The Future Is Blue(sky)

Bluesky, the Twitter-but-not-Twitter social networking service that was founded by one of the original people who founded Twitter itself, is having a moment in the wake of Trump's re-election. As Twitter became a political weapon seized by Elon Musk, there was a collective breaking point that many others hit much earlier: it was time to find a new home. Maybe that home was Threads, Mastodon, or somewhere else on the internet entirely, but for a lot of people, it's been Bluesky.

Recently, Patrick made a personal shift towards checking Bluesky over Twitter, but the reason for that shift, while in the wake of [gestures at chaotic series of recent events], was actually because of an event much more subtle and personal. Patrick's also someone who's grown up in an era of the internet where social media, in some form, has felt ever-present. Rob, a few years older, had a slightly different journey.

You've probably heard enough about Bluesky at this point. We get it.

Nonetheless, here's how Rob and Patrick arrived at this moment. And no, you will not have to scroll past a picture of Musk if you read this.

Patrick: X/Twitter is a cesspool. It’s dangerous. It’s likely to become a weapon of the state. And yet, for too long, I have been unable to shake spending time there. I have hundreds of thousands of followers built up over more than a decade of work. I have carefully curated lists for games, politics, and sports that help inform me and waste my time. For a long time, it felt like Twitter was an important platform because it existed outside of my place of employment. It didn’t matter if I lost or left a job, because you could follow me on Twitter and we’d stay connected.

Habits are hard, man, and I suspect many, many people who loathe Elon Musk and what Twitter has become have, nonetheless, continued to spend time on Twitter, even if they won’t admit it.

But there was a moment a few weeks ago where, on a Discord call with Kinda Funny’s Blessing Adeoye Jr. ahead of a podcast recording, we started talking about social media habits. Blessing mentioned that he’d recently moved the Twitter app to another page on his phone, and placed Bluesky in its spot. Prior to this decision, he’d wanted to make the mental shift to checking Bluesky more often than Twitter, but sheer force of habit had him thumbing the ol’ Twitter app. This one simple change produced a massive change in behavior, though. Now, he was on Bluesky way more often, and spending time curating follows to make it more interesting.

I paused. Then, right then and there, I made the same change. I dumped Twitter into a folder called “social networking,” alongside Mastadon and Threads, while pushing Bluesky out. (I rarely use Mastodon and Threads, beyond crossposting my work out of convenience for others.)

Dude, the personal vibe shift was immediate. 

Now, to be fair, one of the reasons I’d held off on shifting to Bluesky was because the entire sports world remained addicted to Twitter. (It feels like elements of the reporting world started making a shift for the exits after the election was over.) But there was a moment where ESPN analyst Mina Kimes decided to make a move and start bullying all her colleagues. Then, people set up mirror accounts to follow for folks like Adam Schefter, and suddenly Bluesky was beginning to look a whole lot more like my old hangout, except with decent moderation policies.

Social media is bad blahblahblah. I get it. But for me, it’s the ultimate time waster, an invaluable resource for discovering stories and people to talk about for them, and my favorite way to quickly scan the news. If you squint, Bluesky doesn’t look different than Twitter, which is what I wanted. I hope it’s a better place, but mostly, I wanted a home I felt less guilty about visiting.

Our relationships with social media are a little different due to work, obviously, but I’m curious where you’ve ended up these days as you poke at your phone and decide where to end up.

Rob: The worst thing about Bluesky has always been the people who think being on Bluesky is a profound act of moral and political resistance. The best thing about it has always been the way it is basically just like Twitter in its earliest incarnations, before the site’s attempts to figure out monetization increasingly chipped at the stuff people want out of a social media network: a giant, convenient water cooler hang with people who find each other interesting. Ultimately what Bluesky has needed, and finally started to get with the arrival of sports media, was a critical mass of normies who are not primarily interested in talking about politics and who do not regard their primary role on the platform as being a poster. Even now, I still notice a dichotomy between the two networks: if I want to follow news or sports I go to Twitter, if I want to actually talk about sports I post to Twitter… but most of the people I actually know are on Bluesky and the conversations I want to catch up on are happening there.

Twitter’s strength is still the huge numbers of people who just see it as the default site to find news, clips, reactions to stuff happening in cultural spaces.