March 31, 2025, 10:34 a.m.
Bluesky isn't just another Twitter/X competitor. It fixes what's wrong with social media.
Crazy Stupid Tech
I joined Bluesky as soon as I could get my hands on an invite back in the summer of 2023. Twitter/X had become an increasingly unpleasant place since Elon Musk bought it in 2022. And then I discovered what many did back then: There weren’t enough users. I stopped using it.
This is the biggest problem for any new social network: It needs to reach a certain size for it to be useful. The trick is getting to that certain size. You have to offer something truly new or be the beneficiary of some galvanizing force to get over that hump. Many thought the changes Musk made to Twitter/X during the first year he owned it would be enough. They weren’t.
Then Donald Trump became President. He made Musk, who’d spent more than any single person in history to help elect him, a top advisor. And that proved to be the final straw. Millions fled Twitter/X all at once to Bluesky. Its user base immediately doubled to 20 million. By the end of January it had hit 30 million. By the time you read this it will be 33.8 million. Bluesky looks like it’s adding more than 1 million users a month, based on some of the apps that track that data.
It’s still a fraction of the users on other more established networks. But it’s large enough to be relevant and more importantly, to experience network effect liftoff. That’s where users start joining because it seems like everyone else is joining.
Former President Barack Obama joined last week. Those with top follower accounts now include The New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, investor Mark Cuban, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, actor George Takei, Rachel Maddow at MSNBC and author Stephen King. Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber’s hour-long interview with board member and journalist Mike Masnick was one of the most covered events of the SXSW conference in early March.
It’s tempting to respond to all this with a shrug. Many thought Twitter was a social media cesspool before Musk bought it. Is it progress that we now have two Twitters? Musk turned Twitter/X into the Fox News of social networks. Bluesky - for the moment, anyway - feels like the MSNBC of social networks. So what.
Many of us thought Meta’s Threads might become the next Twitter when it launched in 2023. It certainly got big fast - it now has more than 300 million users - because Meta leveraged its giant Instagram user base. But it’s not much of a news source because of the way Meta manages the algorithm. And of all the social networks I use, it generates the least real engagement. I don’t know why. But I’m not alone.
But Bluesky is different because of the way it’s designed. And that’s actually worth attention. It may look like a Twitter/X or Threads competitor. But it’s actually an entirely different thing. Bluesky is built on an open source programming standard called AT Protocol. That makes it the first open source social network to achieve meaningful scale. Many thought Mastodon, built on the similar but older Activity Pub open source protocol would be that. But its growth has flatlined, probably because Bluesky is easier to use. Bluesky feels like using Twitter 15 years ago.
Why is that important? Because users are not locked in. This isn’t how social networking works today, as we all know. Social network companies don’t want us to leave. So they’ve made it almost impossible for us to import our social history and network connections into competitors. Everything we do on Bluesky is portable.
What this means is that if someone creates a better version of Bluesky a year from now, we can take our social graph and social history and begin using that new application with zero startup costs. Our social graph and history would travel with us. And we’d still have access to the giant user base Bluesky helped build.
When you create a Bluesky identity, Bluesky actually doesn’t own it, You do. It doesn’t own your network or your social interactions. You do. It doesn’t even own the 34 million person user base. I just set up Flashes, an app that looks a lot like Instagram, except it seamlessly sinks with my Bluesky feed.
Graber, Bluesky’s CEO, knows about these issues first hand. “When I was building a social network back in 2019, I was building an alternative to Facebook events. It was really hard to get the initial network density to get enough people on this app,” she said in the SXSW interview. “And that's the challenge most social network builders face. But if you have this shared network you can tap into, you can freely build. And all of a sudden you're tapping into a user base of 32 million users, and all the things they've ever posted, all the connections they've already made. And you can build apps that don't require getting from zero to a few thousand users to get over the barrier of relevance. “
It’s not just users that are joining Bluesky because everyone else is. Developers are too.
Any developer can create an app or an app addon that works with Bluesky. They don’t even have to tell Bluesky about it. There are already thousands of them. And two weekends ago about 150 of them, including Graber, gathered at the University of Washington in Seattle for one of their first in person meetings to talk through some of the most hoped-for applications. I have 14 different ways to view my Bluesky feed all developed by independent developers.
It still feels like an open source project in that you can’t just go to Bluesky.com and find everything you need. For starters Bluesky.com is a site to order paper calendars. The site you want is Bsky.social about the company and Bsky.app to find your feed on your laptop.
Bluesky itself offers a list of feeds you can easily add. But it’s not nearly as complete as the unaffiliated Bskyinfo.com which lists more than 20,000 of them along with lablers and tools. If you want a big list of Starter Packs (categorized lists of Bluesky members to follow) that’s at the unaffiliated Blueskydirectory.com. The SEO site Backlinkinfo has a lot of statistics about Bluesky, though the one mentioned as often is https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats. None of these claim to be official lists. They’re just Bluesky members trying to make the ecosystem work better. But because Bluesky is an open network with open APIs, the data is considered reliable.
