by Seph Fischer ’25

In the two and a half years since billionaire Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform Twitter, now known as X, a number of alternative sites have flourished briefly before dying. Bluesky seems to be the enduring competitor, though.

The site, a near-clone of X, has become popular with social progressives disquieted with Musk’s increasingly vocal support of right-wing politics, alongside what they see as failures in the site’s moderation policy, with some left-wing users abandoning X entirely for Bluesky. Others post to both platforms. Despite its near-identical appearance, Bluesky’s content couldn’t be more different. It’s in the site’s content, not its design, where its flaws begin to show.
The user base of a social media platform, especially a microblogging platform, is its content. Much of X’s popularity can be attributed to the interesting people it attracts. Subversive comedians, avant garde artists, and independent scholars interact and share ideas with each other and mainstream celebrities and politicians, leading to a culture and environment which is totally unique to the platform. A competitor site can be significantly better designed, with far better features than X, but so long as it doesn’t have the user quality that X has, it will never succeed to the same degree.

In the case of Bluesky, user quality is simply not up to snuff. The site is mainly populated with journalists and Democratic pundits and politicians—the anonymous creatives who are the new progenitors of culture and have made X the predominant platform where news, pop culture, and current events are discussed have seemingly decided that X remains good enough, despite flaws. The type of content encouraged by the platform is similarly dull. The site does not include the popular X feature of quote reposting, with which users can “quote” another post and contribute their own thoughts on the post. This feature allows for long-ranging back-and-forths between users and more interesting discussions. However, over concerns that the feature might contribute to user hostility, it was deliberately left out of Bluesky. Instead of making the site friendlier to use,  this change has made the site more boring than it otherwise would have been.

Bluesky could be best described as a retirement home, with bland discussions of Netflix series, puns, and nature photography populating the timeline, all of which are discussed in far more depth and in far more unique ways on X. It’s likely Bluesky will exist as a far less popular alternative to X, but unless serious changes are made, it will never hold the position of a cultural touchstone that X does.