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Liberals started a woke Twitter rival, and it's going down in flames
Our ancestors dressed up and attended public hangings. We can achieve the same thing by logging into Bluesky, the floundering social media platform that was supposed to embarrass Twitter. The app’s elevator pitch reminds me of a recurring twist throughout Mike Judge’s HBO series "Silicon Valley," where nerds who fawn over the newest tech can’t understand why the rest of the world doesn’t get it. Bluesky began as a pet project of some of the higher-ups at Twitter. What do you expect from a social media platform designed by bubble boy Big Tech brainiacs, largely composed of dejected Twitter exiles who left the encampment to start their own digital civilization?Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was the first to mention it publicly in 2019. From the start, it seemed as though his vision was somehow corrective, as if he had given up on Twitter’s enormously opaque machinations. Dorsey’s goal seemed laudable enough: He wanted to create a decentralized microblogging social media platform. This would allow the user base to shape and adjust the algorithm. Unfortunately for Bluesky’s would-be sizzle hype, Mastodon has used this model for nearly a decade. Dorsey was joined by Twitter's then-CTO, Parag Agrawal, who was pivotal in placing Lantian “Jay” Graber in Bluesky’s CEO chair. The 32-year-old Graber was working on a platform called the Happening, a decentralized social network similar to Bluesky, when she was called to action. “Bluesky” is actually named after her, Lantian, the Mandarin word for “blue sky,” a name chosen by Graber’s mother as a way to inspire her to greatness. Founded in 2021, Bluesky went from Jack Dorsey’s daydream to a platform of its own, and until six months ago, it was invite only. For this reason, estimates for early user-base size are usually untrustworthy, if not objectionable. Today, the estimates range from 500,000 to six million, although that upper figure seems cartoonishly high. Not long after Bluesky’s founding, in February of 2022, Trump launched Truth Social, which has since accrued somewhere between 600,000 and two million users, with an estimated 12% of “all U.S. social media users having used or visited the Truth Social platform.” Then, in October 2022, Elon Musk finally bought Twitter, which now, as X, boasts an estimated 650 million users. Claims that Bluesky would become Twitter’s rival were overblown on arrival. But Bluesky’s failures since have transcended the membership count. Mastodon, the original safe space for whiny journalists escaping Elon, has a lower user base yet a much stronger reputation. Like Bluesky, Mastodon offers a decentralized approach to social media networking. But Mastodon came first — by far — and it did it better.
SOPA Images/Getty Even still, its baggy slogan hints at its weakness: “Social media used to be fun. Be your unique self and create with your friends, all while keeping tabs on what's happening at a global scale.”It certainly cannot perform on a global scale. But can it even “keep tabs on what's happening at a global scale”? Many Bluesky users’ idea of keeping tabs is fixating on moderating “misinformation.” The app combines the ban-happy liberal hysteria of Reddit with all the showboating of Gab, a censorship-free social media platform whose reputation was impacted by many users living up to the unflattering caricature of the right-wing internet dweller. Despite the political leanings of most journalists, Bluesky failed to gain the approval of any major news site, including the tech outlets that Bluesky must have assumed would be on its side. As Wired so harshly put it, “Bluesky’s Future Is Social Media’s Past.” The Wired article criticizes Bluesky for what it lacks: “a harmony of difference.” That’s actually the nice way to say it. What do you expect from a social media platform designed by bubble boy Big Tech brainiacs, largely composed of dejected Twitter exiles who left the encampment to start their own digital civilization, assuming that Twitter would fall and their new homeland would thrive?Instead, these expatriates got stuck playing sock puppets with themselves. Don’t tell Bluesky users, though. They’re raging like the old days on Twitter when they could throw a tantrum and write about it in an article on the same day. For fans of spectacle, you’ll be happy to witness all the stereotypical progressive killjoys as loud and proud as they were in pre-Elon Twitter. For just about everyone else, X.com marks the social media spot.
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