“Our goal is to enable you to build and choose your own adventure experience to Bluesky,” Graber said during her SXSW interview. “So if you want to just talk to your close friends and have a more safe, closed experience, you can customize that … you can use feeds that show you only what you want to see, install moderation services that filter who you interact with and even close off replies to just people who you’re following…. We think it really should be up to the user how they want to interact and choose how they want their space to be.”
What this means is that Bluesky isn’t all powerful central hub dictating to its developers and user base the way Meta does with Instagram, Facebook, Threads and What’sApp; Google does with YouTube; Snap does with Snapchat; Bytedance does with TikTok; or Microsoft does with LinkedIn. It’s just the biggest player in the much bigger open social web.
That now includes sites built on AT Protocol like Bluesky and its many apps. It also includes those built to work with the older Activity Pub protocol like the newsletter site Ghost, social network Mastodon, and photo sharing site Pixelfed. Wordpress now has an Activity Pub plugin. Even Meta is experimenting with the so called fediverse by enabling Mastodon users to view their Threads profile. You can’t do that on Bluesky yet.
It’s reasonable to assume the two protocols will merge or seamlessly interoperate soon, says Mike McCue, who just launched Surf, an app (still in Beta) that reimagines how we navigate social networking. Surf works with both protocols. “I’m right in the thick of that (merging the protocols) helping to navigate how we take the best ideas from both these protocols and bring them together,” he told me. (My partner Om Malik wrote about Surf for CrazyStupidTech when it launched last December)
This is an undeniably good thing. We care a lot about what Mark Zuckerberg says and thinks not because we want to, but because we and more than 3 billion others are locked into Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and What’sApp. So when he announces a slew of changes to suck up to the new administration, we feel stuck. The big tech companies have become as powerful as the 20th Century television and phone networks once were - the primary source of our news, entertainment and communications. Being able to easily change the channel when we don’t like the programming is something we should all want and expect.
I don’t know what kind of a business Bluesky will make. It raised $15 million back in October bringing its total funding to $23 million. But it only has 20 employees. That should give it some runway to figure out the right business model. It plans to offer a subscription tier later this year. Many have suggested Meta do this over the years. It has not.
But will users pay for additional features on an open source platform when developers can immediately copy and undercut those offerings? YouTube Premium has worked because it shares a big chunk of those subscription revenues with creators. Maybe that strategy will work for Bluesky. Or maybe Meta will re-architect Threads into a completely portable and open source alternative. Microsoft popularized this “embrace and extend” strategy at the peak of its powers in the 1990s.
But it almost doesn’t matter what happens to Bluesky, the company, long term because it has jump-started an ecosystem that is now large enough to be self-sustaining. “Everyone thinks it’s just Bluesky versus Twitter. But it’s bigger than that,” McCue said. “(The development of the open social web) has been overshadowed by all the things happening in AI. But this is absolutely a revolution.” McCue has been one of the more successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley for a generation. He sold his first company to Netscape in 1996 for $20 million and became its vice president in charge of technology. He sold his second, TellMe Networks to Microsoft for nearly $1 billion in 2007. He started Flipboard in 2010, a social magazine, which became the foundation for Surf. He told me that if you add up all the outfits connected to the open social web - excluding Threads - it likely approaches 100 million users.
Why does this matter to any of us? For starters, it’s way more practical. I have one primary phone number. I have one primary email address. I have one primary contact database. It stands to reason that I should have one primary social network identity that I can use anywhere, not one on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Threads, on YouTube, on Twitter/X and on TikTok that I can’t connect to each other. Yes, I never found use for Snapchat.
Twenty years ago when Facebook and LinkedIn were getting started, we all traded openness for convenience. No one had created a social network of any size before. We needed the features, control and operational functionality only possible inside a closed network ecosystem. But most of that technology has been commoditized and open sourced. Most of the innovation in social networking is now going on outside the big social networks.
It’s also comforting, at least to me. Because I’ve seen this movie before. The history of the internet is filled with examples of closed networks being forced open, or dying, as the underlying technology becomes commoditized and open sourced. And that almost always leads to more innovation, more access and a better user experience.
America Online in its earliest days wouldn’t let users send emails to anyone without an AOL email address. Can you imagine email today operating like that? Apple’s iMessage is now under similar pressure, though iMessage has never been entirely closed.
Cell phone networks used to be closed too. Sure, you could call anyone. But until 2003 you had to change your cell phone number if you wanted to change cell phone carriers. Try explaining why the phone companies got away with that to someone today.
Open vs closed was a big part of the Microsoft antitrust trial a generation ago. A big question was whether Microsoft could use its control of personal computers to turn the nascent open internet into its own closed network.
Yes, PC and Mac applications remain distinct. But since most of us now keep our data in the cloud, and since many of the most necessary applications can run inside an internet browser, it’s increasingly a distinction without a difference. The switching costs between both platforms used to be nearly insurmountable.
The point here is this: Conventional wisdom about networks is that bigger is always better. Maybe what we’re learning from watching Bluesky grow is that sometimes other characteristics - open, instead of closed, for example - matter just as much.
You can find me on Bluesky @fvogelstein.bsky.social
You can find my partner Om Malik @om.co
