Can Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky Initiative Revitalize Twitter?

Bluesky, currently the most popular members-only destination on the internet, has the atmosphere of an elite establishment, frequented by highly active internet users, renowned Twitter personalities, and disillusioned former users of the platform owned by Elon Musk.

Musk won’t be there — and that may be part of the appeal to those who miss the way things were before the Tesla billionaire bought Twitter and changed almost everything about the social network, from anti-harassment rules to a content moderation system that ensures visible user identities. It also helps that Bluesky grew out of Twitter — the pet project of former CEO Jack Dorsey, whose board he still sits on.

“It was designed to replace Twitter,” said Sol Messing, who worked at Twitter as a data scientist until January and is now an assistant professor at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Policy. “And you can see that in the way the system is designed. It works like Twitter.”

But can Bluesky replace Twitter? Prominent Twitter users such as model Chrissy Teigen, US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Drill, a humorous account that grew out of “Twitter Freak” and has mocked Musk since the billionaire took over the platform, are active users. Journalists, researchers, and politicians—the users who helped make Twitter the soul of culture—also flock to the app (if they can collect the invitation codes).

“I really wonder where he should leave the second line,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote recently, expressing concern about how Musk’s Twitter will handle next year’s presidential election. “There’s a line where the harms of unchecked disinfo outweigh the benefits of direct, genuine communication. It’s really sad.”

That being said, Bluesky has bigger goals than just replacing Twitter. In addition to the social network itself, it’s building a technical foundation—what it calls a “public conversation protocol”—that could make social networks work like email, blogs, or phone numbers.

In computer science, protocols are technical rules for processing and transferring data, and are common standards that everyone agrees to follow. Without the TCP/IP protocol, we wouldn’t have the Internet, for example.

When you call someone on the phone, it doesn’t matter if they’re on Verizon, AT&T, or Cricket Wireless—as long as they have service on their phone, they can reach you and talk to you. But on Facebook, TikTok or Twitter, you can’t go to another social network to leave a comment on someone’s account. Twitter users must remain on Twitter and TikTok users must remain on TikTok to interact with accounts on those services.

There is no pass-through – there is no interoperability. Big Tech companies have built a moat around their online real estate to help serve their advertising-centric business models. Your Twitter friends are your Twitter friends, and if you move to a new social network, you can’t easily bring them with you—if you can bring them at all. Bluesky tries to reimagine all of this. Moonshot or illusion, it’s clear that invitations to the Bluesky social networking app are a hot commodity, with some even being offered on eBay for $100 or more.

But as everyone knows — including Musk, who paid $44 billion for Twitter — the social network’s value doesn’t just lie in the technology behind it. It’s in the people – the network of people who use and participate in the platform. And transitioning people, especially non-teens, to a new social network is a huge challenge. Just ask Mastodon. Truth Social or any other alternative network that has appeared recently.

“We’re all active on Twitter because we’re all active on Twitter. And so it’s very, very difficult to switch to a different social media platform when you have thousands of Twitter followers,” said Messing, who also worked in data science at Facebook and the Pew Research Center.

While it’s unlikely that Bluesky will replace Twitter as the global communication channel anytime soon, it’s much more intuitive and user-friendly than the 7-year-old Mastodon, which was not long ago touted as a potential Twitter alternative but which many find confusing. . Complex and missing important features. Although it looks and feels like Twitter, Bluesky lacks many features that Twitter has built over the years. It is not possible to send, for example, direct messages, and there is no verification system.

For now, Bluesky is like the back room of a house party, where the cool kids and the unfit have found safety from the competition growing outside – at least until the chaos conquers him too. Now it is used by less than 100,000 people. This is by design.

“When it opens up and allows different types of content moderation to be adopted, it’s a completely different platform,” Messing said.

Bluesky’s approach to content moderation is similar to its approach to the algorithms that determine what users see. This means giving users the ability to choose what they see. The app starts with a chronological feed, which means you see the posts in the order they were published. Other social platforms like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter use secret algorithms to show you what you are likely to be interested in. Bluesky also has “custom feeds” that allow users to choose which algorithm controls what they see.

“Imagine you want your timeline to be only posts from your shared posts, only posts with cat pictures, or only sports-related posts – you just pick the feed of your choice from the open marketplace,” CEO Jay Graber recently wrote on his blog. send. . Bluesky did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s an open question whether Bluesky will fly or if the pie will stay in the sky. But some of Twitter’s early backers are cautiously optimistic. After all, Twitter started out small, and along the way both creators and users have learned a lot.

said Evan “Rubbel” Henshaw-Plath, who worked with Dorsey at Odeo’s predecessor, Twitter, and is now CEO of Planetary.Social, another decentralized social network.

In a certain way, we have democratized the media. We have changed the world. We gave everyone a voice. “But we didn’t think about what to do with it,” he said. “We haven’t given ourselves good tools to deal with it.”

Could Bluesky be the Twitter app it was made out to be?

“I wish these guys would come up with a clever way to preserve data portability without essentially losing the ability to edit content,” said Henshaw Plath. “Yes, it may be impossible, but this is what I would like to see eventually.”