Bluesky: Is "better than Twitter" enough?

In October I announced my departure from Twitter. Believe it or not, this wasn't an easy decision. I'd used my main account for over 12 years, literally my entire adult life, and in that time I'd built up a decent following of over 15,000 followers. I might not have been a celebrity, but it was enough to get eyes on my work, connect me with some really cool people, and help Super Lesbian Animal RPG become a decent success. Beyond this, though, it was also just one of my preferred places to shoot the shit on the internet, and the website that had the largest intersection of my social groups all in one place. Game devs, furry artists, other fans of the stuff I like, longtime internet friends, real life friends I've known since high school. So many little moments in my life were recorded on Twitter, because everyone I wanted to talk to was there. Until they weren't.

Twitter was never a good site, though. There's a tendency to romanticize the pre-Musk, pre-paid verification era now after a constant stream of bad decisions, but it was often a fairly miserable place even at its height. It was a site where I needed to auto-block over 100,000 users who followed reactionary ringleaders to feel even remotely comfortable running a public account as a trans woman making queer video games in a post-GamerGate world. Right wingers, reactionary trolls, and centrist debate perverts have always had a large presence on the site. Even among more desirable company, the small character limit has always made it difficult to have nuanced conversations. This has been true since long before the advent of the quote retweet dunk, and it's only gotten worse since. I've seen so many otherwise reasonable people become needlessly aggressive in arguments over their interests due to the way Twitter encourages hostility. This isn't just a problem with the new owner, this is something that's arisen from the format of the site itself down to its very core.

So it should be no surprise that Bluesky, an offshoot of Twitter that's largely identical to the pre-Musk site in its design and functionality, has some of the same issues as pre-Musk Twitter. Though, to its credit, Bluesky also has a few new ideas of its own, some of which are genuine improvements and some of which introduce new frustrations.

Make no mistake, if you're still holding out on Twitter because you like the format, I wholeheartedly advocate that you move to Bluesky. It's a clear upgrade over the current state of Twitter, and I don't regret making the jump at all. But the way a lot of early adopters talk about the site bothers me. For a long time, they bemoaned Twitter becoming a Nazi bar and claimed that it's everyone's moral imperative to stick it to Musk and move sites. Which site you used was seen as a sign of moral character. Criticism was often met with "if you don't like it, then go back to X." Now that over 20 million users actually have left Twitter for Bluesky, the site is feeling the strain and conflicts are emerging, but those vocal early adopters still seem to believe that these problems can mostly be solved by chastising people and telling newbies "how we do things on Bluesky." If we simply make everyone post better, surely Twitter will turn out better this time.

But while it's certainly possible for users to influence the site's culture to some extent, at the end of the day user behavior is going to be shaped primarily by the structure of the site itself and the tools everyone is given. And, frequently, what the Bluesky userbase wants is in direct opposition with its design. Those structural decisions and the ways in which they influence the vibes of the site, both in positive and negative ways, are what I want to dig into today. How does Bluesky improve on the Twitter format, and what behaviors does its design encourage? How will people feel about it on its own merits as the honeymoon phase ends? As a queer furry artist with a dwindling number of safe havens left on social media, I want Bluesky to succeed, but I think in order for it to truly succeed it needs to work on some of these things first—or, at the very least, more of its proponents need to admit that these problems exist.

Yes, it's better than Twitter

Again, I'll just say this up front to avoid any ambiguity, before I complain a lot and make it sound terrible. Bluesky is way better than Twitter. The vibes are better. It hasn't been slathered with bullshit AI features. You can look at the replies to a popular post and see earnest comments from actual human beings, rather than just blue check spam. You can post an external link or say the word "commission" without any sort of censorship in an attempt to appease the algorithm.

I will admit that I was hesitant to make the move for a long time. I made my account in July 2023 and would post there occasionally and check my feed daily, but the fact that barely anyone I knew used it kept me from committing to it. At this point, though, so many people have moved over from Twitter that it's by far the more active site for me. My mutuals are there posting about their interests and their creative work. My followers are there to chat with me about things. Despite having way more followers on Twitter, I'm getting better engagement on Bluesky. (Chances are most of the followers I've accumulated over twelve years on Twitter aren't even active anymore.) I've had the painful experience of trying to make shit work on a tiny website like Pillowfort or Weasyl where barely any of my friends were there and any engagement on my art whatsoever felt like a blessing, but this is absolutely not the case for Bluesky. This is a real-ass social network with real-ass traffic.

