How should Bluesky exploit its success?

Strangeness, Hate, and Dumbness: Exploring a Decentralized Ecosystem of Social Networks during the Supercentennial of Musk

This is all well and good, but the features are getting a few more people to use it. But it’s not the core source of the surge in interest. Bluesky has accomplished a cultural feat that isn’t technical. It recreated an older, better era of the internet, one that is actually fun.

Over the past six months, talent and money flowed into social networking companies due to the reign of error by Musk. Among the apps attempting to capitalize on Twitter’s decline are Post, T2, Artifact, Mastodon, and a still-untitled effort from Instagram.

The concept of decentralization is too unwieldy to be thought of in terms of its own. And yet if you used Twitter in the early days, you benefited from a decentralized ecosystem. Twitter’s ecosystem grew larger, and its service improved faster, because an ecosystem of developers congregated and worked on it together.

New social networks often require some novel mechanic to captivate attention and drive daily usage. It was a bug that, for a time over the weekend, notified everyone who had replied to a popular thread whenever anyone else replied. Eventually, users were able to mute it. But for a few days, the thread went wild with nudes, a text-based game of tic-tac-toe, and the popular Bluesky character Berduck, “an account that represent[s] a duck writing in baby voice that used artificial intelligence to reply to any user’s skeet with a question.”

All of this is supremely silly, of course. It’s silly in the way a social network needs to get liftoff. The weekend was a good time to be strange in the app as users ignored the engagement hacks that defined recent months and instead used shitposts, pet photos, dad jokes, and nudes.

If you used the Bluesky platform, all of this was visible through its convenient “What’s Hot” tab, which allows you to browse a chaotic feed of popular posts to see what’s happening on the skyline. Until Monday, much of what was “hot” involved nude photos, which for all the flaws in content moderation that represents was a great growth tactic while it lasted. (For the poster and for Bluesky.)

Towards a Dinner Party: The Decentralized User Experience on Mastodon’s App, and What it Tells Us About It

One, it should keep its decentralized nature in the background for average users. Most users will be perfectly happy to use the company’s default server for a long time to come. When the app does open up to other servers using its custom protocol, the company should strive to ensure that it remains easy to find friends who might be joining from elsewhere. (Mastodon today finally took that hint, announcing it would begin to add new users to a default server without requiring them to choose.)

There is a fizzy, infectious fuck around energy, like everyone went to a Red Bull on a Friday afternoon and the boss was away. Users are making their own words and calling them “skeets.” There are threaded posts. The vibe is similar to the weeks when Clubhouse was invite-only and looked like it was going to be the next big thing.

In a eulogy for pre-Musk Twitter, New York Times Magazine editor Willy Staley described the platform’s current atmosphere as “the part of the dinner party when only the serious drinkers remain.” I thought of that comparison while scrolling Bluesky this weekend. The new app feels like a dinner party where everyone has had martinis but not eaten yet, when it seems like anything could happen at a moment’s notice.