The Thing About Griping About Bluesky

We're in another round of garment rending on Bluesky because not enough people are using it, we're told, and the reason is that Bluesky's heavily progressive community is mean to non-progressives or insufficiently-progressives, we're told. This discourse runs on a relentless cycle. A story comes out about Bluesky's growth going flat, a journalist or pundit publishes an "I tried Bluesky and the vibes were hostile" essay, and posts flow with people either nodding along or pointing out that the complainers seem perfectly fine with much worse vibes elsewhere.

That last part is where the argument tends to get tangled up. Much of this perennial discourse centers on which network journalists and political columnist types find amenable, and one thing the last several years demonstrate is that quite a lot of journalists and political columnist types just find progressives more irritating than they find Nazis off-putting. A good deal of that is they have frog boiled themselves on X into seeing the former as more divergent from the norm than the latter. When you marinate for years in a particular kind of online unpleasantness, unfamiliar unpleasantness lands harder, not because it's worse (Nazis are objectively worse than progressives, no matter how keen you are on progressives) but because it hasn't yet faded into being just the water you digitally swim in.

I should note that I think these are bad arguments. In fact, I think they're really just a rhetorical gloss on the pretty understandable real motivation for them, which is that the speaker wishes more of their friends were on whichever network they're on. Almost nobody complains about the vibes of a social network whose vibes they like. The vibes discourse is downstream of social geography. People are arguing about where the cool kids ought to be, dressed up in the language of community values.

But what actually matters is that none of that matters. The entire genre of "Bluesky needs to change or it'll never grow" is built on a category mistake about what Bluesky actually is.

The mistaken picture goes like this: a platform is a single thing, with a single community, run by a single company, and the only way to make the platform different is to change the people. This is how Twitter worked, and how Facebook works, and how Instagram works, and how every major social network you've ever used has worked. You can't separate the community from the platform from the protocol, because they were built as a single inseparable thing. Each user sees a slightly different version of the network , but everyone's looking at it through the one interface the company built, on the terms the company sets.

Bluesky was built on the opposite premise. The point of AT Protocol , the underlying open standard that Bluesky-the-app sits on top of, is to make those things separable. The network of accounts and posts is one thing. The app you use to look at the network is a different thing. On Twitter, those two things are fused. On AT Protocol, they aren't.

To see what this looks like, take Blacksky .

Blacksky started in 2021 and launched publicly in 2023, founded by technologist @rude1.blacksky.team as a project to build infrastructure and curation tools for Black users of the AT Protocol, many of them refugees from Black Twitter. It runs its own Personal Data Server, where users can host their accounts and migrate their identity off Bluesky's hosting whenever they want. It runs its own global relay—called atproto.africa—which it built from scratch and which stores its own copy of all activity from every AT Protocol account on the network. It runs its own moderation relay that aggregates labels from every moderation service operating across the network. It runs its own feed generators. The whole stack is written in Rust, in an open-source project called rsky , and it depends on Bluesky-the-corporation for none of its operation.

If Bluesky—the platform and the corporation—vanished tomorrow, Blacksky would continue on unscathed. Its users would still post, still follow each other, still see their feeds, still be moderated according to Blacksky's policies rather than anyone else's. And they would still, because the protocol is open and the data is portable, be able to interact with everyone on the network who chose to remain reachable to them.

This is a working system, today, with real users and real infrastructure.

Wanna see? Go to blacksky.community right now, log in with the same handle and password you use on Bluesky, and you're on Blacksky's app, looking at the same network you were already on, with Blacksky's feeds and moderation layered over the top. What's more, you can keep using the Bluesky app in another tab, and a post you make in one will be visible in the other. The cost of trying it is the time it takes to log into a website you already have credentials for. If you have a Bluesky account, you already have a Blacksky account.

Take Blacksky seriously and the gripes about Bluesky look misplaced. If you want a social media platform that grounds its community in the twin values of "You should never say anything mean about the New York Times" and "Maybe J. K. Rowling has a point," you can do that. You can stand up your own PDS, or pay someone to host one for you, or partner with an existing one whose terms you like. (In fact, Blacksky-the-company has built a turnkey service called Acorn to help you do just that.) You can run your own relay, or trust someone else's. You can build your own client app with whatever interface and feed defaults you want, or fork an existing one. You can run your own moderation service with whatever labeling policies you prefer.

And here's the thing: that community, and the platform it calls home, can set the moderation policies it wants ("You'll get banned if you behave in ways that make reactionary centrist pundits feel unwelcome") and enforce them as strictly as it would like, and still allow everyone posting there to follow and interact with anyone they want from any other community and platform built on the same open AT Protocol. The asymmetry is the whole game. Moderation is local. Connection is universal. A user banned from your platform doesn't disappear from the network. They just don't appear when your platform's lens is the one you're looking through.

The same architecture works for whatever flavor of community you want. A religious community that wants strict comportment norms can have that. A hobby community that wants on-topic-only enforcement can have that. An adult-art community that wants the defaults flipped can have that. Academics who want citation standards in replies can have that. None of these communities has to negotiate with Bluesky-the-company about how Bluesky-the-default-app handles their concerns, because none of them has to use Bluesky-the-default-app. They can build their own lens onto the network, and let everyone else build theirs.

The demand that Bluesky reform itself into a different kind of community is, structurally, the demand that AT Protocol fail in the specific way Twitter failed. It's the demand that one community get to be the universal public square. It's the demand that pluralism collapse back into a single acceptable form, run by a single company, governed by a single set of rules. The whole reason AT Protocol exists is to make that demand unnecessary.

If you find the current Bluesky community grating, the answer needn't be "make Bluesky different." The answer can be "make a different community." Or use a different lens onto the same network. Or wait for someone else to build the lens you want and use that. The energy you're spending demanding that Bluesky's community become hospitable to you is energy you could be spending building the community you actually want, on infrastructure that already exists and is already being used by people who figured this out a few years ago.

The protocol is open. The tools are available. Blacksky is right there as the working example. Stop trying to renovate someone else's house. Build your own, and let your friends visit, wherever they happen to live.