Bluesky promises to rethink social media by focusing on openness and user control. But what does this actually mean for the millions of people joining the site?
November was a good month for alternatives to X. Many users hit their balking point after two years of controversial changes turned Twitter into X, a restrictive hub filled with misinformation and hate speech. Musk’s involvement in the U.S. presidential election was the last straw for many who are now looking for greener pastures.
Threads, the largest alternative, grew about 15% with 35 million new users. However, the most explosive growth came from Bluesky, seeing over 500% growth and a total user base of over 25 million users at the time of writing.
We’ve dug into the nerdy details of how Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky compare, but given this recent momentum it’s important to clear up some questions for new Bluesky users, and what this new approach to the social web really means for how you connect with people online.
Note that Bluesky is still in an early stage, and many big changes are anticipated from the project. Answers here are accurate as of the time of writing, and will indicate the company’s future plans where possible.
Is Bluesky just another Twitter?
At face value the Bluesky app has a lot of similarities to Twitter prior to becoming X. That’s by design: the Bluesky team has prioritized making a drop-in replacement for 2022 Twitter, so everything from the layout, posting options, and even color scheme will feel familiar to users familiar with that site.
While discussed in the context of decentralization, this experience is still very centralized like traditional social media, with a single platform controlled by one company, Bluesky PBLLC. However, a few aspirations from this company make it stand out:
- Prioritizing interoperability and community development: Other platforms frequently get this wrong, so this dedication to user empowerment and open source tooling is commendable.
- “Credible Exit” Decentralization: Bluesky the company wants Bluesky, the network, to be able to function even if the company is eliminated or ‘enshittified.’
The first difference is evident already from the wide variety of tools and apps on the network. From blocking certain content to highlighting communities you’re a part of, there are a lot of settings to make your feed yours— some of which we walked through here. You can also abandon Bluesky’s Twitter-style interface for an app like Firesky, which presents a stream of all Bluesky content. Other apps on the network can even be geared towards sharing audio, events, or work as a web forum, all using the same underlying AT protocol. This interoperable and experimental ecosystem parallels another based on the ActivityPub protocol, called “The Fediverse”, which connects Threads to Mastodon as well as many other decentralized apps which experiment with the functions of traditional social media sites.
That “credible exit” priority is less immediately visible, but explains some of the ways Bluesky looks different. The most visible difference is that usernames are domain names, with the default for new users being a subdomain of bsky.social. EFF set it up so that our account name is our website, @eff.org, which will be the case across the Bluesky network, even if viewed with different apps. Comparable to how Mastodon handles verification, no central authority or government documents are needed for verification, just proof of control over a site or record.
As Bluesky decentralizes, it is likely to diverge more from the Twitter experience as the tricky problems of decentralization creep in.
How is Bluesky for privacy?
While Bluesky is not engaged in surveillance-based advertising like many incumbent social media platforms, users should be aware that shared information is more public and accessible than they might expect.
Bluesky, the app, offers some sensible data-minimizing defaults like requiring user consent for third-party embedded media, which can include tracking. The real assurance to users, however, is that even if the flagship apps were to become less privacy protective, the open tools let others make full-featured alternative apps on the same network.
However, by design, Bluesky content is fully public on the network. Users can change privacy settings to encourage apps on the network to require login to view your account, but it is optional to honor. Every post, every like, and every share is visible to the world. Even blocking data is plainly visible. By design all of this information is also accessible in one place, as Bluesky aims to be the megaphone for a global audience Twitter once was.
This transparency extends to how Bluesky handles moderation, where users and content are labeled by a combination of Bluesky moderators, community moderators, and automated labeling. The result is information about you will, over time, be held by these moderators to either promote or hide your content.
Users leaving X out of frustration for the platform using public content to feed AI training may also find that this approach of funneling all content into one stream is very friendly to scraping for AI training by third parties. Bluesky’s CEO has been clear the company will not engage in AI licensing deals, but it’s important to be clear this is inherent to any network prioritizing openness. The freedom to use public data for creative expression, innovation, and research extends to those who use it to train AI.
Users you have blocked may also be able to use this public stream to view your posts without interacting with you. If your threat model includes trolls and other bad actors who might reshare your posts in other contexts, this is important to consider.
Direct messages are not included in this heap of public information. However they are not end-to-end encrypted, and only hosted by Bluesky servers. As was the case for X, that means any DM is visible to Bluesky PBLLC. DMs may be accessed for moderation, for valid police warrants, and may even one day be public through a data breach. Encrypted DMs are planned, but we advise sensitive conversations be moved to dedicated fully encrypted conversations.
How do I find people to follow?
Tools like Skybridge are being built to make it easier for people to import their Twitter contacts into Bluesky. Similar to advice we gave for joining Mastodon, keep in mind these tools may need extensive account access, and may need to be re-run as more people switch networks.
Bluesky has also implemented “starter packs,” which are curated lists of users anyone can create and share to new users. EFF recently put together a few for you to check out:
- Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff
- Electronic Frontier Alliance members
- Digital Rights, News & Advocacy
Is Bluesky in the fediverse?