It's also got some neat little unique features here and there. Most notably, you can make custom feeds and pin them to your home screen, with the option to pin feeds made by other people as well. This is nice, but in practice I don't really look at my pinned feeds much, so I won't say much more about them here.

Yes, admittedly, the userbase skews older, with earnestly dorky millennials and gen Xers making up the bulk of the quote unquote "Bluesky Elders." (Ugh.) This throws some people off, and makes people think the site has more of a lame vibe than Twitter. And, well, first of all, it depends on who you follow, obviously. But also, some earnest lameness is important to keep a website's ecosystem healthy.

Such a large portion of the left-wing side of Twitter's userbase these days skews towards jaded, detached, too-cool-for-you irony and sarcasm, a mask that hides how plugged in and self-conscious you actually have to be to keep up with what minor differences in lingo or behavior will get you labeled as "cool" or "uncool" online at any given time. Even the slightest whiff of corniness or cringe will set people off now. Sincerity gets you mocked. I've seen people develop superiority complexes over things as trivial as what text separators strangers use in their bios. When more and more of the "cringe" people leave, the bar for what's "cringe" gets lower and lower, because there always has to be someone to make fun of. It fucking sucks. It feels like most of the people I encounter on Twitter in 2024 are either people like that, or people who 100% buy into hype culture and the "let people enjoy things" mindset and will try to ratio you for being a contrarian hater if you have even a mild dissenting opinion on something currently popular. I'll take the occasional well-meaning but cringe 38-year-old who calls themself a heckin' wholesome chaos gremlin on Bluesky over the pit of misery that is modern Twitter, thanks.

Also, earlier this year I posted an innocuous Fortnite clip to Twitter, and it somehow got me a drive-by reply from a random neo-Nazi who tried to dox me. (I will not confirm or deny whether or not they posted my actual address, but the intent is the same regardless.) I immediately reported this, as did several friends, but it took a month and a half for any action to be taken by Twitter's current skeleton crew of a moderation team. The tweet was up for over 40 days. I don't even know how this guy found my post or why he chose to target me, specifically. Meanwhile, on Bluesky, this guy would've been banned within a few hours, tops. So, again, I can't say it's hard to choose which of these sites I prefer using.

Part of this general improvement in pleasantness is due to the fact that Bluesky has much stronger blocking than Twitter has ever had, a thing that I greatly appreciate.

The "nuclear block" and other disengagement options

The block feature on Bluesky is so powerful that it's become colloquially known as the "nuclear block." Not content to simply stop the blocked user from looking at your posts (and vice versa), Bluesky's block also hides every reply the blocked user has ever made to you from everyone on the platform. People viewing their posts can still find these replies, but they won't be able to see what they were replying to. If they quoted any of your posts, it severs the link between their quotes and your original posts. While this sometimes makes arguments impossible to follow and allows shitheads to hide their critics, and I'll sometimes see a mutual say they blocked a troll and wish I could go see the reply in question so that I could preemptively block them myself, the strength of the block is overall a good thing. Going back to that doxxing anecdote, on Bluesky I could've just blocked the fucker and the reply with what may or may not have been my home address would've been hidden forever. I cannot understate how much safer I feel on Bluesky because of this.

Furthermore, Bluesky has solid options for when you want to limit engagement but don't want to block people. Similar to modern Twitter, you can limit who can reply to a post or mute notifications for a thread if you're just tired of seeing the replies, but you can also manually detach a post from a quote repost or even completely disable the option for people to quote a post. It's these weapons against the dastardly quote retweet that really improve the tenor of conversation on Bluesky the most, I think. The QRT dunk and its emphasis in Twitter's algorithm has done so much damage to that site. It's such a pain in the ass to have something you said completely misinterpreted by some snarky and/or angry stranger, let alone when it's straight up used for targeted harassment. It's nice to be able to disengage from that, rather than constantly being opted into PVP, and the fact that people CAN do so much against a quote repost seems to be greatly limiting how much it's used to be an asshole on Bluesky. There are endless posts lecturing people not to quote dunk on Bluesky, but it's these tools hard coded into the infrastructure of the site that actually make a difference on that front.

