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Bluesky is having a moment — a moment that has already spanned nearly three months.
Over the summer, the social media app saw a wave of new subscriptions in Brazil after X (formerly Twitter) was temporarily banned there. In the US, dissatisfaction with changes at Company
According to SimilarWeb,X traffic and Account deactivations peaked the day after the presidential election. Meanwhile, Bluesky says it has begun adding 1 million new users every day; Saturday company Announce It now has 18 million users, and is currently the number one free app on the Apple App Store.
This has, unsurprisingly, caused some issues, with periods of slowness or when the app won’t load, as well as… Content moderation and safety challenges. in Interview with The New York TimesCEO Jay Graber acknowledged that there are “always some difficulties with growth,” but said that her team of 20 full-time people “pride us in our ability to scale quickly.”
Beyond the technical issues, longtime users seem to be grappling with what this rapid growth means for the Bluesky community. Yes, there was Victorious posts About App Store rankings and the latest celebrity subscriptions, but also Selfless speech About the qualifications of being “Bluesky the Elder”, Hand scrub When the wrong types of users show up, beg/reprimand reminder To “don’t engage, just block” when dealing with trolls.
I even noticed that the strange relationship with Bluesky was changing. Although I’ve spent more time on any other social media app in the past year, my follower count has stalled at around 200 — a fact I’ve found strangely freeing, though it hasn’t motivated me to post more than once a month. Or so. However, this week, the numbers started to rise again — and while they’re still pretty low (I’ve been on other social media a lot, I swear), I immediately started to worry that someone might actually notice if I said something stupid.
Although My Bluesky existence Being negligible, I feel protective about it. I suppose it’s a familiar story: early fans always complain when the mainstream discovers something new and cool. No, I’m not about to start posting “Keep Bluesky Weird!” Or declaring, “Bluesky is finished!” But I worry that what was fun, quirky, and even life-affirming about the Bluesky community could dissipate or disappear with the influx of new users.
In other words: Bluesky has always felt like the little left alternative to X. What makes Bluesky Bluesky when it no longer exists? The “short king” of social media? After seeing so many familiar names from old Twitter, I wondered if we’d be recreating Twitter circa 2014. worst thing, but can’t we do better?
At least Bluesky executives have indicated they want to do things differently. Some distinctions, such as the focus on decentralization, may be largely invisible to everyday users, but many of their priorities appear to be built into the product and business. there Aggressive blocking featuresthe Time-series feedback (not algorithm).the Pledge not to train AI on user postsAnd a future business model that focuses on paid subscriptions rather than ads.
Graeber recognizes a potential cultural conflict, describing it as the problem of “eternal September,” where old-timers become unhappy when waves of newbies emerge, and inevitably the culture. She said Bluesky is looking to address this issue by adding more features to allow users to personalize their experience, and by improving automated content moderation tools.
Perhaps the coming months and years will prove that these decisions and features can actually protect and nurture healthy online communities. And perhaps we’ve all learned something from seeing how other social networks wither or become toxic. I hope so. And if not? Well, one thing IWhat I learned from Twitter is that you should always be ready to move on to the next app.
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