“Fediverse” refers to a wide variety of sites and services generally communicating with each other over the ActivityPub protocol, including Threads, Mastodon, and a number of other projects. Bluesky uses the AT Protocol, which is not currently compatible with ActivityPub, thus it is not part of “the fediverse.”
However, Bluesky is already being integrated into the vision of an interoperable and decentralized social web. You can follow Bluesky accounts from the fediverse over RSS. A number of mobile apps will also seamlessly merge Bluesky and fediverse feeds and let you post to both accounts. Even with just one Bluesky or fediverse account, users can also share posts and DMs to both networks using a project called Bridgy Fed.
In recent weeks this bridging also opened up to the hundreds of millions of Threads users. It just requires an additional step of enabling fediverse sharing, before connecting to the fediverse Bridgy Fed account. We’re optimistic that all of these projects will continue to improve integrations even more in the future.
Is the Bluesky network decentralized?
The current Bluesky network is not decentralized.
It is nearly all made and hosted by one company, Bluesky PBLLC, which is working on creating the “credible exit” from their control as a platform host. If Bluesky the company and the infrastructure it operates disappeared tonight, however, the entire Bluesky network would effectively vanish along with it.
Of the 25 million users, only 10,000 are hosted by a non-Bluesky services — most of which through fediverse connections. Changing to another host is also currently a one-way exit. All DMs rely on Bluesky owned servers, as does the current system for managing user identities, as well as the resource-intensive “Relay” server aggregating content from across the network. The same company also handles the bulk of moderation and develops the main apps used by most users. Compared to networks like the fediverse or even email, hosting your own Bluesky node currently requires a considerable investment.
Once this is no longer the case, a “credible exit” is also not quite the same as “decentralized.” An escape hatch for particularly dire circumstances is good, but it falls short of the distributed power and decision making of decentralized networks. This distinction will become more pressing as the reliance on Bluesky PBLLC is tested, and the company opens up to more third parties for each component of the network.
How does Bluesky make money?
The past few decades have shown the same ‘enshittification’ cycle too many times. A new startup promises something exciting, users join, and then the platform turns on users to maximize profits—often through surveillance and restricting user autonomy.
Will Bluesky be any different? From the team’s outlined plan we can glean that Bluesky promises not to use surveillance-based advertising, nor lock-in users. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber also promised to not sell user content to AI training licenses and intends to always keep the service free to join. Paid services like custom domain hosting or paid subscriptions seem likely.
So far, though, the company relies on investment funding. It was initially incubated by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey— who has since distanced himself from the project—and more recently received 8 million and 15 million dollar rounds of funding.
That later investment round has raised concerns among the existing userbase that Bluesky would pivot to some form of cryptocurrency service, as it was led by Blockchain Capital, a cryptocurrency focused venture capital company which also had a partner join the Bluesky board. Jay Graber committed to “not hyperfinancialize the social experience” with blockchain projects, and emphasized that Bluesky does not use blockchain.
As noted above, Bluesky has prioritized maintaining a “credible exit” for users, a commitment to interoperability that should keep the company accountable to the community and hopefully prevent the kind of “enshittification” that drove people away from X. Holding the company to all of these promises will be key to seeing the Bluesky network and the AT protocol reach that point of maturity.
How does moderation work?
Our comparison of Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky gets into more detail, but as it stands Bluesky’s moderation is similar to Twitter’s before Musk. The Bluesky corporation uses the open moderation tools to label posts and users, and will remove users from their hosted services for breaking their terms of service. This tooling keeps the Bluesky company’s moderation tied to its “credible exit” goals, giving it the same leverage any other future operator might have. It also means Bluesky’s centralized moderation of today can’t scale, and even with a good faith effort it will run into issues.
Bluesky accounts for this by opening its moderation tools to the community. Advanced options are available under settings in the web app, and anyone can label content and users on the site. These labels let users filter, prioritize, or block content. However, only Bluesky has the power to “deplatform” poorly behaved users by removing them, either by no longer hosting their account, no longer relaying their content to other users, or both.
Bluesky aspires to censorship resistance, and part of creating a “credible exit” means reducing the company’s ability to remove users entirely. In a future with a variety of hosts and relays on the Bluesky network, removing a user looks more like removing a website from the internet—not impossible, but very difficult. Instead users will need to settle with filtering out or blocking speech they object to, and take some comfort that voices they align with will not be removed from the network.
The permeability of Bluesky also means community tooling will need to address network abuses, like last May when a pro-Trump botnet on Nostr bridged to Bluesky via Mastodon to flood timelines. It’s possible that like in the Fediverse, Bluesky may eventually form a network of trusted account hosts and relays to mitigate these concerns.
Bluesky is still a work in progress, but its focus on decentralization, user control, and interoperability makes it an exciting space to watch. Whether you’re testing the waters or planning a full migration, these insights should help you navigate the platform.