Admittedly, it would be nice if you could completely disable quote reposts on all of your posts in your account settings, rather than having to manually disable them on individual posts. Lord knows that things can spiral out of control when you're AFK, and that getting dogpiled over one post can lead to people digging up other old posts of yours to yell about. But at least there's something you can do about it. It's better than Twitter, where I'd just delete tweets if I was getting annoying engagement on them. And, yes, people can still just screencap and repost other peoples' posts for a dunk. There's no way to prevent this. But at least then there's a couple extra steps to go find the original post, which makes it a somewhat less effective tool for harassment than the direct quote. Any extra effort required to be a dick in someone's mentions is going to lessen the amount of harassment received.

(Also, if you just want to stop seeing an individual post, you can hide that post and never have to see it again. It's shocking to me how few sites have this feature built in!)

Anyway, here's where I start to get into the things I'm less enthusiastic about.

Blocklists

Bluesky's block features also include a built-in ability to create and share blocklists. You may think I'm a fan of this feature, as someone who has over 100,000 people blocked on Twitter, but public blocklists often do more harm than good.

The simple fact is that it's difficult to trust a blocklist by someone other than yourself. There's always the possibility of false positives, or people who were put on there simply because the list maker has beef with them. Infamously, a GamerGate blocklist heavily promoted by Wil Wheaton on Twitter ended up getting a ton of random trans people labeled as right wing trolls and shunned by people they'd never met, either due to false positives or due to personal grudges of the person making the list. That's to say nothing of outright troll blocklists made to falsely label innocent people as all sorts of heinous things. There are very good reasons why third party services like Block Together fell out of favor on Twitter. If it's a short list, you can manually vet it first, sure. But if it's a list that's thousands of users long, that becomes impossible.

Here's an anecdote about a blocklist on Bluesky to illustrate why I don't trust blocklists. In the wake of the election, many users have been promoting the use of a MAGA blocklist with thousands and thousands of users. Upon investigating who was actually behind this blocklist, as well as others for TERFs, Elon Musk fanboys, users with Nazi dogwhistles in their bios, etc., I discovered that this self-appointed community moderator had also made an automated blocklist for users who have the unicode hammer and sickle character in their username or bio. Hopefully as a known leftist I don't have to explain why I think that this is complete fucking loser behavior. I do not believe that this person should be allowed to act as the site's unofficial hall monitor, and I'm not touching any blocklist they make with a ten foot pole. I would advise anyone reading this to do the same. Again, you just can't fully trust the judgment of anyone other than yourself when it comes to who you do and don't want to block.

General missing features

There are still several key features missing from Bluesky, but I won't put too much emphasis on that here. Bluesky's devs have been good about regularly adding new features, and quite a few things I'd wished the site had a year ago have since been implemented. DMs, video and GIF support, the thread composer, profile media tabs, pinned posts, the ability to manually label adult content instead of relying on the site's auto-moderation, the ability to mute terms, and more have all been added in relatively quick succession. A short while ago hashtags didn't even do anything on Bluesky, and now they work better than they do on Twitter. Being able to click on someone's tag in an art post and see everything they've posted with that tag? Awesome!

So I'm cautiously optimistic that many of these things, including several that are already on the roadmap, will get added within a matter of months. But still, it's worth at least acknowledging that these things are missing right now, and that the site would be better if these things were added. My current wish list includes:

