Nothin’ but blue skies from now on

Opinion: You may be aware there is a new social media platform in town that goes by the name of Bluesky. You may also have heard that people are joining at a rate of a million a day as people exit Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter.
You may also have heard Bluesky is an echo chamber for liberals and leftists. So, I thought I’d write a few words of introduction for those thinking of joining.
First off, though Bluesky is new, it is only relatively new. It was founded by Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter, in 2019 as a project exploring the possibility of decentralising social media. Dorsey, with all the money he received from selling Twitter to Musk, recently departed Bluesky over an argument about moderation policy – a point I will come back to.
The current Bluesky CEO is Jay Graber, who was first hired in 2021 but who in the same year made Bluesky an independent company – Bluesky Social. The invite-only version of Bluesky was launched in February 2023 and its code was made open source in May of that year and was later developed into the ‘AT’ protocol it now runs on. In February 2024 it finally opened to the public.
I joined in March and became user 5,226,111. We were all notified of these numbers in September when the platform reached 10 million users. It’s now November and it has well over 20 million.
I had already been off Twitter since November 2022 when I deactivated my account and joined another Twitter alternative, Mastodon. The Musk takeover had slowly turned Twitter (at that point soon to be X) into a sewer of disinformation, so I was glad to leave. Musk himself had also become more open about his alt-right alignment, and it was clear he’d spent a lot of money to get Trump re-elected.
I think Mastodon is the real future of social media. Like Bluesky, it runs on an open-source protocol called ‘ActivityPub’. Like Bluesky’s AT, it allows you to link to other social media platforms using the protocol, but unlike Bluesky it allows you to create your own server – an ‘instance’ – that is federated or linked to all the other instances allowing everyone to talk together. Bluesky likes to boast it is immune to billionaire takeover, but Mastodon genuinely is. However, at the moment, Bluesky is doing a much better job at being user-friendly, so most X-iles are turning up there.
When I first arrived I found the Aotearoa community (#NZpol) that I had missed when I left Twitter, and while I have built up a good network on Mastodon I also found the comics community I’d left behind. As more people arrive, this community has only grown, and it feels great.
The reason they are there is because of Bluesky’s moderation policy. In July 2023 a minor controversy erupted when users pointed out to Bluesky that people could use racial slurs in their Bluesky handles. In short this led to a strike by users and a review resulting in a stronger moderation policy. This is the moment Jack Dorsey left.
So, moderation became the direction followed and millions have chosen to follow Bluesky as a result. A consequence of this decision is that Bluesky is now regularly described as an ‘echo chamber’, a place where someone supposedly only ever hears the same thing and it is always what they like.
First, the people saying this, mainly in legacy news outlets, have not necessarily read any of the scholarship that challenges the very idea that echo chambers exist.
Second, this largely unfounded criticism tells us a lot about how far our politics seem to have drifted to the right. Apparently, we can no longer consider ourselves as partaking in a genuine ‘town square’ and we cannot consider our speech ‘free’ if we are not open to being shouted at by neo-Nazis, racists, misogynists, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, science deniers, homophobes and transphobes.
When the alt-right came to light around 2015, their stated aim was to shift what is called the so-called Overton Window, or what is deemed permissible in public debate. Looking at the complaints laid against Bluesky, we can only conclude they have succeeded, but that does not mean I should be forced to listen to their antisemitism, Holocaust denial, race science, rape apologies or the myriad forms of discrimination they are committed to enforcing. Bluesky allows us to turn them off, and Bluesky users are pleased by that.
Third, it also says so much about right-wing politics itself. When the ‘liberals’ and the ‘leftists’ (names that in fact mask a great deal of diversity) left Twitter, the political right then tried to chase them into the places they migrated to. This previously happened on Mastodon where neo-Nazis quickly opened Mastodon instances and attempted to federate with others in order to continue their trolling, only to be quickly de-federated by the other instances and left to float off into cyberspace. (This is how Mastodon’s immune system works.)
Bluesky offers this protection by enabling strong moderation, but what does it say about those chasing ‘the left’ into Bluesky? What it says is that they only find pleasure and a sense of identity or community by attacking others. On Bluesky we can all just chat about trees, cakes, comics, cats, science, art, music, literature, and, of course, express our deep-rooted concerns about the planet and the state of global politics.
In short, on our own, we have lots to do and myriad ways of enjoying ourselves. The problem with the heart of some contemporary right-wing politics is there’s no joy without antagonism and feeling good depends on demeaning someone else. All of which means I’m very happy to be on Bluesky.