Exploring Bluesky, one constellation at a time

The explosion of text-based social networks that occurred after Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (and its subsequent rebranding to X) has mostly quieted down. Instagram has Threads, a brand-safe, sanitized playground full of engagement bait. Mastodon is still Mastodon, no more prepared for mainstream adoption than it was a year ago. A few other also-rans have lost steam and died unceremoniously.

Out of all of them, I have the highest hopes for Bluesky, which has been steadily improving over the last year with frequent updates and thoughtful additions to its vision of decentralized social networking. It dropped the invite system in February and now has almost 6 million users, with 1.4 million active every month.

I find Bluesky particularly interesting for its attempts to meld the benefits of decentralized and centralized social networks—they’re introducing choice at every level of the experience, but if you don’t care about that, you don’t have to. You can use Bluesky out of the box, with a satisfactory default experience, similar to the way you'd use Twitter.

If you do want to customize your experience, you can do so in a targeted way. You can go as far as to move all of your data to your own server. Or you can choose your own moderation services. But perhaps the most exciting—and accessible—feature is custom feeds.

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