How Bluesky Can Become More than Just Lib Twitter
On December 11, 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced a bold new effort to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. It would be incubated within Twitter, but the ultimate goal of the project would be to “allow [Twitter] to access and contribute to a much larger corpus of public conversation, focus our efforts on building open recommendation algorithms which promote healthy conversation, and [force Twitter] to be far more innovative than in the past.” He named it Bluesky.
After Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, Bluesky was spun off and eventually launched an app of the same name. Early growth was healthy but manageable, driven largely by invitations. Friends invited friends; nerdy techies made up a large percentage of the early commentariat. Many were Twitter expatriots fed up with Musk’s management of their beloved social media platform—an echo of earlier decampments on the right, when those unhappy with the Dorsey regime fled to Parler and Gab. The sharp politicization of X during the 2024 election, however, led to a tipping point: whereas the right-wing networks had peaked around 2 to 4 million active users, Bluesky exploded to over 42 million. Suddenly, social media had balkanized: X was for right-wingers, and Bluesky had become Lib Twitter.
Now, many are starting to ask questions about Bluesky. Is the platform really an idealized version of X for the liberal intelligentsia, where science and facts get their due? Is the balkanization of social media actually a good thing for democracy? With Trump Derangement Syndrome running rampant, is Bluesky trapped in a doom loop of its own making?
But all these questions miss the forest for the trees. Its real significance lies in its architecture and ethos of openness. By building a platform where control is distributed—across users, algorithms, and servers—Bluesky offers a vision of social media that isn’t beholden to any single corporation or ideology. It has the potential to deliver something rare in today’s tech arena: user empowerment. But to get there, the platform will need to expand its network, welcome a broader public, and encourage outside innovation. If Bluesky succeeds, it won’t just be another Twitter clone; it could redefine how we connect and communicate on the internet.
The X-odus
Bluesky’s genesis can be traced directly to Dorsey’s acknowledgement of Twitter’s failures: he saw that Twitter had become too centralized and vulnerable to corporate and government control. To get Twitter back to its roots as an open, decentralized system, Dorsey founded Bluesky. The idea was bold: instead of letting a single company control the public conversation, build a federated, user-controlled network; recreate Twitter as a protocol—a set of open standards that anyone can use and build off of—rather than as a closed platform.
In 2021, Twitter’s leadership brought on Jay Graber as CEO to spearhead the effort. The small but scrappy Bluesky team worked on building what would eventually become the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol: the underlying architecture designed to enable a federated social web.
At its core, the AT Protocol establishes a standard format for identity, follows, and social data, allowing different apps and servers to interoperate. In practical terms, this means a user could move their account from one server to another without losing their followers or content. It also means no single provider owns your social identity. “There’s no one company that can decide what gets published; instead there is a marketplace of companies deciding what to carry to their audiences,” Bluesky explained. In other words, the network is meant to be decentralized by design: many independently operated communities connected by a common protocol, much like email. Users, not corporations, ultimately hold the reins.
All of this was going on behind the scenes at Twitter, with the goal of eventually integrating Twitter into the AT Protocol as its first client. Then Elon happened.
Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in late 2022 marked a dramatic shift for the platform, as he sought to reduce excessive content moderation and restore what he saw as a commitment to free speech. His changes—including reinstating some banned accounts, overhauling Twitter’s verification system, altering content moderation and curation policies, and restructuring the company’s workforce—were intended to make the platform more open and financially sustainable. Twitter also jettisoned the Bluesky team.
As fate would have it, the chaos happening in San Francisco turned out to be a blessing. The Bluesky team kept working on achieving its mission of creating a decentralized social media protocol as an independent organization. In its early days, the platform was tiny and exclusive—essentially a techie salon for those with invite codes. This closed beta phase beginning in early 2023 helped refine the technology, but it also shaped public perception: from the outside, Bluesky looked like an elitist clubhouse of techy cognoscenti. As one commentator quipped, Bluesky was little more than an “invite-only clone of Twitter” that was more “like a country club … where you can go and be with your [techie] peers.”
Bluesky opened to the public in February 2024 and grew to a few million users over the next few months. Then, in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, daily usage saw hockey stick growth as the app went from approximately 3 million to 30 million users overnight. People fleeing Musk’s X—primarily people with a progressive-liberal bent revolted by Elon Musk’s close relationship with President Trump—flocked to Bluesky in what has become known as the “X-odus.”