• Locked accounts. This is a huge one. I miss having a private account open only to a select few who I can trust, and I still know several people who still use Twitter just because they can't make a locked account on Bluesky. All the disengagement options in the world aren't a true replacement for having a friends-only personal account.
• The ability to turn off shared posts from individual accounts. This was a lifesaver on Twitter, and I sorely miss it here. Sometimes people just share way too many posts every day, but you also don't want to unfollow them. I also don't want to look at a custom feed that hides all reposts. I want to see people sharing cool stuff they like! I just don't need the constant firehose of current event or hyperfixation reposts from some people.
• The ability to apply content labels to text posts, not just media posts.
• Custom content warnings would also be nice, but aren't a requirement when you can already just mute terms.
• Polls. Polls are fun! I miss them!
• Drafts and scheduled posts.
• Better grouping of notifications to reduce clutter. (If someone goes through your posts and likes 50 posts in a row, you'll get 50 separate notifications for it.)
• A mentions-only tab on the notifications page. (EDIT: They literally rolled out this update right before I finished this piece lol)
• The option to see notifications for posts you've shared. You don't get that satisfaction from sharing a post you think your mutuals will really enjoy and seeing them like it on Bluesky.
• Blocking should remove the blocked account from your follower list. ("Soft blocking" currently isn't possible.)
• Bookmarks would be really nice, as I made heavy use of bookmarks for stuff I wanted to remember long-term. In the meantime, though, I'm just DMing things to myself on one of my other accounts as a makeshift bookmarks list, which works well enough.
• I'd also really like audio posts, especially since the one minute video limit is proving bothersome for musicians, but this is a long shot since so few sites support this.

But, again, several of these things are already on the roadmap. Bluesky in December 2024 looks very different than it did only a year ago, and I'm sure the same will be true of the Bluesky of 2025.

What I'm more concerned about is...

The Discover feed

You'll often see the claim made that Bluesky "doesn't have an algorithm." This is a lie. It doesn't have the same kind of algorithm as Twitter, which seems to prioritize quote retweet arguments and punish external links. There's very little concern over posting "the right way" in order to not get buried by an algorithm. This is good. But it does have a feed that algorithmically recommends posts based on what it thinks you'll engage with, which many people use.

This algorithm is called the Discover feed, and it fucking sucks. It's amazing how central the Discover feed is to many of my biggest complaints about the Bluesky experience.

Here's the thing: while this isn't what you'd expect to hear from someone who loved using Cohost enough to own an Eggbug plush, I get why algorithmic content feeds exist on modern social media sites, and I even enjoy using them from time to time. They absolutely shouldn't be your main feed, but when I've got a few minutes to kill I don't mind checking my recommendations to see some art and jokes and posts about my interests that I might have otherwise missed. (Though Twitter's algorithmic feed is also exceptionally good at finding things that will annoy me, which is one of many reasons why I'm glad to have ditched the site.) So long as this is completely optional and secondary to a chronological following feed, I have no problem with recommendation feeds like this existing.

The problem is what the Discover feed will show you. Half of it is stuff I'd already seen on my following feed, sometimes including my own posts, but a distressing amount of it is random text posts with fewer than 20 likes from completely random accounts. Oftentimes these are banal posts from people announcing they're gonna try to use Bluesky more, or people saying they're sick, or complaints about bad sleep habits, etc. But they can also be deeply personal posts about something tragic, or posts about strangers' sex lives and kinks, or intrusive thoughts, or other things that I feel weird and invasive from having read from a stranger.

I don't know how the Discover feed finds all of these. These accounts don't have many followers. They aren't followed by anyone I follow. Nobody I know liked these posts. They just seem to be completely random. And by clicking on these peoples' profiles to try and figure out if they're a friend of a friend or something, Bluesky's algorithm takes this as a sign of interest and decides to keep showing me more of their random low-engagement text posts. (I've had to mute multiple complete strangers just to stop Bluesky from showing me all of their text posts in my Discover feed.)

So if it sucks so bad, why do I look at the Discover feed? Well, everyone always says that the Discover feed starts out rough, but it gets better. You just have to keep liking things and clicking "show more like this" or "show less like this," and before long Bluesky will figure out what you like and show you more of that. Well, guess what? I've been on this website since 2023, and the Discover feed has sucked the whole time. I keep trying to do this Pavlovian training shit on it to get it to show me better posts, and it's barely gotten any better. But the promise of a better Discover feed keeps getting dangled over my head, so I keep trying to give it feedback. It's a chore.

