There were periods over the weekend where I was getting more than 1,000 new Bluesky followers every hour. This was very exciting not just because I was enjoying the dopamine of seeing a number go up, but because it was happening to many other people on Bluesky, too.
Over the last week, more than a million people have joined Bluesky and, more importantly, people who already had accounts there started actively using it again, to the point where it felt like the most energetic move away from Twitter since Elon Musk took over. Bluesky is different and, in my opinion, better than X and Threads because it is operated as a public benefit corporation and not owned by an oligarch. It is also decentralized and is federated, meaning it is moving toward a future where users “own” their audiences and can port them elsewhere (you can, and many do, argue about the details here, and about the differences between ActivityPub, which Mastodon uses, and the AT Protocol, which Bluesky uses).
The active migration away from social media networks that are owned, controlled by, and distorted by the richest men and most powerful companies in the world to a decentralized platform that is not owned and controlled by billionaires is one of the more hopeful things to happen in what has largely been a bleak year for the human internet as AI slop infects everything and billionaires put their thumbs on the scale of what we see on social media. The Bluesky migration is good news, and I hope it continues.
Bluesky feels more vibrant and more filled with real humans than any other social media network on the internet has felt in a very long time. It has surpassed Threads as the current most popular app on the App Store, and now has more than 15 million users overall. If you’re on Bluesky, you can follow all of us here.
(We talk much more about Bluesky in the second half of this episode of the podcast)
Close followers of 404 Media may remember an article I did a year ago called “Mastodon Is the Good One,” in which I put my eggs in the Mastodon basket. I am now taking most of those eggs (my attention and effort) and putting them in the Bluesky basket for a few different reasons, most notably the fact that Bluesky feels incredibly vibrant across a wide variety of topics. There are journalists and academics and scientists and Swifties and all the Brazilians who left X when Brazil temporarily banned it. Lots of people from Black Twitter are there. There are main characters on Bluesky and they are getting dunked on sometimes, and that’s something I like. Importantly for me, many of my favorite baseball writers and accounts have made their way over to Bluesky and are actively posting there. It has, as they say, the juice.
I still think Mastodon is important and I will continue to use it, but a year after my article, I have complicated feelings about it. I still think that federation and decentralization, where publications and users “own” their followings and can port them across a variety of different services is the future of the internet if we want to have any hope of taking back any control from billionaires.
I do not find Mastodon itself to be that difficult to use, and I find the people there to be very nice. I believe in decentralization and federation broadly speaking, and 404 Media will continue to support and hopefully be involved in attempts to disseminate our content more widely across the fediverse (it should be noted that Mastodon is not the only part of the fediverse, and that there are an increasing number of services that use ActivityPub). My Mastodon feed still has many interesting people talking, but I’ve found it difficult to make a diverse and active feed that has a lot of posts about things that aren’t technology, cybersecurity, open source, etc.
But something happened to many of the larger Mastodon servers over the last few months. I have a theory about this: Threads happened to it. Threads announced that it would become a part of the fediverse, and that it would allow people to share their Threads posts using ActivityPub.
The website Mastodon-Analytics, which tracks active users on Mastodon instances shows that the number of active users has steadily dropped over the last year, from 1.6 million in November, 2023 to a little less than 900,000 at the end of October. This cannot be fully blamed on Threads federating, but, anecdotally, Threads’s uneven entry into the Fediverse feels like it has made my personal feeds deader. My theory and fear is that Threads has allowed people to perform the act of federating by having their Threads posts go to the fediverse, but it does not allow people on Threads to respond to people on Mastodon. This gives people a permission structure to abandon their Mastodon accounts, use Threads, and sort of passively invest in the future of decentralized social media while actually just giving more power to Mark Zuckerberg’s side project.
This makes for what is at the moment a really bad dynamic, where you’re broadcasting your Threads posts to the fediverse, and people on Mastodon can respond to them, but you can’t respond to those people.
I talked about this on the Dot Social podcast with Flipboard’s CEO Mike McCue and ProPublica’s Ben Werdmuller, both of whom are extremely bullish on the future of the decentralized web, and they both told me that they think in the long run having a big fish like Threads investing in the fediverse will be good. Part of the whole point of the fediverse and decentralized social media is that it will ultimately not matter what server you’re posting from.
But we are not quite at that point yet, in my opinion, because it still feels very difficult for me to build a feed on Mastodon where I feel like that is the only social media platform I can visit and where I am getting everything I need from that one place. Mastodon and ActivityPub still heavily overindexes on people talking about tech and nerdy internet topics (said lovingly), and it’s hard to find active discussion about, say, sports, pop culture, celebrities, etc. In the short term, I think that Threads cannonballing in a partial way into the fediverse has cannibalized some of the energy that Mastodon has had over the last year, whereas Bluesky has been allowed to grow its own voice and userbase kind of on its own, without Zuckerberg jumping into the pool.
This article is nominally about Bluesky, but Threads and Mastodon are as much a part of the Twitter-replacement story as X and Bluesky itself are. (You should check out the episode of Dot Social where McCue interviews Bluesky’s primary owner and CEO Jay Graber, by the way.)
Threads has also become more vibrant over the last few months, with Meta forcing people onto the platform by injecting Thread posts onto Instagram. This has led Threads to apparently add a million users a day, but it is not clear to me how real that userbase is, and how many of them are simply downloading Threads because they saw something on Instagram and are not regularly using the app or are just interacting with it when they see something on Instagram.
Threads still feels to me like a gas leak social media network with a busted algorithm that over indexes on extremely annoying middle managers in Silicon Valley who dogpile on anyone who thinks that maybe social media network that suppresses links and political content, has horrible and uneven content moderation, and is owned by the same company that is paying an army of posters in developing nations to spam their flagship platform with busted AI is maybe not the platform to bet on. It is also—sorry—full of people who think Threads is perfectly fine and do not want to do even the tiniest bit of work to take a microscopic bit of power away from a company that has dominated global social media to disastrous outcomes for 20 years, and who cannot be bothered to do the bare minimum amount of introspection or reading to understand why a viable platform not owned by Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk might be something worth building toward.
So, anyway. Bluesky. I am not going to pretend to be an expert on Bluesky’s AT protocol, how it differs from ActivityPub (which Mastodon uses), and its future plans for interoperability. I know enough to know that if I attempt to explain it here, I will get something wrong and people will be mad at me. But I have been impressed with the tools that the open source development community is building to bridge the gap between the AT protocol and ActivityPub, and I’m hopeful that some mixture of Bluesky and Mastodon will eventually serve most of my needs as a social media user and, hopefully, as someone who co-owns a website.
I do not know if this current enthusiasm will last. 404 Media’s Sam Cole has endlessly made fun of my willingness to embrace new social media platforms and declare them to suddenly be where we should all focus our energy, and perhaps I will look back on this post and realize that I was naive or stupid. Cory Doctorow, who is perceptive about such things, worries about Bluesky enshittifying, and its model of decentralization is not as robust at the moment as Mastodon’s, which is certainly a concern.
But I do know that the energy on Bluesky is exciting, that the app and website are very usable, and that, as a journalist, I appreciate a platform that does not and says it will not punish links in any algorithm and which mostly operates in reverse chronological order. I think that the “Starter Packs” that let you follow tons of people at once according to your interests have made the onboarding process really easy. What’s happening on Bluesky right now feels organic and it feels real in a way no other Twitter replacement has felt so far, and it feels better than X.com has been ever since Elon Musk took over. If the masses are going to move off Twitter, we can do much better than Threads. And we could do much worse than Bluesky.
