Bluesky lacks an opportunity to explain to people that its network is more than its own Bluesky social application.
In recent weeks, a number of titles and posts have surfaced wondering if Bluesky’s growth is declining, if the network has become too much from a leftist echo room, or if its users have no sense of humor, among other charges.
Investor Mark Cuban, who even supported Skylight financially, a video application built on the underlying protocol of Bluesky, at Proto, complained this week that the answers on Bluesky have become too hateful.
“The commitment has made great convos on many subjects, to agree with me or you are a Nazi fascist,” he wrote in an article on Bluesky. That, he said, “force” people to return to X.
Naturally, the owner of X Elon Musk and the CEO Linda Yaccarino took advantage of these disorders, with the first display that Bluesky is a “pile of super judge rooms” and the last proclaiming that X is the “real” world place in the city.
The debate on this subject is not surprising.
Without a more direct thrust to present the wider network of applications built on the open protocol that the Bluesky team led, it was only a matter of time before the Bluesky brand became a liberal and left alternative to X.
This characterization of Bluesky, however, is not a complete image of what the company has built – but it could become a stumbling block towards its additional growth if it is not corrected.
It is true that many initial users of Bluesky are those who abandoned X because they were not satisfied with his new property under Musk and his quarter of the right which accompanies him. After the November elections in the United States, the adoption of Bluesky has skyrocketed while X users fled the Trump’s largest individual contributor’s platform. At the time, Bluesky added millions of users in rapid succession, climbing north of 9 million users in September to almost 15 million by mid-November, then 20 million a few days later.
This growth continued in the months that followed, while the best Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton joined the application. Today, Bluesky has more than 36.5 million registered users, indicates its public data.
It therefore follows that user conversations around news and Bluesky policy would help define the tone of the network when they have become the dominant voices. Of course, this can express trouble for any social network, because the partisan applications on the left, like Telepath, and on the right, as to speak, failed to challenge X..
Bluesky is more than its application
What is missing in this current story is the fact that the social application of Bluesky is supposed to be an example of what is possible in the widest of the proto ecosystem. If you do not like the tone of trendy subjects on Bluesky, you can go to other applications, modify your default flows or even create your own social platform using technology.
People are already using the protocol that feeds Bluesky to create social experiences for specific groups – like Blacksky made for the black online community or as a social gander made for social media users in Canada.
There are also flow manufacturers like Graze and those in surfing that allow you to create personalized flows where you can focus on specific content that is important to you – such as video games or baseball – and exclude others, such as politics.
Built in Bluesky (and other third -party customers) are tools that allow you to choose your default flow and add other people who interest you from a range of subjects. If you want to follow a flow devoted to your TV show or your favorite pet, for example, you can.
In other words, Bluesky is supposed to be what you do, and its content can be consumed in the format you prefer best.
In addition to Bluesky himself, the wider network of applications built on the AT protocol includes photo and video sharing applications, live tools, communication applications, blogging applications, musical applications, film and television recommendation applications, etc.
Other tools also allow you to combine bluesky flows with other social networks.
Openvibe, for example, can mix together social media flows such as threads, bluesky, mastodon and nostr. Applications like Surf and Tapestry offer means to follow articles on open social platforms as well as those published with other open protocols like RSS. This allows applications to draw content from blogs, information sites, YouTube and podcasts.
The Bluesky team may not be those that directly build these other experiences and social tools, but by emphasizing and promoting the existence of this wider and connected social network benefits the Bluesky brand.
This shows that not only is Bluesky more than a simple Twitter / X alternative, but it is only an application in a wider social ecosystem built on open technology – and it is greater than simply building another X.
