Bluesky is a retreat

What are the major sources of left-liberal ideas and activism in the U.S.?

Academia, the labor movement, and primary-secondary education (teachers more so than administrators) are obvious mainsprings; we can also add swathes of the legal profession, Hollywood, pop music, and publishing. Indeed, “teacher” and “lawyer” are the professions most associated with donations to Democratic politicians and causes¹.

These same professions were the drivers of Twitter’s decade-long pole position in shaping and delivering U.S. political discourse. From roughly 2012 to 2022, the site, despite being small compared to Facebook and even Tumblr (remember Tumblr?), was an unrivaled source of high-speed news and entertainment—with a well-curated feed, you could blow by breaking news (before the TV networks even got it), screenshots of obscure academic texts that supplied apt commentary on a current event, and dense insider jokes that in some cases escaped into the extremely offline world.

The Twitter tandem effect

Twitter had a tandem effect going, one that I believe is impossible to reproduce in the current era:

• It had hundreds of millions of casual users who’d joined it when it in particular and social media in general were both novel. The fact that it was so odd, limited, and text-centric didn’t matter in those early years, starting from its founding in 2006: It was one of the only options, and its name, like Facebook’s, became synonymous with a new mode of media production and consumption. Such casual users created the critical mass of a somewhat diverse and representative—this is important!—audience that made Twitter an influential media outlet.
• The left-liberal constituencies mentioned above were generally influential and powerful and produced a disproportionate amount of the conversation through their compulsive use of the site. To dip into the “replies” column of like a stay-at-home lawyer was to find literally hundreds of posts every single day, discussing anything from NBA minutiae to breaking political news. Such lonely power users catalyzed discourse and also became somewhat famous, often by getting coveted blue checkmarks (which were handed out liberally to journalists) to indicate their verified status. At the same time, the dominance of these users didn’t send conservatives running from the site. They were still pretty entrenched.

Why can’t this effect be recreated anywhere else? Because:

• Social media isn’t new and exciting anymore. It’s become a lot like TV, with all of its biggest platforms now serving as much video as possible, hosting tons of ads, and providing almost no freedom to shape your own consumption. Casual users have been captured elsewhere, on YouTube and TikTok most prominently, and aren’t necessarily willing to try any new site or service now. Accordingly, post-2016² social networks are echo chambers that star highly self-selected groups, rather than “town squares” that feature cross-sections of the public.
• The most important left-liberal constituencies, the one that fed Twitter’s content machine, are substantially weaker than they were even two years ago, when Elon Musk bought the site and then renamed it X. Hollywood and publishing are the most obviously diminished, but academia is also really and education has been beset by the COVID-19 crisis and voucherization. You could barely ask for a better example of the overall decline than the fact that Kamala Harris’s celebrity-heavy campaign came up short in a way that’d have been unimaginable for Barack Obama in 2012.

Smaller and more homogenous

Which brings me to Bluesky, the “is this the next Twitter?” du jour. There can’t be a “next Twitter” for the reasons above, but Bluesky seems like the closest thing to “old” (pre-Musk) Twitter. But how close is it?

Max Read captured the gulf between the two in a recent newsletter:

[T]he users who’ve been joining Bluesky en masse recently are members of the big blob of liberal-to-left-wing journalists, academics, lawyers, and tech workers—politically engaged email-job types—who were early Twitter adopters and whose compulsive use of the site over the years was an important force in shaping its culture and norms. (Some of those users have been on the site for a while, valiantly attempting to change Bluesky’s culture from “toxically wack” to “tolerably wack.”) … Part of what’s made Twitter so attractive to journalists is that it’s relatively easy to convince yourself that it’s a map of the world. Bluesky, smaller and more homogenous, is harder to mistake as a scrolling representation of the national or global psyche—which makes it much healthier for media junkies, but also much less attractive.

Twitter was attractive to journalists for that reason and for how it made journalists and their social circles the “main characters” of the site, through verification badges (which proved they were who they said they were) and a massive soapbox for their ideas. When the first exodus from Twitter happened in 2022, many of the site’s compulsive users tried Mastodon, only to run into various technical (what’s an “instance?” is Mastodon a “website” per se ?) and cultural (beefing with the Linux nerds who love the service) issues. These issues are well-documented.

But one that I don’t hear about as much is that Mastodon, by its very anti-corporate design—in addition to no ads, it doesn’t verify any accounts, you have to do that yourself by embedding something on your website to prove that it and your account are connected; it also doesn’t promote any content and has no suggestion algorithm—refused to make them stars. They couldn’t port their mini-celebrity from the bird site to the elephant site³.

Humiliation rituals

Moreover, this humiliation ritual signaled how their professions and the elites at the top of them had declined alongside Twitter itself. It wasn’t just that Twitter was disintegrating; the very constituencies that’d powered it had either moved on (casual users flocking to TikTok, Discord, Joe Rogan’s podcast, whatever) or become too weak to drive the conversation (left-liberals, now powerless to overcome Musk’s myriad changes to how the site ranked and served content).

Threads, Meta’s Twitter clone, offered little refuge because it was focused on real celebrities, not the pseudo ones created by Twitter itself pre-2022. It also provided very little control of your feed. You couldn’t be a star, or control your own destiny.

So, in this context, Bluesky seems to ex-Twitter addicts like salvation. It has a straightforward chronological timeline, a somewhat minimalist design, and no ads. And most vitally, its small-pond nature means the blue checkmarks of yore are once again the stars. Yet, as Read noted, it’s a fraction of what Twitter is even now, let alone in its heyday. It’s small, ideologically homogeneous, and hostile—yes, hostile, as Adam Kotsko⁴ correctly labeled the site after he retreated from it October. The echo-chamber culture is harsh to outsiders, manifesting itself on this site as lots of blinkered liberalism and meaning about “unfair” The New York Times headlines⁵.

Once more into the retreat

Riffs on ancient Twitter jokes, fatphobic discourse about Ozempic/Wegovy, and complete nonsense by amateur failed statehouse candidates like Will Stancil filled my timeline when I experimented with the site before retreating myself. This is the next social media site?

It felt more like one big retreat, not just from Twitter’s size, discursive centrality, and diversity, but from a string of cultural defeats—most pivotally, Musk buying the site in 2022 and Trump winning in 2024 long after he’d decamped from the site that had once done so much for his own political career, for his own echo chamber, Truth Social⁶.

Early in Trump’s rise to the top of the GOP, someone likened him to a warlord ruling over a failed state. This turned out to be inaccurate because the party wasn’t “failed” at all; it was actually ascendant. But this ruling-over-the-ruins picture reminds me of Bluesky today, where some metaphorical “big fish” finally have a “small pond” they can retreat to and in which they can remaining themselves as the main characters once again.