To partisans behind Bluesky, it must have seemed like a gift from the gods when Elon Musk bought Twitter. In short order he changed its name to X, shifted its moderation policies sharply to the right and sent millions of internet refugees searching for a new home.
But as the ancients knew, gifts of the gods often come with strings attached.
In the two years since Bluesky opened to all comers, the social media app has gained 43 million users, an amazing feat for a company with fewer than 50 full-time employees. That growth got a huge boost from Musk’s antics in the lead-up to the 2024 election, which endowed Bluesky with a base of devoted users — users who skewed heavily progressive and brought with them cancel culture tactics that had flourished on X. Those users are now the platform’s biggest barrier to growth.
Consider the firestorm that ensued when Jesse Singal joined Bluesky in late 2024. Singal is reviled on the left for his reporting on youth gender medicine, and tens of thousands of users have blocked him. Many petitioned for him to be banned from the platform. Bluesky refused. Wherever possible, the company relies on strong moderation tools (such as mass block lists) that let communities police their own boundaries, rather than the whole app. That admirable ethos let Singal stay, but abusive users inundated him with death threats. Singal is the most extreme example, but it’s common enough that one of the site’s technical advisers felt compelled last May to clarify that it was not okay to tell other users to kill themselves.
Social media depends on network effects: In theory, each user makes the platform more attractive to other users. In practice, Bluesky has a group of users who try to repel outsiders.
Those users are a minority of a minority. Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang told me that politics accounts for only 10 percent of Bluesky activity, and most folks are sharing stories and swapping memes, not mobbing fellow users. But the territorial faction is strong enough that many non-progressives quickly gave up, and active daily use stats suggest the platform is hitting a plateau rather than escape velocity. While the number of people with Bluesky accounts keeps inching up, active daily posters currently hover around 650,000, about the same as in September.
Last fall, Chief Executive Officer Jay Graber tried to tamp things down by posting some gentle humor on the platform, only to face backlash from users angry that Bluesky still hadn’t banned Singal. “Harassing the mods into banning someone has never worked. And harassing people in general has never changed their mind,” she wrote in a follow-up post, which also didn’t go over well. On March 9, Graber announced she was stepping down to return to a more technical role.
So I asked Wang how the company can grow in such conditions. She had an answer — a good one. But it will be tricky to pull off.
Bluesky is not a normal social media company. Organized as a public benefit corporation, it doesn’t have to prioritize profits for its investors. It takes a special kind of mission-oriented investor to embrace that ethos, but apparently they exist. Bluesky just announced that it had raised $100 million for the company to invest in the platform’s app and open protocol.
The protocol is arguably more important. What is it? Well, Bluesky isn’t trying to build a walled garden like Facebook or X. It’s trying to create something more like email: an open system that lets developers build their own Twitter or Substack-like apps atop a shared network of users who would have one identity across all those applications. Users, not the developers, would own their identity and internet presence, and it would be portable across applications.
I find that vision appealing because I got my writing start as a blogger, when the internet was a loose federation of blogs, forums and more established institutions, held together by a web of cross-linking that let users move from one place to another.
It was glorious. It also couldn’t last.
The old internet nerds loved the freedom, but when the masses arrived, that freedom became overwhelming. There was too much content and no quick way to organize it. Social media companies eventually developed algorithmic feeds that showed users a sample of what was available, rather than drowning them in the torrent. Inevitably, companies realized it was more profitable if those algorithms prioritized in-app content over links. Links, after all, took users off your platform, where you couldn’t serve them ads.
Meanwhile, traditional media was building its own walls. When digital readership was small, it was safe to put your content online for free, as a kind of advertising. As readership for print publications dwindled, giving your stuff away got more expensive. The economics became even more challenging when the algorithms changed; you could no longer count on stories going viral and bringing you valuable eyeballs that advertisers would pay for. Media was now increasingly dependent on subscribers, which meant paywalls. The open landscape of the old internet was increasingly dominated by fiefdoms.
A lot of virtual ink has been spilled regretting this shift. Bluesky is betting on its reversal: reopen the frontier, leave the little subdivisions and once again cavort on the open range, where communities and developers shape the network without a common gatekeeper.
I want to believe that this can happen, as I want to believe that I can be 28 again. Yet even a public benefit corporation needs some revenue to keep things running, and I’m not clear where that will come from — whether or not the vision is realized. Can a small base of highly active users sustain a major platform? Can an open protocol capture enough value to become self-sustaining?
I have my doubts. But I am rooting for Wang and her team to defy my pessimistic expectations. It might be a fantasy. But if so, it’s an awfully compelling one.
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