Is Bluesky the New Twitter? - The Atlantic

Bluesky, a Twitter-style, short-post social-media site, has exploded in popularity since last week, adding 1 million users in just that time. A lot of people hate X—especially if they hate Elon Musk, or Donald Trump, or Nazis, or algorithmic feeds, or shadowbanning, or impersonation, or engagement farming, or porn hustling. Can Bluesky be the fix for all those woes, and a lasting replacement for the site that once was Twitter? I really doubt it.

Woe that people, myself included, have been inspired even to ask the question. Although white supremacy, scams, and porn are real and worsening problems on X and other social media, I have written before in The Atlantic about a problem that I see as superordinate to all of these others: People just aren’t meant to talk with one another this much. The decline of X is a sign that we may soon be free of social media, and the compulsive, constant attention-seeking that it normalized. Counterintuitively, the rise of Bluesky is also a good sign, in that so many people are still trying to hold on to the past. Giving up on social media will take time, and it will inspire relapse.

For all its growth, Bluesky still trails far behind Meta’s Threads—Mark Zuckerberg recently told investors that his Twitter-like app adds 1 million users each day. But numbers alone don’t tell the full story. Meta has added buttons to access Threads from Instagram, so that any of its 2 billion users can slide right over, even if they never end up posting there. Bluesky, meanwhile, seems to be drawing actual users, especially in the United States, who want to post and follow.

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