Safe and cozy in your doomsday bunker

Let’s check in on Bluesky, shall we? Last night, newsletter writer David Roberts caused a big brouhaha over there after he posted what I think is a largely accurate observation. “It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Bluesky has been a net negative for US politics,” he wrote. “They corralled everyone on the left into a little glass fishbowl where they shout at one another and everyone else ignores them. Meanwhile, all the [politicians] and institutions stayed on X and are being dragged farther right.”

I said “largely accurate” up at the top because while Roberts gets a few things right here, I think he’s also misdiagnosing what’s actually happening. Let’s break it down.

First up, is Bluesky a net negative for US politics? I think that’s a bit overblown. “Getting worried that what I post here isn’t influencing Rust Belt voters,” podcaster Patrick Monahan snarkily wrote on Bluesky this morning.

Bluesky doesn’t have a ton of big homegrown political victories to point to, but I have heard from multiple parties over the last year that it’s actually a huge driver of progressive donations. The growing consensus among Democratic operatives seems to be that Bluesky is garbage for driving traffic or even influencing culture, but there are a ton of users over there who are super interested in spending money. In fact, Illinois congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh told me that Bluesky was basically her main platform for campaign funding during her failed run earlier this year.

Roberts’ next point, that Bluesky is a “little glass fishbowl” where everyone just shouts at each other and is broadly ignored by the rest of the world is, of course, objectively true. He’s also right that most politicians and political organizations have stayed on X, where the right wing sets the agenda. This is true for the media, as well. The number one complaint I hear from journalists still working in traditional newsrooms right now is that their (usually older, Gen X) editors have also stayed on X. And while those editors may not be posting, they are still assigning stories based off the right-wing talking points they’re inundated with on the platform.

So, even in its significantly decayed state, X is influencing our politics, the media, and, downstream of that, all of pop culture, to some extent. “If I wanted to talk about Twitter I’d go back to Twitter. This is Bluesky. We talk about Bluesky here. And it sucks,” musician Patrick Cosmos wrote on Bluesky this week, likely subtweeting (subskeeting?) Roberts. But talking about Bluesky, more often than not, means talking about what the CHUDs over on X were talking about 12 hours ago. If you prefer Bluesky to X, that’s fine, but let me tell you, as someone who uses both apps fairly equally now, Bluesky is basically just a libbed-out reader service for X. In other words, for all of Bluesky’s growth over the last few years, X still rules the world.

But, also, Bluesky still isn’t consistently growing. According to our data, across eight out of the last 12 months, Bluesky growth across its largest accounts has been down month-to-month. I’m increasingly of the opinion this is probably as big as Bluesky can ever be.

So the interesting question here, one Roberts didn’t really try to answer, is why Bluesky is ignored by the rest of the world. Why is it garbage for driving traffic or even influencing culture? And it’s not just because its users are annoying. Users on every website are annoying. But the annoying users on X or even Reddit have much more impact on the world than Bluesky. So what’s the deal? Well, I think it’s fairly simple actually.

The first issue is that Bluesky is just as inhospitable to outside links as X is, even without an algorithmic For You feed. Its users just don’t click on anything. It’s a cultural problem with no real fix. Regardless of what kind of publisher or creator we’re talking about, no one I’ve met is getting any meaningful traffic from Bluesky. (If you are, I’d love to hear about it!)

For example, we share almost every Garbage Day post on Bluesky and some of those posts have thousands of shares. In the last year we’ve only had around 600 people from Bluesky sign up to our mailing list. We get more traffic from Substack, which we aren’t even on anymore. And if no one is clicking on links, that means the only thing worth posting on Bluesky is native content. So all of Bluesky’s impact needs to go in the other direction. In other words, if Bluesky isn’t sending traffic elsewhere, it needs to pull traffic towards it. Ten years ago, Twitter worked this way, ruling the internet via screenshots. There were years where Instagram and Reddit (and viral listicles) were basically just glorified galleries of tweets. But the internet is different now. Short-form videos are king. And Bluesky’s video features are still very bad. Videos have to be under 100 MB, which is extraordinarily small. So not only can Bluesky users not upload short-form videos from other platforms, they can’t meaningfully post original content that could then be shared to other platforms. The end result is an internet where everyone else is talking about short-form videos and the digital cul-de-sac of Bluesky is talking almost entirely to itself.

You may think, as I do, that short-form video is a scourge, but if the entire internet has settled on a new atomic unit of attention and Bluesky can’t support it on a technical level, they’re going to be, by definition, left out of the conversation.

Now, here’s where I’ll say that none of this matters if you are a normal person who just wants a chill place to spend your time online. If you aren’t an activist or a journalist or a creator or anyone who has to care about the attention economy in anyway, then this is actually probably a good thing. But the general consensus I see from Bluesky users is a sort of indigence or confusion as to why the rest of the world is trapped in a right-wing echo chamber that they don’t care about. And it’s because their little doomsday bunker has not really affected the apocalypse raging beyond their walled garden. Which, again, is fine if you don’t care about that. But I sorta think most Bluesky users do care. Which means you’re either going to have to make your bunker more attractive to new members or venture out and face the horrors outside.