Bluesky: An Echo Chamber for X’s Bitter Exes

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The day after Trump’s reelection, a record 115,000 X users deactivated their accounts. A week later, the microblogging site Bluesky—AKA “Twitter for Pedophiles”—boasted that it had gained a million new followers.

After giving Bluesky a brief look-see, it seems to be little more than Anne Frank’s Attic for people who can’t handle X’s newfound “toxicity” under Elon Musk’s lordship. And yet, although they’re all presumably fellow travelers huddled together for safety up in that attic, they still find a way to cannibalize one another.

I’ve been on The Site Formerly Known as Twitter since 2009, but as one of the most antisocial people on social media (I don’t “follow” anyone and rarely post anything beyond links to my new articles, podcasts, and books) I watched how Twitter enabled unprecedented social-justice hysteria to blossom during the Obama years. But it also provided at least a temporary voice to the “race realists,” IQ noticers, and those who would eventually congeal into the Alt-Right—which gained enough clout that even Hillary Clinton mentioned them in her ill-fated campaign against Donald Trump in 2016.

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But after Trump beat Clinton and continuing until late 2022, Twitter’s censorship and deplatforming seemed shamelessly one-sided. People who were banned from Twitter had to find shelter on self-reinforcing right-wing echo chambers such as Gab and Telegram. Very few, if any, of them left Twitter as part of an infantile, poo-flinging, I’m taking-my-keyboard-and-going-home tantrum—they were forced out.

Then, late in 2022, along came the World’s Richest Man to purchase Twitter, rechristen it as X, and allow most of the types who were guillotined during Twitter’s purges of the hateful to sew their heads back on, walk back in, and speak their minds again.

Although Musk has his political biases, as did former Twitter owner Jack Dorsey, I’m unaware of Musk banning his side’s critics to anywhere near the degree that Dorsey did. Musk has been much more openly vocal about his biases than Dorsey was, too, but I don’t see the sort of one-sided censorship that flourished under Dorsey. If, as the screeching left insists, X started to hemorrhage users under the Muskenreich, it was voluntary.

There’s a colossal difference being banned and deactivating your account. It’s the difference between being kicked out and walking away in performative disgust.

Bluesky started in 2019 when Jack Dorsey tweeted that Twitter was funding a research team to develop an “open and decentralized standard for social media” and that they were “calling the team @bluesky.”

Bluesky’s logo is a blue butterfly instead of Twitter’s blue bird. What was formerly known as tweeting is now unofficially called “skeeting,” which is a portmanteau of “sky” and “tweets.” In ghetto argot, “to skeet” means “to ejaculate.”

After Musk acquired Twitter in late 2022, he severed all corporate ties between Twitter and Bluesky.

In February 2023, Bluesky went past the development stage to become an invite-only service. By the summer of 2023, it had an estimated 200,000 users.

Bluesky didn’t allow open registrations until February 2024, long after Musk’s demonic talons had sunk deeply enough into X that it allowed most forms of “hate speech” to survive unscathed.

By July of this year, Bluesky’s estimated membership was around six million. In mid-September, total users hovered around 10 million. As of November 13, it was the #1 free app on the Apple Store. Membership has nearly doubled since Trump’s reelection, ballooning from an estimated 13 million in late October to around 24 million now.

But though some are lamenting that we’ve entered an ominous new phase of “social media fragmentation,” of self-contained and mutually exclusive “echo chambers” and “hugboxes” where people only hear the opinions they already agree with, I see no evidence that Musk is censoring the woke squads that have frolicked unhindered on the site since its inception. All he’s done is reopen the door for those that Twitter used to ban in droves.

Searching “MAGA” or “Elon Musk” or “Trump” or “Red State” on X coughs up an array of divergent takes. Searching these terms on Bluesky, it’s 100% negative.

Poring over the “Top 500 Bluesky Users,” the app’s social-media account comes in at #1, followed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who recently became the first public figure on Bluesky with over a million followers. Nipping at her heels at #3 is the gay Nip George Takei from the Star Trek franchise, followed by Mark Hamill from Star Wars. Trump-hating Mark Cuban is at #7. No one in the top 10, nor as far as I could tell the top 100, could be remotely classified as Trump-sympathetic. This is by design.

From an October 2024 analysis of the “Top 10 most-followed personalities on ‘X,’” only Elon Musk, Narendra Modi, and Donald Trump could be classified as “right-wing.” The rest are dopey shitlib entertainers and soccer hunk Cristiano Ronaldo. There’s room for nearly everyone on X, but if you’re the type to get conniptions at the hint of disagreement, no one’s forcing you to stay.

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In a November 24 piece for the Sydney Morning Herald, a blonde filly named Parnell Palme McGuinness contrasted Bluesky with X:

Bluesky is a microblogging site for idealists, devoted to protecting them against the raging reality of divergent opinion in a democratic system…. Conservatives used to insist that politics is downstream of culture…. America’s choice of Donald Trump this year should finally persuade them that this adage isn’t complete. Culture is downstream of economics. The party perceived to be capable of managing things so you can live a good life has first dibs on defining the mainstream culture….

But you won’t hear that over at Bluesky, where the butterfly logo symbolises a new type of white flight from unpleasant ideas. As the progressive influx gains pace, the Bluesky Trust & Safety team received 42,000 reports of “harmful content” in a single day, compared with 360,000 for the whole of 2023.

Although the frail blue butterflies at Bluesky ostensibly escaped from all the “hate,” they have nothing left to do but turn on each other through reporting and flagging. Moderation, blocking, and banning at Bluesky are far worse than they were at Twitter even at the height of Jack Dorsey’s reign—so bad that in early May, Dorsey announced on X that he was no longer on Bluesky Social’s board. He told an interviewer that Bluesky’s managers “were literally repeating all the mistakes [Twitter] made as a company.”

User after user after user has all of their skeets flagged under the rubric of “intolerance,” so you have to click on and “unfurl” them just to see what was said. Most of the time, it’s something pathetically trivial.

This is what happens when you cloister yourself in a little blue bubble—it becomes a maelstrom of infighting, back-stabbing, and purity-spiraling. These Star Trek and Star Wars nerds wind up sodomizing one another with their lightsabers during marathon bouts of intersectional bloodsports. Instead of a bedside sound machine that lulls everyone into soothing slumber with the gentle pitter-patter of raindrops, Bluesky is more like Chinese water torture where everyone is driven mad by the faintly different timbre of one another’s voices.