Bluesky is finally open — can it replace Twitter?

Can anything replace Twitter?

Bluesky logo

After nearly a year of an invite-only closed beta, Bluesky opened itself up to the world this month. In October, I wrote about Bluesky and how it became my favorite social media app, fully replacing Twitter, although the app is not equipped to do that yet. You can’t yet DM folks on Bluesky yet and there are no hashtags.

After two days of being open to everyone, the service saw more than one million new signups. By contrast, it took Bluesky three months just to get to 70,000 users. Now the service has five million users, which is more than Truth Social’s two million.

While in beta, Bluesky built the foundation for its own AT protocol, which allows users to voluntarily opt-in or opt-out to seeing flagged content such as nudity, violence, and hate speech. It also lets users switch servers or “hosts” without losing any data or identity. Bluesky launched on the web, iOS, and Android and in December, announced an identity: a butterfly, its own version of Twitter’s bird.

Twitter, meanwhile, has collapsed. In one of the biggest branding disasters in modern history, site owner Elon Musk destroyed the company’s shorthand, effectively throwing away patented terms like “Tweet”; he’s rebranded some — not all — of the site with a double-crossed 𝕏; the platform has rid itself of a trust and safety team, leading to thousands of Taylor Swift A.I. deepfake porn images to surface, which prompted Musk to shut down any search of Swift’s name. It turns out that hundreds of employees at a large social media site were actually necessary. Finally, advertisers have stopped advertising due to the site’s favorability of hate speech and violent content.

Speaking of less favorable content, Bluesky has ways in which it thinks it can tackle hate speech, bullying, and misinformation.

Speaking to Wired, CEO Jay Graber said this:

We have community guidelines to prevent harassment and hate speech, and we use moderation to try to create a baseline of a healthy, welcoming social space on the default Bluesky app. Then because it’s built on this open protocol, anyone can set up and run their own infrastructure and start labeling or annotating content and accounts in the network…