Bluesky feels more like old Twitter than X does

In the two years since Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X, the platform has become crowded with deceptive ads and unchecked misinformation. Now, with President-elect Donald Trump heading to the White House and Musk joining his administration, countless people announced their departure from X. Rival social media site Bluesky told Vox that 2.25 million new users have joined in the last week alone. And they’re having a blast.

Bluesky looks a lot like the old Twitter you knew and loved. It’s a reverse chronological feed of posts, including images, videos, and links that you can like and repost. Like old Twitter, your feed is not ruled by an algorithm. Meanwhile, Bluesky’s open source, decentralized framework gives you a lot more control over how your feed works than X or even Threads, the X alternative Meta has been pushing onto Instagram users. 

In addition to the technical differences, there’s also a different vibe on Bluesky. It’s overflowing with weird memes and digital art thanks to early users who hurried to recapture that fun and serendipitous feeling of the original Twitter. But with an influx of a million users in the last month, Bluesky is growing fast and bracing for some sort of evolution. The people arriving from X seem like they’re having fun so far, too. You can also expect to see a lot less Elon Musk on Bluesky, if only because he doesn’t own the place.

If the good vibes continue, there’s a chance that Bluesky could usher in a brighter future for social media, one that gives users more power over their experience. Theoretically, the company’s model could give people a way to hang out on the social web outside of algorithmic feeds stuffed with targeted ads and ruled by trillion-dollar tech companies. For now, at the very least, Bluesky is a welcome breath of fresh air.

Why people are fleeing X

This isn’t the first time people have flocked to Bluesky. When Twitter accepted Elon Musk’s $44 billion bid to buy Twitter in April 2022, a lot of people freaked out about the possibility of the billionaire changing the platform into a place where trolls and grifters could run free — all in the name of free speech. Those initial anxieties turned out to be correct. After Musk changed the name to X, what used to be Twitter filled up with white supremacists and became overrun with harassment, AI slop, and election misinformation. 

This overhaul turned into a huge opportunity for open source, text-based social networks, like Mastodon and Bluesky. Early on, it looked like the decidedly decentralized Mastodon would be the Twitter alternative of choice, but after it saw an initial burst of interest, some people felt like Mastodon was just too confusing. As a federated network, Mastodon let people set up their own servers, which functioned as independent but interconnected communities within the larger network. It’s related to the larger concept of the fediverse, where a single protocol could allow information to be exchanged between all social media platforms. The fediverse, like Mastodon, is very confusing.

Bluesky took this idea of a federated network and made it easy to use. It started back in 2019, when Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced that Twitter would fund a small team that would build an “open and decentralized standard for social media.” The ambition — which would eventually result in Bluesky — was to work toward an open social media ecosystem, where users could control how content appeared in their feeds and take their data and followers with them when they moved platforms. Bluesky registered as its own public benefit company in February 2022, just a couple of months before Musk offered to buy Twitter.

The first Bluesky app launched in beta about a year later, and it looked a heck of a lot like Twitter, down to the blue logo, which would become a butterfly rather than Twitter’s bird. Rather than require you to figure out which server to join, as Mastodon does, Bluesky initially centralized the user experience on one server so users could see one feed, just like on Twitter. Within a few months, some prominent Twitter users, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Chrissy Teigen, had set up Bluesky accounts.

Bluesky has only gotten easier to use since its early days. While the company announced it was federating earlier this year, allowing users to store their data on their own servers, the Bluesky user experience remains very straightforward and Twitter-like, down to the look and feel of the app and website. Honestly, if you’re not paying attention while you’re scrolling your feed, you might think you’re on Twitter circa 2021.

That said, the future of Bluesky is supposed to be transformative. While social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have been plagued by content moderation problems, Bluesky wants to put users and communities in control of those policies. The same goes for what shows up in people’s feeds. Bluesky says that instead of one algorithm to rule all users, it will let developers create all kinds of different algorithms and empower users to choose their own experience on the platform. 

“I’m really excited that folks can choose the social media that’s right for them. I’ll say for me, I like small social media where I talk to barely a dozen people,” Rory Mir, associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said of Bluesky’s open source architecture. “And then if folks want a really big audience and to really blow up that’s also available.” 

This is not how Bluesky works for everyone quite yet. You can just set up an account, follow a bunch of people, and then see their posts. But looking ahead, Bluesky has an optimistic vision for a near future in which social media doesn’t make people so miserable.

For new users, Bluesky’s appeal is all about the culture 

Timing has proven crucial to Bluesky’s current position as the X alternative du jour — that is, it’s had a significant amount of time to gather momentum leading to what seems to be this tipping point moment. 

When the platform launched over 18 months ago, it was as an invite-only space, prompting extremely online types and various public figures to flock to try to get in. (The fact many of those early adopters were journalists didn’t hurt in terms of building hype.) That long period of limited entry served to build FOMO, of course, but it also served to allow a niche group of users time to help shape what the dominant modes of communication, moderation, and platform etiquette would be. 

“The health and positivity of Bluesky’s community is very important to us, and we’ve invested heavily in Trust and Safety,” Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu told Vox in an email. “Last year, Bluesky required invite codes to sign up — not to build hype or exclusivity, but rather so we had time to grow the network responsibly and build our Trust and Safety team.”

