Bluesky, Smiling at Me

After an hour or so of scrolling through Bluesky the other night, I felt something I haven’t felt on social media in a long time: free.

Free from Elon Musk, and his tedious quest to turn X into a right-wing echo chamber where he and his friends are the permanent, inescapable main characters.

Free from Threads and its suffocating algorithm, which suppresses news and real-time discussions in favor of bland engagement bait.

Free from my own bad habit, honed through years of obsessive Twitter use, of packaging my thoughts for consumption by an audience of opinionated strangers.

You may be wondering why Bluesky — an experimental social media app that was started in 2019 under Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former chief executive, before becoming an independent company in 2021 — is attracting so much attention these days.

In the past several weeks, the app has swelled to more than 20 million users, and is adding more than a million users a day. It’s been the top-ranked free app on both Apple’s and Google’s app stores. Celebrities, politicians and artists are flocking to it. A.O.C.! Lizzo! Mark Cuban! Its 20-person team can barely keep up with all the growth.

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