Bluesky misses the opportunity to explain to people that its network is more than just a Bluesky social app.
Many headlines and posts have questioned whether Bluesky’s growth has been declining, whether the network is in a left-leaning echo chamber, or even among other fees if users don’t have a sense of humor.
Investor Mark Cuban, who financially backed Skylight, a video app built on Bluesky’s underlying protocol, complained this week that the reply on Bluesky was too hated.
“Engagement is from a great combo on many topics to agree with me, or you’re a Nazi fascist,” he wrote in a post about Blueski. It’s “forced” people to go back to X, he said.
Naturally, X’s owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino have exploited this uncertainty, posting that the former declares Bluesky “a bundle of super judge hole monitors” and the latter declares X as a “true” global town square.
Discussions on this topic are not surprising.
Without the more direct driving force to showcase the wider network of apps built on open protocols, the Bluesky team was at the forefront, it was only a matter of time before the Bluesky brand punched a hole as an alternative to the liberal and left of X.
However, Bluesky’s distinctiveness is not a complete picture of what the company is building, but if not fixed, it could become a stumbling block towards further growth.
It is true that many of Bluesky’s first users were users who abandoned X, as they were unhappy with the new ownership and right-wing changes under Musk. Bluesky’s adoption spiked after the November election in the US as X users fled from a platform led by Trump’s biggest individual supporters. At the time, BlueSky was rapidly adding millions of users in succession, climbing from north of 9 million users during September to nearly 15 million by mid-November, and 20 million people after that had climbed a few days later.
That growth continued in the last few months as the best Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton joined the app. Today, Bluesky has over 36.5 million registered users, its public data shows.
So, users’ conversations about blueski and politics help to define the tone of the network when they become the dominant voice. Of course, it can spell trouble for any social network, as left-party apps like Telepath and right-party apps like Parler have failed to challenge X well.
Bluesky is more than an app
What’s missing from this current narrative is the fact that Bluesky’s social app is just one example of what’s possible within the broader ecosystem of Proto Ecosystem. If you don’t like the tone of Bluesky topics, you can switch to other apps, change your default feed, or use technology to build your own social platform.
Already, people are using protocols that strengthen BlueSky to build social experiences for certain groups. Just as Blacksky does for the Black Online community or Gander Social does for Canadian social media users.
There are also feed builders like Graze and Surf. This allows you to focus on specific content, such as video games or baseball, and create custom feeds that exclude others, such as politics.
Built in Bluesky (and other third-party clients) is a tool that allows you to choose your default feed and add others who are interested from a variety of topics. For example, if you want to follow a feed dedicated to your favorite TV shows or animals, you can.
In other words, Bluesky is intended to be what you make it, and its content can be consumed in any format you like most.
In addition to BlueSky itself, the wider network of apps built on the AT protocol includes photo and video sharing apps, live streaming tools, communication apps, blog apps, music apps, movies, TV recommended apps, and more.
Other tools also allow you to combine Bluesky feeds with other social networks.
For example, OpenVibe can mix feeds from social networks such as threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr etc. Apps like Surf and Tapestry provide a way to track posts from social platforms that are published on other open protocols such as Open social platforms and RSS. This allows the app to draw content from blogs, news sites, YouTube and podcasts.
Bluesky’s teams may not directly build these other social experiences and tools, but rather be teams that emphasize and promote the existence of this widely connected social network.
It shows that BlueSky is not just a Twitter/X alternative, but it is one app in a wider social ecosystem built on open technology.