Bluesky could be the Twitter-like that we’ve all been waiting for.
Yes, I do know that it is still an invite-only platform. Yes, I do know that there are currently only a few thousand people using the platform. Yes, I do know it still lacks important features such as video uploads and DMs.
Bluesky seems to be the way to go.
It happened in the past few days. The decentralized Twitter alternative , which was created by Twitter, has been flooded with people who I follow. The same people would ask for Bluesky invites over and over. A few minutes later, they would appear in my Bluesky timeline and be tweeting. This means that I can use Bluesky to gather actual news, which is the main reason I use Twitter. I was also happy to see that many of these newshounds and ex-Twitter obsessives were posting with an energy I hadn’t seen for a long time.
Bluesky reached virality in one day
On Thursday, some of the biggest internet names joined the platform. Dril joined. Then, AOC. WeRateDogs is a dog-rating site. Darth the Sith Lord, red panda. Hell, I found even a “Thursday!” account. Hard Drive is the satirical publication about video games.
Bluesky was able to survive a brief downtime during that busy day. Bluesky’s official account announced that the service was down for a long time, even longer than expected, after experiencing “our largest single-day increase in users”. The skyline returned eventually, and everyone breathed a collective relief. Twitter’s whale, which was a failure in the early days of, is still legendary. It’s good that people were eager to see it return.
I’ve written before about and how much I enjoy Bluesky. The platform was a niche thing that I assumed would be populated by super geeks and cat lovers. The platform is clearly not finished — to use it on the web, Bluesky suggests , a link that includes “staging”, in the URL. I thought the small development team would continue to work before opening up the floodgates.
I did not expect Darth Dril and AOC to be joining Bluesky the same day , less than two weeks since I published this. Bluesky is a buzzing place right now.
I haven’t completely quit Twitter. For the latest news, I still use the bird app. Bluesky is not for everyone I want to be following. I wish that there was something like DMs or video.
The vibes don’t seem to be as positive as they were when I joined a few weeks ago, which may be the best indication yet that Twitter 2.0 is here. As people chase clout, I see a lot of performative posts. Some posts were downright nasty — some users threatened to beat Matthew Yglesias with hammers. Not good!
It’s my hope that the situation will improve over time, and I look forward to seeing new features added. All of this could help Bluesky maintain its momentum and avoid becoming another “flash-in-the pan” app like Ello or Peach . Bluesky’s promised features, such as account portability, could be attractive to more people.
The Bluesky team’s activeness on the platform is also encouraging. I like hearing from those who are actually developing the product when issues arise. The Bluesky team said that they “cleared our calendars” on Friday to ship blocking, which was highly requested throughout the week. If it hasn’t happened yet, blocking is expected to be available on mobile apps in the near future.
I began Thursday by posting a photo of a cat to Bluesky. I never thought that at the end of Thursday, I would be pondering about skeets. Bluesky still has a lot of work to do before it can replace Twitter in my eyes, but I’m starting to think that it could.
