Bluesky could make the internet fun again

As Bluesky approaches 25 million users, there’s been predictable hand-wringing about the effects of moving to a new public square. Since many of these perspectives treat Bluesky as a straightforward X (formerly Twitter) clone, I wanted to share why I’m more excited about the Bluesky platform than I ever was about X.

It’s worth pointing out that Bluesky already offers a superior user experience by avoiding X’s three biggest antifeatures:

1. X prioritized posts from paid users at the expense of interesting content. This led to low-quality engagement farming at the top of the newsfeed and most large comment threads.

2. X suppressed external links and references to competitors, which made it worse at surfacing useful information from elsewhere on the internet.¹

3. X encouraged toxic user interactions like quote-dunking and dogpiling, which got noticeably worse in the era of poor moderation.

But these differences in user experience, while substantial, are secondary to the real benefit of Bluesky: the open social graph underpinning it. Bluesky’s decentralized approach to social media has the potential to bring back the fun and possibility of the early web.

Building on the AT Protocol

Bluesky doesn’t own your social data in the same sense as other social platforms—your followers, posts, likes, and blocks are public, recorded via the AT Protocol specification. Bluesky is just one view of the underlying AT Protocol network, designed to show the microblogging facets of a user’s profile.

In her great explainer, Emily Liu compares Bluesky to a browser: you can use it to interact with the social web, but the browser doesn’t own your data, and you can always switch to a different browser with better features.

To make this point more concretely, go enter your Bluesky username in this third-party AT Protocol browser. Almost all of the data you’ve ever generated on Bluesky is publicly available. Other apps that interface with the AT Protocol, collectively dubbed the “ATmosphere,” can also serve you this data through their own interfaces. You can also migrate your data to your own server while still interacting with Bluesky and the rest of the ATmosphere.²

This open framework has some neat implications—let’s explore a few.

Same framework, different apps

By moving social data to the open web, the AT Protocol offers a stronger guarantee that these data will be consistently available to independent developers.³ At the time of writing, there are 145 independently-developed apps, bots, and visualizations listed on the Bluesky Community Showcase, plus another 70 projects recorded on this Github repo. These include:

• A network analyzer to find friends of friends
• An ID detector extension for Chrome that shows the authenticated social profile associated with the website you’re currently visiting
• A Github-style heatmap showing your posting “commit history” over the past year
• A visualization of the Bluesky firehose that shares every post in real time

A quick drink from the Bluesky firehose.

Let a hundred algorithms bloom

Bluesky users have pointed out that the default “Discover” algorithm is less aggressive than other social media feeds—to me, this misses the larger point that the app is designed to allow any algorithm you want. On top of curated feeds showing posts from select users, there are already helper feeds for your mentions, mutual friends, posts popular with your friends, trending links, and pictures only.

Since anyone can create an algorithmic feed, I expect we’ll get increasingly tailored algorithms to match a wide range of user preferences. Breaking news feeds are more likely to emphasize trending posts compared to friend-oriented feeds that place more weight on your local social graph or topical feeds that highlight specific users and keywords. I’d personally like an algorithm that posts new journal articles on weekdays, then exclusively fluff on weekends.

Social media research is back

Reddit’s and X’s previous API terms enabled a generation of social media research—researchers could bulk download years of data from millions of users to identify trends in sentiment or track real-world events as they unfolded.⁴ This ended abruptly in 2023, when both platforms limited their free APIs. Thanks to Bluesky, academic researchers once again have access to a rich trove of social data from tens of millions of users.

The hackable social graph

I’m most excited about the opportunities to integrate AT Protocol social data elsewhere on the web, including my personal website. I’ve set up a Bluesky-linked comment section for my blog—by responding to this post, you can join the conversation below.⁵

Returning to a fun internet

Bring it back. Screenshot from the brilliant One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age project.

We’re all familiar with the broken promises of the social media era. Instead of a democratized internet, we got a series of increasingly walled gardens where fundamental aspects of our social lives were subject to algorithmic manipulation.

Other people have diagnosed this problem more lucidly than I can: Cory Doctorow calls it enshittification and links it to the financial incentives of social media companies, whereas Jia Tolentino describes the psychological and social damage wrought by perpetual online performance. In both accounts, social media companies try to concentrate your social universe into one platform, then slowly shut off opportunities for interaction outside that platform as network effects take hold. The result is a virtual Colosseum—it feels like the whole world is watching, the wild animals are closing in, and you can’t make a break for the exits because your friends are stuck in there with you.

Compare this to the nostalgic view of the early internet, where the joys of personal creation and exploration were paramount. People who could overcome the hurdle of getting online felt empowered to build their own websites, which they might share with friends, family, and perhaps a few like-minded hobbyists via messageboards or IRC. That version of the web seemed both intimate in its interactions and expansive in its possibilities.

Doonesbury, February 26, 1995: Mike stays up late on the internet. Reprinted with permission.

I’m hopeful Bluesky might revive some of that fun on the modern web. The Bluesky app makes it easy to post and find friends; the open framework allows you to build beyond the confines of the app; homespun algorithms allow you to explore; data sovereignty allows you to leave. Instead of becoming one more walled garden that aspires to capture all your interactions, Bluesky (powered by the AT Protocol) could operate as the convenient social touchpoint for a wider and wilder internet.

The Bluesky story has a touch of romance: an experimental Twitter project spins off as a public benefit corporation right before the ship starts sinking, then quietly builds the next generation of social internet. Perhaps that story makes me overly optimistic—some future crisis, or the simple financial reality of running a social media company, could force Bluesky into the same unpleasant cycle as its predecessors.⁶ For now, I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

You can find me building, and having fun, on Bluesky.

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