“​​When Musk first bought Twitter, the first things he did were rolling back moderation on transphobia on the platform and because of that we were the first group to leave Twitter in numbers,” journalist Katelyn Burns told Vox. “Because of that, a large group of funny, talented trans posters were the earliest adopters of Bluesky and were able to forge the platform into what it is today: funny, frequently horny, and with very strong moderation tools. If you like Bluesky’s vibe right now, thank a trans person.”

When the platform finally opened to the public in February, this culture was already well-established: Lots of shitposting passed down from the days of Weird Twitter (including various Alf memes that recently led to some confusion); a seemingly inevitable leftist tilt; a subcommunity of NSFW posters; and, perhaps most important, an emphasis on proactively curating your own experience using Bluesky’s robust moderation tools. 

The centrality of these tools are arguably the defining trait that allows Bluesky to stand out, especially compared to Twitter, which struggled for its entire existence to properly deal with bad actors on the site (until Musk more or less jettisoned that struggle altogether). Bluesky not only allows you to block and mute various people, words, and tags, it also allows you to hide individual posts on feeds, and allows users to subscribe to curated block lists directly from the platform that blocks users en masse. 

“To me the biggest difference between Bluesky and every other social media platform I’ve ever been on is the close relationship between the user base and the (quite small!) team of developers,” journalist and longtime Bluesky shitposter Miles Klee told Vox. 

“When people first joined, it was very bare bones, and the devs pursued new features according to what they heard users wanted. Because a lot of people were looking to escape the toxicity of X, that meant they ended up prioritizing safety and accessibility,” Klee said. “On Bluesky, many users feel that they’re building something new together, and that gives them a feeling of ownership, control, community.”

“I adore Bluesky,” author and Bluesky user Debbie Ridpath Ohi told Vox. “While so many other new platforms chased user numbers, Bluesky focused on user safety first, and that made a huge difference. I am having fun using social media again.”

Bluesky does have one significant drawback. Because the platform is federated, accounts can’t be “locked” away from public view the way they can on X. Still, for many people, that’s likely a feature rather than a bug; after all, X’s easily accessible public interface and ease of searching and surfacing content made it indispensable to many users, especially the many journalists who used it and still continue to use it. These are all features that Bluesky replicates — without, so far, the endless trolls that came with X’s recent era.

What it means to leave Twitter

For people who have spent many years on Twitter — which launched in 2006, enough time to grow into an impossible teenager — it may be sobering to contemplate actually leaving the platform. This is, after all, the supposed “hellsite” that many of its most active users were all but glued to for everything from live events to hilarious viral incidents that found us all united through the power of a virtually instantaneous, public, and collective social media.

Yet for the vast majority of users, the thought of leaving X now probably feels much more plausible and realistic a possibility than it did a year ago, when Vox first declared that X was in its death throes. That’s not unusual; social media platforms very rarely die instantly. 

For the most part, platforms don’t suddenly shut down and strand all of their users. That only happens in extreme cases when a platform’s systems collapse, or it’s seized by the government, or the owner kills the site — situations that just don’t really happen to modern social media with complex infrastructure. The inverse scenario, in which all of a platform’s users simply give up and leave en masse overnight, doesn’t happen at all. 

Instead, as we’ve seen across various internet platforms, including mass migrations away from LiveJournal, Tumblr, Facebook, and now X, the exodus takes years and involves multiple inciting incidents that push people out of their comfort zone and off the platform in incremental movements. All of these steps shift users slowly and inevitably toward the decision to fully leave a platform — sometimes before they even realize they’ve made it.

“Social media is, by definition, social,” Bluesky early adopter Maura Quint told Vox. “People want to be at places where they get something from other users, and where the tools the site provides help them have the experience they’re looking for. If people are miserable in a space, they leave.”

“Elon Musk made sure to design his version of Twitter to be an unpleasant, dull place,” Quint continued. “Why choose an awful room run by the worst guy you’ve ever met when there’s an alternative where cool people are hanging out, telling jokes, creating their own goofy lore, and engaging on issues they care about?”

As a platform slips into decline, those inciting incidents often become more and more frequent and close together. X has had multiple such inciting incidents this year, including a major ban in Brazil that sent 500,000 users to Bluesky in a single weekend in August, a crucial step in jolting X’s massive international fandom community out of its complacency. Then came the twin announcements in October: first, that X would be allowing third-party AI companies to scrape all user data, and then that blocking a user would no longer prevent them from being able to see your content — a change that arguably nullifies the point of blocking to begin with. Most recently came the US election and Musk’s unabashed weaponization of the platform in service of Trump and the far right.  

This latest inciting incident seems to have been the final straw for many users to not only leave X for Bluesky, but begin deleting all of their content from X. (Some extensions and apps allow you to import all of your content over from X to Bluesky first before you delete.) Still, while these actions suggest that momentum has well and truly shifted toward Bluesky, the newer site will likely have growing pains as old users adjust to newcomers and the platform itself grapples with the strain of millions of new users.

“Our infrastructure is holding up!” Bluesky’s Liu told Vox. “We’ve prepared our infrastructure to be able to handle this demand, though there are definitely a lot of new users signing up right now.” She added that the site is building a subscription model to aid sustainability, though the site will always be free to use.

Despite the rapid growth, users are optimistic about the future. “Every influx of users brings with it more voices, some with good intent and some with bad intent, but Bluesky is responsive to the people who use it in ways that encourage people to stick around,” Quint said. “When you compare that to sites where white nationalists organize mass attacks, spending money lets anyone drown out real discussion, and mass disinformation spreads at the whim of a billionaire, Bluesky is clearly the place to be.”