Ok, it’s been a minute since I’ve written here. Picking up where we left off, Threads has been not much more than a little distraction while the rest of the world has descended into pre-apocalyptic chaos.
Twitter has fallen further into a cesspool of hate, and is overrun by bots, crypto humpers, grifters, and literal nazis.
Post election, I’d had enough. I finally deleted my account for good. I had long deprioritized my use of Twitter since Elon took over- first moving it off my home screen, eventually deleting the app and only checking in on the web from time to time.
I still love the idea of Mastodon and its underlying technology ActivityPub. And it will always have a place in the world of social media, but it just didn’t have the juice, as they say, to really take off with the mainstream set.
Threads got off to a big start- that’s what happens when you can leverage an existing property with over 2 billion users to kickstart your “new” social network. Among its many other problems, I always felt uneasy about its ownership by Meta. As I said previously, we shouldn’t want one company to own the entire social graph.
At the time of the last Great Twitter Exodus, there was a third entrant emerging in the social space, Bluesky. I had signed up for it as soon as I could, but wasn’t all that interested- it just felt superfluous, and it was struggling to get any traction with all the other things happening. There was also another billionaire involved at the time that I didn’t trust to do the right things.
Well, that billionaire is gone, the product has matured significantly, and there’s a heck of a lot more activity on it lately thanks to the latest Great Twitter Exodus. I believe Bluesky is fast approaching 20 million users, seemingly all at the expense of Twitter which is reportedly feeling a lot more like a network of bots yelling at each other these days.
Bluesky spent the intervening time building up their trust and safety teams (no doubt hiring many of the people Elon kicked to the curb), investing in their technology, shoring up their infrastructure, building a culture of transparency and openness, and fostering a strong sense of community among its users.
The place feels like vintage Twitter. People are having fun, but also meaningful conversations without all the bots and nazis fighting for attention in the replies. Whole communities are springing up and finding each other and making Bluesky their home.
From a technology perspective, everything is being built in the open. The protocol, the mobile app, the website, personal data servers, all of it is open source and available to anyone. Someone pointed out as the Bluesky app hit the top ranking in app stores this past week that it might be the first open source app to do so.
I’m very interested in the idea of Personal Data Servers and what they can mean in terms of federation, decentralization, and data ownership and portability.
Their idea of algorithmic choice is compelling, and I’m curious to see what advancements can be made in that area.
All to say, I’m rather enjoying my time recently on Bluesky. It feels like something really cool is happening there, and the vibes are great. I’m optimistic about where it’s heading, and hopeful that it will be able to avoid the pitfalls that others have stumbled into.
Oh, and I love that you can use a domain you own as a custom handle on the site, a kind of self-verification system. For example, you can find me on the site as dave.samojlenko.com
Previously: