, and infuriating, all at once. At its best (and maybe also its worst) social media is like tapping into the live-wire id of a thick slice of humanity. It’s a raw and unfiltered flood of content. Instead of tweets you send “skeets,” threads are called ropes and there’s no direct messaging. There were reconnections between old online friends, an aggressive pile-on of a well known writer, and wide-eyed celebrity and politician accounts just posting through it all.īluesky is shamelessly derivative and rudimentary. Every refresh brought genuinely inscrutable memes, posts from an AI duck account that spewed gibberish, and a torrent of nude selfies. When I logged on Thursday, it was to the kind of wild, elated scrum that’s all but become extinct on mainstream social networks in the 2020s. Last week, when thousands of people got those invitations, suddenly, in online and techie circles, at least, AI was on the sidelines, and it was all anyone was talking about. In March, when Bluesky launched in invite-only beta, few had even heard of it. Many have never been more eager to find a Twitter alternative, after all, given all the ways Musk has made it more unpleasant to use. When Elon Musk took over, he cut it off from Twitter, and now, ironically, Bluesky may become Twitter’s most viable direct competitor. Funded as an in-house initiative by former Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, Bluesky began in 2019 as an effort to build a protocol for a decentralized social network - basically, a way to make social media work more like email, where different clients such as Gmail and Outlook can talk to each other. I spent the last week on the surging social media upstart Bluesky trying to find out why, and discovered something alarming: We’ve entered social media’s reboot phase.īluesky looks and feels just like Twitter did 10 years ago, and there’s a reason for that: It was born in the belly of the bird app. It’s a glitchy copy of Twitter, circa 2013. The buzziest startup in Silicon Valley in May of 2023 is not an AI outfit or a metaverse play.
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