Casey Newton: The Bluesky Exodus, One Year Later

Bluesky’s ingenuity in reimagining feeds and moderation tools has been a boon to social networks, which have happily adopted some of its best ideas. (You can now find “starter packs” on both Threads and Mastodon.) Ultimately, though, it has the same shape and fundamental dynamics as a place that even its most active users called “the Hellsite.”

Bluesky has had some really good ideas, and it has been cool to see them roll out to different platforms.

That said, I actually find Bluesky to be the text-based social network I browse the least these days. Well, obviously, besides X. Mastodon is where I go to see what the cool nerds are talking about, and Threads, despite my skepticism just a few months ago, has turned into a pretty good replacement for what Twitter used to be for me. If I hear rumblings that something notable just happened, there’s a good chance I can open Threads and find out exactly what’s going on because people are chatting about it. Not to make every post here about politics, but let’s just say in the past 10 months, there have been quite a few instances where something notable has happened and I want to get caught up quick.

Another thing I’ll mention here is that while Bluesky definitely got the headlines a year ago when they were getting numerous enormous spikes in users, it definitely seems like a lot of those users have fallen off. And while Mastodon never quite got that level of viral adoption, it does seem to be chugging along relatively healthily. At this point, I don’t think Mastodon is ever going to be super mainstream, but I also don’t think it needs to be.