Bluesky currently has over 36.6M users

Bluesky is Not Dead. (It Isn't Even Sick.)

Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle caused a ruckus last week with a piece declaring that Bluesky is, well, over. She argued that declining engagement on Bluesky proves it has failed and somehow “lost” to Twitter/X. The reason? Bluesky is a liberal echo chamber, and it has stopped growing because its partisans have run out of fellow liberals to recruit into what McArdle calls a “blue bubble.” Then on Thursday, Slate's Luke Winkie weighed in with his own Bluesky fail piece.

Predictably, annoyed Bluesky users blasted McArdle and Winkie on the platform. Here at Bluesky Directory HQ, we were unmoved. Maybe it's because the four of us have been building software for so long. We’ve seen just about everything.

First, we won't delve into the political aspects of this. We think casting it as yet another Blue vs. Red culture war is just nonproductive clickbait.

When Bluesky launched, no one involved with it (not even its sponsor, Jack Dorsey) claimed it would be a Twitter killer. To this day, the company doesn’t even consider it a “product” in the traditional sense, but rather a reference implementation of the project’s true innovations–portable identity and the AT Protocol. Moreover, Bluesky’s commitment to not “enshittify” the network with algorithmic feeds (as CEO Jay Graber has stated) means its growth is likely to be more organic and less driven by viral outrage like social networks that tech pundits deem more "successful."

Wild fluctuations are common in software products as they grow, especially social networks, and are particularly pronounced among new entrants that must compete with the Meta/X duopoly for eyeballs. Mastodon, another platform the media proclaimed a "Twitter killer" in 2022, has also experienced large fluctuations in engagement.

Also, it's worth asking what is being measured in these debates. As Paul Frazee, CTO at Bluesky, pointed out the other day, services tracking Bluesky engagement don't count "lurkers." These are users who read Bluesky posts but don't engage with the platform with likes, reshares, comments, etc. Frazee estimates that if these people were counted, Bluesky probably has twice as many active users as the trackers report.

Ultimately, all this squabbling over numbers misses the point of Bluesky. It's a bigger (and more meaningful) project than "beating X" or opposing a political ideology. AT Protocol is an opportunity to revolutionize social media, making it more open, interoperable, and (little "d") democratic. People are already building products on AT Protocol, many of which are unrelated to Bluesky (something that most developers gave up doing with X, given how restricted and expensive its API has become).

Such a fundamental reimagining of social media is an ambitious enterprise, and it will take time. We think it will be worth the wait.

Other Bluesky News

A new thread UI is in the works...

Recent product additions

• ​@ATStudio: @ATStudio provides developer tools to interact with the @ATProtocol.
• ​PostingCat: Free Social Media Management Platform, powered by AI​
• ​Worker Cooperatives: A starter pack of democratically managed workplaces, worker-owned cooperatives, and collectives. (Did you know Bluesky Directory is owned by a worker cooperative? 🙂)​

We hope you're enjoying being on Bluesky and finding products to help you on Bluesky Directory!

Cheers,
Bluesky Directory Team
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