(The Discover feed is also already supposed to be the improved form of Bluesky's algorithm as the successor to the even shittier What's Hot feed, which still exists as "What's Hot Classic." It has even more random personal text posts than I see in Discover, as well as a heaping helping of Resistance Liberals stealing memes from Facebook, but it's also ruthlessly efficient at finding random dick pics. It's fucking wild. Almost every single time I've ever checked What's Hot Classic there's been a dick pic within the first few posts. Just checked it again while writing this paragraph and sure enough, dick pic! It's like a truffle pig that was trained specifically to sniff out amateur cock photography.)

But, yeah, sure. I could just stop using the Discover feed and look at other, more specific custom feeds instead. But the problem is how it shapes behavior on the site when every new account is given a feed that behaves like this.

Like, think about it. If I'm seeing random peoples' private thoughts meant only for a small follower base on my Discover feed, that means other complete strangers are also seeing my thoughts on their Discover feeds. When I'm talking about my personal life or saying that I think a cartoon character is hot, I have no idea how many grandpas from Iowa with "democracy defender" in their bio are getting exposed to it. And, look, I'm not stupid. I know things I post on a public social media account are publicly viewable. But on Twitter it was fairly easy to blend in with the crowd and mind your own business, even without locking your account. Posts typically needed a certain amount of traction to "leave their target audience," due to the way the algorithm was very targeted and favored popular posts over random thoughts with eight likes and no retweets. But here, everything is leaving its target audience all the time, because every single post, no matter its level of engagement, is treated as grist for everyone else's Discover feeds.

I've seen mutuals have to deal with random drive-by assholes going "what the fuck is this and why is Bluesky showing it to me," particularly from new users who don't follow many accounts and default to using the Discover feed. People will post a joke and then get hounded by hordes of wine moms from the Discover feed who didn't get the joke. (See, for example, the replies on this post by wayneradiotv from people not familiar with his running gag of putting absurd and facetious captions on completely innocuous photos of his dog.) Boomers are using it like it's their morning paper, like every post is tailored just for them, and then getting mad at the people whose posts they don't get or that they find irrelevant to their interests. This lack of separation is also why we had things like normies spreading furry blocklists in the early days of the site. With such a bad algorithm, horny furry posts were getting recommended to everyone on the site, rather than staying within the community. Did you disable the mature content filters because you're okay with artistic nudity? Well then here you go, here's some lovingly rendered Nick Wilde butthole. It reminds me of the absolute nightmare that is Mastodon's live feeds of all posts made on a server, which was one of the main things that made me bounce off of Mastodon so hard.

It's just a mess. Things can't continue like this. We need some combination of:

1. An overhaul to the Discover algorithm so that it stops showing me random strangers' intrusive thoughts with eleven likes. At the very least, posts that aren't deemed "relevant to your interests" should require a certain threshold of likes before showing up there.
2. The ability to opt posts out of appearing in the Discover feed.
3. Locked accounts, please for the love of god give us locked accounts

The algorithm isn't the only source of unwanted attention on Bluesky, though!

Starter Packs

You might be surprised to hear that I take issue with these. On the surface, Starter Packs seem like a cool little feature for Bluesky, and a good way to get the ball rolling for people who just signed up and want their following feed to be more active. Want to keep up to date on the news? Follow this curated list of news outlets and journalists. Do you like video games? Here's some accounts that post about video games. Simple, right? They can also be nice for very niche communities, or for listing all of the members of a project's creative team, or for giving your friends a follower bump, or that sort of thing. They can be useful! For most people, their experience with Starter Packs will start and end there.

The problem comes for people who get put on Starter Packs they'd rather not be on. Especially the people who get put on a lot of very general Starter Packs.

(There's also Resistance Lib grifters making tons and tons of Starter Packs full of randos as part of an obnoxious "No Dems Under 5k" follow-for-follow scheme, but I don't have the energy to get into that nonsense here, so we'll just focus on the problem of unwanted inclusion.)

See, the thing that sets Starter Packs apart from regular old lists of users is that they have a "follow all" button. If you're in a lot of popular Starter Packs, you're probably going to get followed by a lot of people who don't actually know who you are and didn't look at what your posts are like before they followed you, because they just clicked "follow all" on a list of 150 people. In milder cases, this leads to a follower base that doesn't match your vibe. At its worst, this can lead to a lot of tech-illiterate boomers clogging up your mentions when you make a post that they don't like or understand.