Celebrities, politicians, and the chronically online rushed to claim their usernames on Bluesky, lending the new social network an aura of being the next big thing. Given that most of these new users’ only commonality was a hatred of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, it was natural that the Bluesky discourse trended heavily toward anti-MAGA politics, shaping public perceptions of it as a progressive sanctuary rather than the more ideologically diverse network it aimed to become. High-profile progressive users including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, George Takei, Kara Swisher, and Bryan Tyler Cowen were influential in defining the discourse. It is no coincidence that The Lincoln Project, a vehemently anti-Trump political group, is one of the most followed Bluesky accounts.
This was partly by design: Bluesky’s content moderation approach is far more proactive than Musk’s laissez-faire ethos on X. The Bluesky app launched with robust tools to help users curate their experience with features like community block lists, content labels, and customizable feed algorithms. Users could even subscribe to shared block lists to automatically mute entire groups (one popular block list targets accounts labeled as “MAGA supporters” en masse). However, this also reinforced the Lib Twitter label. The federated model was not yet fully in effect—most users were all in one big community—so if that community leaned liberal, there was no easy on-boarding of right-leaning or nonpolitical groups elsewhere.
Amid this hype, Bluesky’s deeper mission has been obscured. Fundamentally, the project has always been about building an open, federated social media ecosystem where users control their data and communities set their own rules. Indicative of this mission is Bluesky’s unofficial motto, mundus sine caesaribus, which roughly translates to “a world without emperors.”
But high-profile incidents have distracted from this mission. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Jesse Singal Incident.
When Jesse Singal, a self-described liberal journalist known for his opposition to youth gender transition, joined Bluesky, the backlash was immediate. Singal quickly became the most-blocked account on the platform, and a petition circulated urging Bluesky’s leadership to ban him in spite of the fact that he had not broken any platform policies. Deplatforming Singal rapidly turned into a progressive cause célèbre. Ultimately, Bluesky leadership declined to take action, adhering to its principle of user-controlled moderation rather than top-down enforcement. But the incident underscored an important tension. While Bluesky was designed as an open and decentralized network, its early user base was ideologically skewed, and incidents like this demonstrated that it was an inhospitable space for certain viewpoints. In sum, a perfect storm of user migration, moderation philosophy, and early adopter demographics earned Bluesky its reputation as Lib Twitter.
Looking Under the Hood
Despite its politically homogeneous start as Lib Twitter, Bluesky’s architecture holds the promise of far greater pluralism. The very goal of federation is to enable many communities with different norms and viewpoints to coexist, each operating its own server under the shared network. In theory, Bluesky could host a constellation of diverse forums—conservatives, liberals, centrists, Twilight stans, Catholics, furries, Joe Rogan fans, sadomasochists, etc.—all interoperating through the AT Protocol. Instead of one company’s rules setting the tone (as with Twitter or Facebook), each community can set its own moderation standards. Most importantly, each community is subject to the others’ rules when entering each other’s spaces; no spamming your political enemies.
The key innovation Bluesky is pursuing is algorithmic choice. Unlike traditional social platforms that impose one opaque algorithm on everyone, Bluesky is building a system where users can select (or even build) their own feed algorithms. “We want a future where you control what you see on social media,” CEO Jay Graber wrote. The goal is to enable a “marketplace of algorithms.” In practical terms, a Bluesky user might swipe between a purely chronological timeline, a community-curated feed, or an algorithm that downranks “hateful” content. Users’ choice over how their feeds work can be even more granular, switching from their puppy-pictures feed to their hyper-political news feed to their sports-news-only feed and back again in seconds, depending on their preference.
By giving people this power, Bluesky aims to break the cycle of engagement-driven outrage. If you can opt out of the algorithm that amplifies the loudest and most inflammatory posts, the whole tenor of the online conversation can change. This user-centric approach to curation could foster healthier discourse and more cross-pollination of ideas than the enraging shouting match that characterized the Twitter experience.
Crucially, Bluesky’s decentralized architecture may offer a better path forward than earlier federated projects like Mastodon. Mastodon and the broader Fediverse—shorthand for the “federated universe” of independently hosted, interconnected social platforms and services that communicate via shared protocols—proved that decentralization can work at scale, but they also exposed pitfalls. The Fediverse experience is uneven and confusing for newcomers. For example, Mastodon’s email-like federation often leads to fragmented conversations: two users on different servers might see completely different reply threads on the same post, because each server only shows the replies it knows about. Bluesky is trying to avoid those pitfalls by designing a more unified network structure on top of federation.
The AT Protocol includes a “Big Graph” service—essentially a network-wide index—to ensure a global view of content and consistent identity across servers. That means a user on a small community server can still seamlessly follow, reply to, or search posts from the main Bluesky server (or any other server) with the system handling the synchronization behind the scenes. If successful, this model would combine the diversity of decentralization with the convenience of a centralized service. In short, Bluesky is decentralized without feeling disjointed. This could make it a far more compelling alternative to centralized platforms than earlier attempts.
