The New Yorker's Kyle Chayka wrote about Bluesky and its CEO, Jay Graber. It's a useful and detailed history of the company and the social media context—and Graber's key role in securing independence for Bluesky from Twitter, from which it emerged. Chayka presents the company's proposition simply: first, it's a functional replica of Twitter before Musk took it over, and second, it's decentralized, which means he (or anyone else) couldn't take it over the same way.
Disaffected X users gravitate to Bluesky as a throwback to a gentler, saner social-media experience. Being on the site feels like a mixture of Twitter in 2012, when it was a haven for internet nerdery, and in 2017, when it was a seedbed of anti-Trump #Resistance. The Bluesky interface reassuringly resembles Twitter's, down to the winged blue logo (a butterfly instead of a bird) and the character limit on posts (three hundred rather than early Twitter's hundred and forty). The platform is theoretically open to all, but some MAGA trolls have reported that their accounts have been blocked. Discourse is solidly left-leaning, and disagreements tend to be internecine. The most followed account belongs to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As if to consummate Bluesky as a successor to the liberal Twitter of yore, Barack Obama recently joined and, in his first post, celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act.
That Bluesky is functionally identical to Twitter a decade or so ago is appealing. But nostalgia is not your friend. The parallels go further than design. Same founder, same venture capital backing, same need for rapid growth, same cash fire. In that respect it's also a map of other problems with Twitter that aren't addressed by decentralization.
Previously:
• Reddit considered decentralization
• Google and decentralization
• Longread: what will it take to re-decentralize the web?