Journalists and tech/science bloggers seem to be getting hit by this the worst, as they're getting put on a bunch of starter packs that older Resistance Liberals are being told to follow if they want to see the news on their feeds, and then suddenly all of the writers' personal posts are subjected to Facebook-tier comments sections. Being found via a Starter Pack colors what people expect from you. Are you in a hundred popular tech Starter Packs? Well, now all your posts about what you had for lunch are at risk of getting treated like they're off-topic spam on the front page of r/Technology. Your followers don't care about that, they were just told that you'd give them tech news! It can make people self-conscious to post basically anything, and I've already seen a few people with higher follower counts say that the joy has been sucked out of Bluesky for them after gaining a bunch of followers from Starter Packs.

I've also seen a number of artists want a fresh start with Bluesky after gaining an uncomfortable level of attention on Twitter. With no private accounts, keeping things lowkey on Bluesky basically works on the honor system. You convey that you want this new account to be a chill and casual place rather than a place to be professional, and you pray that your followers behave accordingly. Being put on Starter Packs can totally wreck this vibe. Suddenly, your chill personal account is getting passed around as a pillar of the Bluesky community for the creative field you're in, and tons of strangers who don't get your vibe or even really know who you are feel the need to chime in when you post an opinion. Now everything you post is Content for people interested in your creative field.

Personally, I haven't had that much trouble from being put on Starter Packs. I don't even think I'm on that many, though I did notice I got put on at least one list for queer indie game devs. And, like, I do find that flattering. I think these sorts of lists are generally made with admirable intentions. But seeing like a hundred random game devs follow me all at once, it's like... do you actually want to follow me? I'm burnt out between projects right now, so I don't post about game development very often these days. I'm more likely to be posting about Sonic news, or sharing a screencap of something I watched/read/played, or taking photos of my little plastic robots, or, y'know, drawing furries with big boobs. Do you actually want to see all that stuff? If so, great! Welcome! Stick around! But if not, are you only following me because you clicked "follow all" on a list of marginalized game developers to meet some diversity quota for your feed? Frankly, I don't need that.

Half of the problem here is that once you've been put in a Starter Pack, there's no easy way to take yourself out of it. Bluesky's main client doesn't even tell you when you're put in a Starter Pack to begin with! For that, you'll have to use the third party app ClearSky, where you can look up what lists any user on the service is on—or which users block or are blocked by any given account, a thing that you shouldn't look at because it will drive you insane. From there, you can sift through the lists you're on, and between the general "cool people" lists your followers might use and "stupid idiot assholes" type lists from people who saw you once on their Discover feeds and decided to banish you to the shadow realm, you'll find your Starter Packs. From there, you can either message the people who made the Starter Packs and politely request your removal, or you can just block them outright. These are your only options.

And, like, that's all kind of baffling given the steps taken to curb other kinds of unwanted interactions on the site? This is a Twitter-like that lets you individually detach quote reposts from your posts, and yet there's no way to detach yourself from a list. This isn't even getting into the fact that lists have historically been used quite a bit as hit lists for harassment groups on Twitter!

But, really, Bluesky is a website built on contradictions between what its developers want, what its users want, and how the site is actually used.

The past, present, and future of Bluesky

So, again, yes. My complaints aside, Bluesky is better than Twitter. It's a low bar, but things have gotten so dire on the internet that for now, that's enough. That may not be the case forever, though.

The project started at Twitter that would spin off into its own company and become Bluesky was once a very different beast. It was originally supposed to be more of a framework for federated Twitter-like social media sites, not unlike Mastodon, rather than A Website. The original dream was even for Twitter to become a part of that federated network. But as Mastodon has shown, a lot of people don't want to fuck around with federated instances. I sure as hell don't, as a person who's seen entire Mastodon instances beloved by acquaintances disappear overnight due to admin drama. So when most people join Mastodon, they just join the main instance, mastodon.social. (Which sucks, but that's beside the point.) Likewise, while the Bluesky project is intended to be a protocol for federated instances, the demand for a new "digital town square" in the wake of Twitter's sale to the biggest dipshit in tech means people really just care about bsky.app, the flagship instance of the AT Protocol, as a self-contained website. 99% of users don't give a shit about the AT Protocol, or even really know what that is beyond some buzzword the devs keep yapping about in updates. They just want a version of Twitter without all the Nazis.

