Recently, while talking to a friend who used to run a large media website, I casually mentioned the rise of Bluesky. More than a million users have deleted their X (formerly Twitter) accounts and moved over to the upstart social media site, which they see as a healthier replacement.
Listen to this article, read by January LaVoy
“I don’t get it,” my friend said, his voice (and apparently his heart rate) spiking. “Why? You’re free!” After all, we had witnessed X’s unraveling, as it turned from a genuine community space into an often venomous one. Why should we imagine Bluesky would avoid that fate? And more to the point: Why keep trying to recreate the internet of the past? Why not accept where we are and move on?
We have officially arrived in late-stage social media. The services and platforms that delighted us and reshaped our lives when they began appearing a few decades ago have now reached total saturation and maturation. Call it malaise. Call it Stockholm syndrome. Call it whatever. But each time a new platform debuts, promising something better — to help us connect better, share photos better, manage our lives better — many of us enthusiastically trek on over, only to be disappointed in the end.
Bluesky, created by one of Twitter’s original founders, Jack Dorsey, has been around since 2019. In the aftermath of the presidential election in November, it has become a digital refuge from the interferences of Elon Musk. People have been fleeing X since Musk bought the company in 2022, when, seemingly for his own amusement, he began stripping it of nearly all its conversational functionality. (Shonda Rhimes was an early deserter: “Not hanging around for whatever Elon has planned,” she posted on the site. “Bye.”) Musk started charging a fee for security features that protected users from hacks, and introduced a requirement that all content be used to train Grok, X’s A.I. chatbot. Since Musk took over, the volume of hateful slurs directed at Black, Jewish, trans and queer people has soared. For many, Musk’s close alignment with Trump was the final straw.
The history of the internet is littered with the virtual headstones of services that rose and faded as tides of attention — and money — came and went. (Anyone remember Turntable.fm? Foursquare? Versus?) Typically the demise of a company doesn’t inspire a collective funereal lament — and a rallying cry to decamp for greener pastures. People rightfully see Musk’s X as emblematic of the overreach of our technocracy, and the site’s devolution into bot chatter, nonsensical spam, low-grade advertising and Pop Crave alerts as a harbinger of the era to come.
