It looks almost identical to X, the social network owned by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and Donald Trump’s No 1 fan. But Bluesky, the fledgling rival that has amassed millions of new users since the US election and regularly claims the top spot in app store charts, is a fundamentally different type of social network for one major reason. It dispenses with the algorithms that are used on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to control what you see.
Those algorithms feed me and millions of other X users an increasingly outlandish dose of ideological drivel and misinformation. Now, longtime Twitter users are heading for the door en masse.
Musk famously bought loss-making Twitter for US$44 billion in 2022 in a deal he went to court to try to overturn in a fit of buyer’s remorse. With advertisers deserting him and no way out of the contract, he opted to turn X into a megaphone for his conservative beliefs and political and business interests.
In many respects, that’s been incredibly successful for Musk, who now has the ear of the president-elect. But it has made the platform largely unusable. The “For You” tab on X now serves me a random collection of conservative podcast hosts, crypto boosters, conspiracy theorists and wrestling commentators.
Musk sees himself as a DJ determined for us all to listen to his playlist. People have been opting to leave the party instead, fleeing to alternative platforms such as Threads and Mastodon.
But Bluesky seems to have more promise than either of them. It displays posts in your feed in reverse chronological order. Priority is given to posts that have very high engagement in the form of retweets, known on Bluesky as “reskeets” and comments. That’s a much more organic way of letting people tap into what is topical and trending.
There are also no advertisements on Bluesky, so no incentive to tweak the algorithms to put a particular product in front of you. Bluesky’s chief executive Jay Graber said recently she doesn’t want to “enshittify the network with ads”.
That’s a noble aim, but it costs money to run a large social network, so a subscription fee is probably on the cards offering perks for paying members. I’m fine with that. Ad and algorithm-free is worth a monthly fee.
Already news outlets like the BBC and the Guardian have a strong presence on Bluesky, so I can see it becoming a useful source of news.
I also like the fact that Bluesky is a decentralised network, which means it is built on a protocol that allows you to take your entire social media graph – all of your posts and interactions on the platform – with you to other apps. The network effect is everything in social media. A platform is only as good as the mix of actively posting and engaging members it has.
But Meta-owned Threads has reached 275 million monthly users, the company claims. That’s critical mass by anyone’s measure, so why isn’t it seen as the logical alternative to X? Because it’s owned by Meta, the master of algorithmic manipulation. It hasn’t got any soul.
People who spent 15 years on Twitter want a more community-minded alternative and Bluesky is emerging as exactly that. I noticed a surge in local users on Bluesky around the time of the hīkoi to Wellington last month.
Our media outlets haven’t really taken to the platform yet, which is crucial to the make-up of a vibrant social network.
Many people have withdrawn from social media, avoiding the toxicity associated with it by browsing and posting less. But the original premise of Twitter is still a compelling one. Bluesky seems best placed to revive it.
