Bluesky surge is impressive but the old days won’t be coming back
Debuting in February 2023, micro-blogging social media platform Bluesky, originally an internal project at Twitter, has seen explosive growth since Donald Trump’s victory at the polls in November.
Speculation has been rife about the possible rise of just such a platform since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, routed its staff and rebranded the social network as X, but the real boon for Bluesky has been Musk going on to develop close ties with president-elect Trump, resulting in a growing sense that X was more of a political project than a place to communicate.
Intended to create a decentalised social network based on an open protocol that is not under the control of any one company, Bluesky – which employs just 20 full-time staff – is certainly a laudable effort and growing from nine million to 25 million users between September and December is nothing if not impressive. It’s too late, though.
While the underlying protocol, known as AT, and even the company itself do show signs of viability, we are no longer in the salad days of social media. Not only are Facebook and X effectively open sewers, clogged up with propaganda, advertising and scams, social media itself has completely lost its shine. Whether or not the early Internet dream of disintermediated mass communication was ever actually viable, we now know that, in our world as it is, it is simply impossible. To everyone who complained, often correctly, about the overweening power of mass media conglomerates and mercurial billionaires the answer has come back: meet the new boss, worse than the old one.
Perhaps more significant, however, is that the Internet is no longer a primarily textual medium. Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and particularly TikTok show the direction of travel, and the destination is not only video, which is easier to consume passively, but short form video, which can be consumed mindlessly.
A self-selecting group has gone off to form communities on Bluesky, but the real lessons of social media are that not only are communities of interest not truly communities, but also that the successful platforms are those that can transmute boredom into gold via attention.
There remains much work to do on how propaganda has been, and is, spread on social media, as well as on the impact of computerised communication on human psychology and the manipulation of our emotions in order to render profit. In the meantime, however, the real money is not in serving up gnomic epigrams, one-liner jokes and links to news reports, but in the much more immersive – and even more ‘thinking-unfriendly’ – medium of videos about nothing, made with minimal effort and consumed with none. We might even call it frictionless.
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