More than merely cloning Twitter’s microblogging, Bluesky’s technology opens up new possibilities for social media innovation. The AT Protocol is open source and intended as a foundation that developers can build on. From alternative Bluesky clients, to browser extensions that verify identities via domain names, third-party apps and services have already started to appear built on top of the AT Protocol.
In the future, entirely new social experiences could be constructed atop the network. Imagine an Instagram or YouTube in which content flows through the same decentralized backend, meaning your followers, content, and identity travel with you. Startups could build novel social networking apps that could immediately be part of a larger interoperable social web. Some enthusiasts even talk about integrating Bluesky with other decentralized tech: using cryptocurrency wallets for identity verification or payments or linking Bluesky content with open publishing tools like WordPress. This extensibility hints at Bluesky’s broader significance: it is not a platform, but an ecosystem.
The full potential of an open social protocol will likely be discovered by outsiders tinkering with it in the same spirit that the early open web spawned unexpected innovations. Bluesky’s decentralization isn’t an end in itself; it’s a means to unleash creativity, competition, and diversity in social media.
Getting From X to B
For Bluesky to evolve from Lib Twitter into the open social revolution its founders and early adherents envision, several steps will be crucial. First, it must expand federation in practice and onboard a far more ideologically and globally diverse user base. This means rolling out support for independent servers and making it easy for all kinds of communities to set up their own spaces. Bluesky will need to actively encourage a wider range of groups to join, including moderates, conservatives, international users, and others who didn’t rush in during the X-odus. If federation remains limited, or if most users stay corralled on the one big bsky.social server, Bluesky risks remaining an insular bubble.
The team’s greatest challenge is to balance growth with its values. In practical terms, that could involve developing tools for inter-server moderation so that servers with lax policies don’t overwhelm others with spam. The goal should be to let a thousand communities bloom while maintaining some connective tissue and shared standards across the network for dealing with illegal content.
Second, Bluesky and others need to nurture a developer and enterprise ecosystem around the AT Protocol. Its success will hinge on others embracing it as an open standard. The project has made its code open source and has already seen independent developers craft custom feeds and apps. This is a promising start, but the momentum must continue. When entrepreneurs have their pick of dozens of social media protocols, the value proposition of building on the AT Protocol must be crystal clear.
Bluesky should facilitate third-party innovation by providing stable APIs, documentation, and perhaps funding or hackathons for building on the protocol. From novel algorithmic feed providers to specialized community servers or moderation tools, independent tools will only enrich the overall network. If companies see opportunity in the AT Protocol, they might build social features into their own products that hook into Bluesky’s network, much like how different email clients and providers all interoperate on the email protocol. Imagine news organizations, universities, or interest groups running their own Bluesky servers for their members, or software companies adopting the protocol for internal social feeds.
Such buy-in won’t happen overnight, but rolling out a welcome mat for outside innovation is essential. This also means Bluesky should prepare for standards governance. Cultivating this kind of open ecosystem will help Bluesky fulfill its role as a public commons rather than just another app.
Finally, Bluesky must figure out a sustainable business model that preserves the platform’s independence and user-centric ethos. As a public benefit corporation, Bluesky has explicitly committed to prioritizing an open and decentralized social web over profit. That noble stance doesn’t pay the server bills or developer salaries by itself. Thus far, Bluesky has been supported by investor funding and the goodwill of its backers. Long-term, it plans to avoid the advertising model used by traditional social media since locking in user data would contradict the whole premise of user ownership. The team’s initial revenue experiments have instead focused on paid services that enhance the user experience. For example, Bluesky introduced a paid domain name service that allows users to purchase custom domain handles (e.g., yourname.com) more easily.
Thousands of users have shown interest in using personal domains as their identity, which both generates revenue and advances the idea of user-controlled identity. This is a start, but additional revenue streams will be needed. Possibilities include premium features, subscription plans for power users, or offering hosting and support for communities that run their own servers (Bluesky-as-a-Service anyone?). Ironically, a good example on how to do that is Elon Musk’s re-commercialization of Twitter in this area.
A Bluesky that fulfills its promise could empower communities of all stripes to take charge of their online experience. It could spawn new social apps we can’t yet imagine, all interoperable and user-first by design. And it could demonstrate that decentralization online isn’t just a pipe dream or a playground for geeks, but a viable alternative to the status quo. In an era of disillusionment with social media, Bluesky’s open-at-the-core approach is a refreshing experiment in what the next chapter of the internet might look like.