The rise of Bluesky, and the splintering of social

For example, Bluesky is great for breaking news because it does not deprioritize links and defaults to a social graph that shows updates from the people you follow in chronological order. (It also has a Discover feed and you can set up others for algorithmic discovery—more on that in a moment—but the default is the classic Twitter-esque timeline.) 

Threads, which has a more algorithmically defined experience, is great for surfacing interesting conversations from the past few days. I routinely find interesting comments and posts from two or three days before I logged on. At the same time, this makes it pretty lousy at any kind of real time experience—seemingly intentionally—and essentially hides that standard timeline of updates from people you follow in favor of an algorithmically-generated “for you” feed. 

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that while these are quite different, neither is inherently better. They offer distinct takes on product direction. And that ability to offer different experiences is a good thing. 

I think this is one area where Bluesky has a real advantage. Bluesky lets people bend the experience to their own will. You aren’t locked into the default following and discover experiences. You can roll your own custom feed, and follow custom feeds created by other people. (And Threads is now testing something similar.) That customization means my experience on Bluesky may look nothing like yours. 

This is possible because Bluesky is a service running on top of the AT Protocol, an open protocol that’s accessible to anyone and everyone. The entire idea is that social networking is too important for any one company or person to control it. So it is set up to allow anyone to run their own network using that protocol. And that’s going to lead to a wide range of outcomes. 

Take moderation, as an example. The moderation philosophy of the AT Protocol is essentially that everyone is entitled to speech but not to reach. That means it isn’t banning content at the protocol level, but that individual services can set up their own rules. 

Bluesky has its own community guidelines. But those guidelines would not necessarily apply to other services running on the protocol. Furthermore, individuals can also moderate what types of posts they want to see. It lets people set up and choose different levels of what they want to allow. That, combined with the ability to roll your own feeds, combined with the ability of different services to run on top of the same protocol, sets up a very fragmented future. 

And that’s just Bluesky. There’s also Nostr, which leans toward the crypto and tech crowds, at least for now. And Mastodon, which tends to have clusters of communities on various servers. All of them are growing.