Bluesky’s best chance of success is accepting shitposting

I have joined so many social networking websites since October 27, 2022, the fateful day in which Elon Musk squandered his net worth and volunteered for the worst job in the world. There are Mastodon, T2, Spoutible, Hive, Post, Cohost and many more, but no alternative twitter has felt as promising as Bluesky. That is due, in part, to the number of crappy posts on there.

Bluesky came out of the Twitter nest in 2019, when Twitter founder Jack Dorsey announced that the platform would fund a small, independent team to develop a decentralized standard for social media. Like Mastodon, Bluesky plans to federate, which means infinitely many individually operated communities can exist within an open source network. Before we could have considered that Musk would buy Twitter, the “blue sky initiative” it was instrumental to the company’s long-term game: now the indie team has launched its invite-only beta, still operating with funding from Dorsey. (Yes, we know how sad it is that we are so excited about a Twitter alternative that is literally bankrolled by a Twitter founder who publicly stated that Musk is the “unique solution” confides with his old company.)

As an astute Bluesky user Pavel Samsonov, wrote: “bluesky (serious people making silly little posts) is the spiritual opposite of linkedin (deeply dumb people trying to write serious thought posts).” Samsonov even included a handy visual aid.

It is an apt description. I’m seeing the same journalists and tech people I follow on Twitter; I even found someone I know from weird facebook — but people aren’t talking about earnings reports, layoffs, and stocks. At this particular moment, Bluesky is a collection of people still addicted to the adrenaline rush of Twitter-style microblogging, but exhausted by the constant onslaught of Musky’s inane speech and antics. Enter: shit post.

In what seems like a few days, a silly and chaotic culture has developed in Bluesky. There is no name for the posts, like Twitter has tweets or Mastodon used to have toots until withdrew that mark because they are cowards So people are calling Bluesky’s posts “skeets,” a portmanteau of “tweet” and “sky” which I’m pretty sure is slang for ejaculation fluid, but I won’t check because I’m clinging to my last shred of sanity. .

Rich Burroughs, a developer advocate, believes that this culture was formed from the top down. Some Bluesky developers are very active on the platform they are building in real time, responding to user questions, complaints, and feature suggestions, all while still acting like a real person.

“Some of the staff seem to be complete bullshit posters, which I think is a great energy that has been lacking with other Twitter alternatives,” Burroughs told TechCrunch. “People keep building these super serious sentiment platforms to compete with Twitter, but what’s happening at Bluesky sounds a lot like the early days of Twitter and why it was successful.”

After fighting publicly with Musk giving him a blue check against his will, the legendary Dril shit cartel joined Bluesky today. Bryan Newbold, a Bluesky employee, posted: “if first @dril.bsky.social poast sucks, let’s burn everything down and try again.”

The Dril fandom seems to be all the rage among Bluesky’s team. Another developer, Emily Liu, posted that Newbold gave her a book of Dril’s best tweets upon joining the team (a book called “There Is No Antimemetic Division” is also shown, which sounds like something you should read ASAP). This fact seemed a bit too perfect to argue my thesis that Bluesky will succeed by deliberately cultivating shitposting, so I double-checked with Newbold to make sure this was legit. He responded: “It is the stated public policy of Bluesky PBLLC that all new employees will receive the best tweets from @dril.bsky.social in print.” Make of it what you will.

As dismayed Twitter users scrambled to find a new platform to call home, some flocked to Tumblr, another social network that has largely failed to monetize because its user base is small. deliberately resistant to behaving in predictable ways. When Tumblr launched a subscription product for creators, users vehemently opposed. According to November data, more Tumblr users have bought board crabs (pixelated crabs that dance around your board and can be gifted to friends) than subscriptions from real creators. and like a very specific gagTumblr also offered users the chance to buy not one, but two blue checks for $8.

In spirit, Bluesky is a bit like Tumblr, except I’ve yet to see anyone leave a link to Archive of Our Own and/or ray ban sale. But unlike Tumblr, these aren’t high school kids posting crap about “Supernatural”; they’re adults with jobs looking for a social media experience as far removed from LinkedIn as possible.

Sure, this is all a generalization, and maybe there’s some very serious corner of Bluesky that I haven’t found yet. But Bluesky seems to have taken what people enjoyed about Mastodon and Twitter and combined it, without as many of the bad parts. Although Bluesky’s architecture is similar to Mastodon’s, Bluesky is intuitive, while Mastodon seems inaccessible: choosing which instance to join feels like an impossible task, and longtime users are very defensive about its beeping post rules, which can make joining the conversation intimidating. As technical reporter Paris Martineau wrote on Bluesky, “genuinely, I think mastodon failed because it discouraged the posting of shit.”

Bluesky still has a lot to overcome. The platform has not yet had to deal with the large scale content moderation concerns which come with decentralization, and the app is still a walled garden (don’t PM me for invite codes – I don’t have any). But at least for this part of Internet history, Bluesky is feeling good. And Drill is here.