The original vision for Bluesky was a very libertarian one where the ills of social media would be solved by putting the power in the hands of the users. Don't like the algorithm? Then just pin a different feed for a different selection of content, or even make your own! Don't want to see certain unpleasant things? Filter it out with our customizable client-side "moderation." Just slide the racism slider down if you want to see less racism. Users can create their own unofficial labeling services to warn people about bad actors rather than needing to worry about banning them aggressively. And if you don't like bsky.app as a whole, well, just make your own server! This is baked directly into the code of the site. But this simply isn't how the userbase Bluesky has actually acquired wants the site to be run. As is always the case, these libertarian ideals fail because maximum personal freedom isn't the answer to everything. Sometimes problems are caused at a structural level, and thus they require structural solutions. You can't just rely on the end user to determine their own experiences, you actually need to take firm stances as a company and moderate the fucking site. You can't just give users a billion toggles, you need to understand how the baseline experience for a tech-unsavvy user raw dogging it with the default settings is going to shape behavior on the site, and tweak that experience accordingly.

Thanks in large part to a vocally progressive userbase, Bluesky has taken many steps away from this original libertarian vision, for the better. Founder and known shithead Jack Dorsey (yes, the Twitter guy) deleted his account and quit the board in disgust months ago. The site has improved a great deal in the last year. There's an actual moderation team now. There was once a time when they didn't want to add DMs or locked accounts because that went against their vision for an ultra-public open source federated network, and now we have DMs and some sort of private posting is a maybe on the roadmap. But the old ideals are still there, deep down, and the site still struggles with this identity crisis. 

In the time since I began writing this piece, Bluesky has been hit with a massive scandal over the unbanning of notorious "just asking questions" transphobe and harassment coordinator Jesse Singal, who it turns out was only banned in the first place because the mods thought he was an impersonator. Not everyone is going to know that name, but he is absolutely one of the faces of the "gender critical" movement here in the United States, a journalist who hides his desire to undermine the trans rights movement behind a veneer of neutrality that all too many people fall for. He has done very real damage to human rights in this country. Progressive users have been vocal about not wanting him around on Bluesky, but the moderators have chosen the coward's way out and decided to leave him alone, letting users simply block him if they don't like him. Many early adopters seem to be shaken to their core over this decision, their trust in Bluesky shattered. Some have threatened to pack up and leave. How could they have done this?

Well, call me a cynic, but I'm not surprised. Bluesky wants to be the Twitter of the early 2010s all over again, as evidenced by the design of the site and the libertarian tech ideals that design was built upon. And Twitter never banned Jesse Singal, either.

I don't criticize Bluesky here because I hate it and want it to fail. While I don't put all my eggs in one basket when it comes to social media, I've got a lot of eggs in the Bluesky basket these days, and I'd like that basket to remain intact for a good long while. I've still got Tumblr, but I don't like relying entirely on the continued existence of Tumblr when their finances seem so precarious and when the CEO is constantly having embarrassing public meltdowns. (Also, y'know, the adult content ban.) The only way you'll catch me making a Threads account is if I get a Phineas Gage-style head injury that causes a complete personality change. I tried to make Pillowfort work for a while, but it's dead as a doornail. I have no interest in Dreamwidth because the founder is a complete tool who doesn't know when to shut the fuck up. You already know how I feel about Mastodon. A lot of people from Cohost also started doing newsletters, but that just isn't the same thing. It's not what I want at all. None of those things are a real replacement to the role Twitter played in my social media presence. So... that leaves me with Bluesky, basically.

Whether the progressive userbase continues to drag the site kicking and screaming in a better direction, like it did in its first year, or Bluesky digs its heels in and remains the same, I'll make do. I put up with Twitter for over a decade, and Bluesky is still an improvement over that. But it would be nice if it could become a site I genuinely liked on its own merits, one that more actively worked to create a better experience for its users, rather than one that's merely good enough for now where I have to qualify my opinion with "well, at least it's better than Twitter."